In many ways, your house is a robot. It may not move around, but it is composed of many sensors, actuators and you….a primary source of information and activity affecting your house’s characteristics. We like to think of Equinox House as Optimus Prime, leader of the Autobots, while the energy inefficiency and unsustainable characteristics embodied in conventional housing construction are similar to Megatron and his Decepticons trying to destroy the human race. Well, maybe things are not quite so dramatic, but it’s something to think about.
Modern living relies on sensors, actuators and processors interacting in a manner to help us stay comfortable, preserve food, move us around, entertain us, and almost any facet of activity one can think of. A major aspect of Equinox House is monitoring all electrical circuits in the house in order to determine how things are operating, and monitoring the temperature, humidity, and air quality (carbon dioxide and VOCs) to ensure we are maintaining a comfortable, healthy environment.
Keeping things simple and transparent is an important aspect of our design philosophy. With our computerized electric circuit panel, we can examine and control Equinox House circuits from anywhere in the world. If you forget to turn the hot water off when traveling on vacation, one can go online and do it from a far-away beach.
These control systems can also allow us to trouble shoot and diagnose problems before they become too severe. Many appliances will limp along, seemingly operating ok, but costing us energy and money. For example, your refrigerator typically operates 30 minutes of every hour. As cat hair builds up on the condenser coil, or a sensor begins to fail, it may continue to keep your food preserved, however it may do that by increasing its operation to 45 minutes out of every hour….a 50% decrease in efficiency that is difficult to detect without monitoring. Designing house with the capability for diagnosis and control of its operation is key to keeping house performance at a high level.
In addition to monitoring the operational health of Equinox House systems, these capabilities will lead to exciting new possibilities. Equinox House can watch the weather forecasts online, and decide if it is prudent or not to “pre-condition” itself for an upcoming weather event. It may also contact you if it detects that one of its systems is not working very well (like the “maintenance required” light in your car). And, maybe it watches over you, alerting someone if something doesn’t seem quite right. This is not future technology….it is available and affordable now, and Equinox House is built on such a foundation. Technology that is there to serve you, keep you comfortable, and life simple.
The figures below show our computerized electric circuit control panel, and some of the house performance data we are collecting as part of Newell Instruments’ research on Equinox House performance. Our circuit breaker panel provides typical house circuit protection with much, much more. We can schedule circuits to activate or deactivate based on time-of-day or cost-of-energy, as well as remotely turn circuits on or off at will. The “Hobo” datalogger collects data from the house that we use to compare with our various simulation models (house temperature, humidity, carbon dioxide, VOCs). Representative plots of data collected from the house and house comfort conditioning system are included, too.
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