Smart control brings smart grid into the home

John Tyhacz, vice president and general manager for Honeywell?s home comfort and energy systems business.

Honeywell has announced the addition of time-of-use utility price schedule programming capability to its Prestige programmable thermostat.

This new ‘smart’ control enables a homeowner to automate energy consumption based on actual cost, bringing the benefits of a smart grid into the home. Honeywell estimates that homeowners can cut yearly heating and cooling costs by up to 33%.

Such technological advances could soon become highly relevant in the UAE, where the cost of electricity is rising steadily in a bid to curb consumption by encouraging energy efficiency. According to DEWA, average individual electricity usage is 20 000 kilowatt hours per annum and 130 gallons of water daily, placing Dubai among cities with the highest consumption per person in the world.

The so-called ‘slab’ tariff structure, introduced on 1 March 2008, was aimed to encourage consumers – both residential and commercial – to reduce consumption through energy-efficiency measures, or face steeper utility bills.

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Honeywell says that Prestige’s patented time-of-use price schedule feature is easy-to-use. Based on the homeowner’s programming specifications, the Prestige will automatically adjust the home’s temperature when prices are at their highest.

“Giving homeowners the tools to interact with utilities and reduce energy use is a critical part of the emerging smart grid,” said John Tyhacz, vice president and general manager for Honeywell’s home comfort and energy systems business.

Honeywell introduced the Prestige in late 2008. The industry’s first full-colour, high-definition, wireless-enabled thermostat, Prestige’s patented, interview-based interface walks a homeowner through the set-up process by asking a series of questions such as ‘what time does the first person wake-up in the morning?’ or ‘what time do you go to sleep at night?’ The answers help the thermostat program itself, so no owner’s manual needed.

Its built-in wireless technology allows it to communicate with other Honeywell RedLink wireless devices, including the Portable Comfort Control, a hand-held device that senses the temperature in any room, giving homeowners the control to adjust temperature from anywhere in the house.

Honeywell is a global leader in energy efficiency, with control technology in more than 150 million homes, 10 million buildings and thousands of industrial plants around the world. In addition to a full-line of home comfort products available through HVAC professionals and retail outlets, Honeywell also works directly with utilities on demand-response programmes that help limit energy consumption when the demand for electricity is at its highest.

The company has installed more than a million load control devices to date, including the Honeywell UtilityPRO thermostat, which has given utilities combined control of more than 1 gigawatt of peak consumption — equivalent to the generation capacity of a medium- to large-sized power plant.