Gadgetory

remember the Jetsons they had gadgets galore from Holograms to a robotic maid but they also probably had an astronomical electric bill as well as a massive carbon footprint that's still an issue for our own home of the future but unlike the Jetsons we're actually using some of that cutting-edge tech to solve it as homeowners of the future will have more ability to monitor our energy consumption but before we get to that let's talk about where that energy is coming from because the home of the future will always need power we built our home to generate a lot of its own power from solar panels installed in the carport roof in fact the solar panels are the carport roof it's an integral part of their house architectural II and that was part of the design of the house from the beginning Stan Pipkin is the owner of light house solar here in Austin which specializes in integrated solar design when Carter put up panels on the White House nobody liked them because they were a big they were bulky they stood out but he's just something entirely different this gives architects something to go wild with you look around Austin this is very different than most solar retrofits that have the panels tacked onto the roof our solar installation is deliberately an artfully designed made to feel like a natural essential part of the house itself I think the whole industry understands it's silly that sort of slab solar on top of the building why not make the building electricity generating itself this is Catherine Beisner an expert in solar technology people are definitely trying to make the solar panels better-looking but still by and large and residential putting solar on top of a roof now a lot of them look like just gorgeous black flat-screen TVs and it's very low profile you know I suspect we'll see a lot of these products in the future here's how the system actually works each one of those squares individually is a solar cell they produce selectively DC power that flows to the inverter and then it's changed to AC power and that's what the house can run on and any energy not used by the house flows into a lithium-ion battery so let's say a homeowner installs solar does that make them impervious from a blackout so unless you have a system that can island away from the grid or basically a micro grid your solar system will not help you during a power outage so here in our home of the future we have a battery and so we're prepared for blackout that's right so this is a really special home you have energy storage that's wired to your critical loads and if there's a blackout you can pull that energy to power your home this array it'll produce enough energy to power say 60% of their needs on a given day it varies by flouds season shade I think for the house the future we probably want that to be more like a hundred percent is it possible to scale the array absolutely the nice thing about solar it's modular so they can live in the house and then scale appropriately over the first year right and so now we're empowering them with tools to actually manage their house which brings us to our energy monitoring our smart home integrator Pete Sanford of smarter homes has given us the ability to see a real-time readout of the energy usage of our home we just jumped from 900 watts to 4,700 watts that jump is gonna tell me somebody just turned on the air conditioning and it gives you the idea of wow that's how much energy I'm using wow we've put a lot of effort into designing our solar array and our energy storage system into the house to meet the majority of our needs on the other hand all of our tech this house is probably gonna consume a lot of energy you'd think so but a lot of these devices are Energy Star rated and they're considered low voltage items your real energy hogs are gonna be you know your non LED lights your air conditioners it's the hot water so here I've brought the control pad for my home does that say eight hundred and seventy-five watts yeah when we started we were between fourteen and sixteen thousand watts we worked really hard to get it that low so let's go in and turn on some air conditioners and then that way you can kind of get an idea of the spike as well so walk downstairs we'll go ahead and drop that down to 70 upstairs and let's go back and see how that's gonna affect our energy wow this is pretty instantaneous as far as our reading goes that's already jumped up to seven thousand two hundred forty one so at our house we loved what we did we saw our new bill so we contacted Austin Energy and we got this data from that so this is before we automate it okay and then here's after and it looks dramatic just as it is but if you look at the scale these spikes are during our laundry times in our shower times and it really enabled us to program our air conditioners to where they weren't just kicking on all day so this is what you would do with solar so you know we hear a lot of solar companies say oh this is gonna cover 60% of your usage but how would they know so having something like this you be able to have the data to support the value of having solar you know seeing this energy usage laid out right in front of you is a very eye-opening experience because normally you just use your appliances and you don't think how much it's costing you but once you see this the incentive is to gamify it to see how much you can save everybody the kids likes to see that number low it's almost like it turns into a mini obsession one of them was like we're down to 450 watts and I was like that's the lowest we've ever been you win it's like a new high score yeah exactly a new low score new low score I think that becoming more aware of our energy usage is the first step not only will homes the food should be smarter about how they use energy but they'll make us more aware of how our actions influence that usage and even for those just passing by the house acts as a billboard for a renewable future thanks so much for watching me explore the energy needs and abilities in this home of the future now I'm wondering how would you power yours let us know in the comments below and we'll see you next week with a brand new episode