Our homes will soon be greener, more comfortable and a lot more fun, as Riyad
Emeran discovers. It's often said that a man's home is his castle, and that's not far from the truth. A home should be a sanctuary from the stresses and pressures of daily life, offering comfort, warmth, relaxation and entertainment. The technology that provides these things is changing, though, and you may be surprised at just how clever our homes are becoming. So let's look at what we can expect to see soon - and what's arriving now - in our search for domestic bliss. THE SEaT Of POwER If our homes are our castles, our sofas are the thrones. When we want to relax, many of us simply flop down on the sofa and switch on the TV. But what if you could do a lot more from the comfort of your sofa than just watching TV? It's now possible to control almost everything in the home without having to leave the sofa. Home AV and automation installations are no longer just for city workers and Premier League footballers, and with the latest wireless technology, it's never been easier to control all your technology from one place. You can spend as much money as you want on automating your home, but it doesn't have to cost the earth. Sonos (www.sonos.com), for example, has completely revolutionised digital music in the home. In a matter of minutes, you can set up a Sonos system that will enable you to listen to a multitude of digital music sources in any number of rooms in your house. With a Sonos system you can control all your music anywhere in you house from a single remote controller. You can even use an iPhone or iPod Touch as a remote, simply by downloading the free Sonos app, and if you're tapping away on your laptop, you can use the Sonos software on that, too. Systems such as this are just the tip of the iceberg, though. If you really want to drag your house into the 21st century, something like Control4 (www.control4.com) might be the answer. With a Control4 system, you can control not only your music but also your home cinema, the blinds on your windows, your bedroom lights, your heating and even your front door - all without ever leaving your sofa. Systems like this are not only for couch potatoes, either. Rather than using an alarm clock, you can program the system to open your blinds or slowly bring the lights up in your bedroom when it's time to wake up. At bedtime, you might configure the system to power down your AV equipment and ensure that all the lights in the house are switched off. Perhaps most importantly, you can make sure the doors and windows are locked without having to patrol your home to check. BE BIg BROTHER Like home automation systems, CCTV used to be a plaything for the rich and paranoid. Now, even the cash-strapped paranoid can keep an eye on their home 24 hours a day from anywhere in the world. CCTV has been replaced by IP cameras, and because these sit on a network, all you need in order to see what they see is a web browser. Companies such as Axis have been selling IP cameras for some time, but a much greater focus has been put on home installations recently. This means the prices have dropped to a level that consumers can afford, and the cameras have become easier to install, set up and use. Configuring Panasonic's latest line of IP cameras takes no more than a few minutes, and with some simple port forwarding on your home router, you'll be able to see what's going on in your home wherever you are. Not only can you view the cameras remotely, you can also control them, so if you want to pan around a room or get a sweeping view of your garden, you can. Most IP cameras can be set to record when they detect motion, so you won't capture hours of nothing. They can record to a memory card in the camera, a storage device on your home network or, for the ultimate in security, a remote storage device. The latter is the best option because, if you're burgled, the thieves can't steal the device that recorded the break-in. As a web browser is all you need to view video from an IP camera, you can just as easily use a smartphone or - if you're feeling indulgent - an Apple iPad. However, the ultimate gadget to complement the array of cameras around your home is Panasonic's KX-NT400 phone. This has a colour touchscreen that can display the feeds from any of your IP cameras. And if you're feeling particularly lazy, you can even use it to open the front door - once you've checked who's knocking, of course. SmaRTEn YOuR HOmE The home of the future isn't just about gadgets, though. It's also about being more aware of what your house is doing and the habits of the people who live in it. We're constantly told that the average household wastes a lot of power, but for most of us it's hard to quantify that waste. When our utility bills arrive, they're either a nasty shock or a pleasant surprise, but more often than not, you'll receive an estimated bill that leaves you no wiser about how much you actually owe. Now you can change all that. Technology can ensure that you never receive another estimated bill, and you'll also avoid those knocks on the door from people asking to read your meter, who always seem to come at the most inconvenient times. Most importantly, you can keep accurate track of all the power usage in your home from pretty much anywhere in the world. All you need is a smart meter. First:utility (www.first-utility.com) has been offering its customers free smart meters for a while now, and the company plans to extend this service to most of the UK this year. A smart meter replaces your electricity and gas meters, and sends regular data to First:utility through a dedicated remote link. This means that no-one has to come to read the meter because it's constantly being read remotely. The real beauty of the smart meter is that First:utility makes all the data available to the customer. This means you can check on your power usage through the company's online portal whenever you like. Electricity readings are updated every half hour, while gas readings are made on a daily basis. Not only does this give you an accurate indication of what your bill will be, but it also enables you to monitor the power usage in your home and, hopefully, find ways to reduce it. To make monitoring your power usage even easier, First:utility has recently partnered with Google, allowing its customers to view their usage through Google's PowerMeter gadget. This integrates with the user's iGoogle home page, and provides an updated electricity usage reading every half hour. Google PowerMeter doesn't show gas usage, but as that updates only once a day, this shouldn't be an issue. The combination of a smart meter and Google PowerMeter gives consumers everything they need to make positive changes to their power usage. They can see the effects of changes in their behaviour on a day-to-day basis, helping them to reduce their utility bills by changing the way they live in their homes. For those who want to keep track of their usage while relaxing on the sofa without having to break out their laptop, First:utility offers a remote energy monitoring unit that can sit on your coffee table and tell you how much electricity you're using while watching your 50 inches plasma TV. It's not as accurate as the smart meter but it provides a live reading of how much electricity you're using second by second, along with the cost per hour and even the amount of carbon dioxide generated by your electricity consumption. HaRvEST THE Sun While smart meters and energy monitors are great for helping you use power more efficiently, you're still pulling it all from the national grid. If you really want to make your house eco-friendly, you should really be producing some power yourself. This doesn't mean buying a wind turbine from your local garden centre, as they're rarely efficient and really only serve to help people show their neighbours how environmentally friendly they are. If you really want your home to create power, you'll need to collect it from the sky. Solar power is nothing new; it's been touted as the answer to the problem of dwindling fossil fuels for some time now. It's an abundant, clean power source that's just waiting to be put to good use. Unfortunately, while the idea of solar power has always been attractive, in practice it has proved difficult and expensive to harvest. That's changed now, though. The latest photovoltaic (PV) solar panels, such as the Kyocera KC200GT, can be fitted to almost any residential home and won't require a second mortgage to cover the cost. That's not to say solar panel installation is cheap, but it's not prohibitively expensive, either, especially when you consider that the benefits are both environmental and financial. Solar panel installation specialist EvoEnergy (www.evoenergy.co.uk) estimates that a solar panel installation for an average residential home will cost around ukp10,000 including VAT. The cost includes the panels, the roof mounting system, the inverter that turns solar energy into electricity and all labour costs. The government used to offer a 50 per cent grant for residential renewable energy installations, but unfortunately the scheme has now been scrapped. You can still get help with the cost of installation, though. A Low Carbon Building Programme Grant will pay up to ukp2,500 towards the initial cost of your installation. Just bear in mind that certain other aspects of your home need to be compliant before you can receive the grant. The real financial benefit will come once your solar panels are up and running. You may think that the point of solar panels is to create and use your own power, but there's more to it than that. Going some way to redress the scrapping of the 50 per cent grant, the government has recently implemented Solar feed-in tariffs. This means your utility company is obliged to buy every unit of power you produce from your solar panels at a set rate, even if you're actually using that power in your own home. If you produce more power than you need, you can have it fed into the national grid and receive payment at an even higher rate. The point of the feed-in tariff is to encourage people to invest in solar power by making the panels pay for themselves over a shorter period of time. These feed-in tariffs will be enforced only for the next 25 years, which the government hopes will encourage consumers to invest in renewable energy sooner rather than later. BuYIng THE HOmE Of THE fuTuRE There's a lot you can do to make your home more energy efficient and environmentally friendly, but if you want to live in a home with zero carbon emissions, you'll have to buy a new one. Many builders are experimenting with homes that minimise carbon emissions, and they're becoming more attractive to buyers for both environmental and economic reasons. One such builder is Miller Homes (www.millerhomes.co.uk), which has recently completed a batch of low-carbon homes in Basingstoke. The company has built five Miller Zero homes on a small residential estate. Each home adheres to a different level of carbon neutral certification, with the level six home achieving zero carbon emissions. Besides the obvious environmental advantages, a new level six home has an added financial benefit as it attracts no stamp duty. There's a lot to consider when building a zero-emission home, starting with the materials used. The walls are thicker, with more insulation to ensure that barely any heat escapes into the outside world. In the same vein, every single window in the house is triple glazed to ensure that the heat inside the house stays there. Another bonus is that the triple glazing keeps out noise from outside. The roof of the house has PV solar panels built in that will ensure that renewable energy is used to power the home at least some of the time. Miller aims for the solar panels to provide most of the household's daytime electricity. A smart meter is also installed so that the homeowners can make sure they're using their power as efficiently as possible. Renewable water usage is also high on the agenda. A 2,000-litre water tank under the lawn collects rain water, which is then filtered and used by the washing machine and toilets to ensure that clean drinking water isn't wasted. Other water-saving measures include lower overflows in baths and basins, and aerated taps that give the illusion of high water flow but actually reduce the amount of water used. There are a couple of ways to generate heat while keeping emissions to a minimum. The first is to use a ground-source heat pump, which works like a reverse refrigerator. Two bore holes are drilled into the back garden and pipes laid. Refrigerant is pumped through these, and as the ambient temperature below ground is higher than above it, the refrigerant takes on that heat. It's then pumped through a series of heat exchangers, which become sufficiently hot to heat a tank of water. As the system needs power only to drive the pump and compressor, the energy it uses is far outweighed by the power it would take to generate the captured heat. The other heating option is a biomass boiler that runs on wood pellets. The pellets are fed into a hopper, but they're not burned straight away. The boiler takes on more pellets to burn only when there's a need for more heat - if someone starts to run a bath, say, or turns on the under-floor heating. Carbon is emitted as the wood is burned, but this is offset by the CO2 that was absorbed during the tree's life. Low-wattage lighting is used throughout the house. Not only does this reduce power usage, but low-power bulbs and LEDs have a far longer lifespan than traditional bulbs and halogen spots. Even the air is used to good effect, as hot air is pumped from the kitchen and bathroom through a heat exchanger and out of the building. The stored heat is then used to warm up fresh air from outside, ensuring that the air in the house is always fresh without reducing the ambient temperature. Basically, nothing goes to waste. THE BIg PIcTuRE Not too many years ago, the home of the future was a vision of automation and entertainment in which all your needs were taken care of without you having to lifting a finger. That picture has changed somewhat, and today's ideal home of the future has a far wider brief. The good news is that we don't need to look far into the future before we can hope to live in the type of home that existed only in science fiction a decade ago. Whether you're concerned about reducing your carbon footprint or controlling all your in-house entertainment from the sofa, the technology to do so exists right now. You'll have to keep your expectations and desires in check, as many of these technologies don't come cheap, but it's clear that as new homes are built, we'll see much of it installed as standard. In fact, government legislation states that, by 2016, all new houses need to adhere to level six code to produce zero carbon emissions. The other pieces of the puzzle will fall into place if consumer demand is high enough. If the people who buy new homes place importance on features such as integrated IP cameras or home-automation systems, more builders will begin to install this kind of technology into new homes. As always, early adopters will pay a premium, but what's considered a luxury or frivolous today might just become commonplace in all homes eventually. Panasonic's future Home If you're interested in futuristic homes and you find yourself in Japan, take a trip to the Panasonic Centre in Tokyo. There you'll find the Eco Ideas House, which is designed to make full use of Panasonic's diverse portfolio of technology to create a comfortable, practical living environment that reduces carbon emissions to an absolute minimum. Power is produced by a combination of solar and fuel cell technology. The roof is covered with PV solar panels which can account for up to 85 per cent of the house's power needs. The rest of the power is generated by the fuel cell, which runs on hydrogen. All the electricity from the solar panels and fuel cell is pumped into a large lithium-ion accumulator battery, where it's stored until the house needs it. Heat-pump technology captures heat in the air and transfers it to where it's needed. The vacuum insulation panels in the walls ensure that the house stays warm in the winter and cool in the summer. Water consumption is reduced through the use of efficient appliances such as Panasonic's tilted drum washing machine. Even the glass and surfaces in the house are designed to be stain resistant to reduce the degree of cleaning required and, consequently, water usage. Touchscreen panels allow you to view security camera feeds, alter the lighting or even start the shower running so that it's warm by the time you step into it. The house even provides full videoconferencing facilities, so you can be just as productive when you work from home as you would be in the office. Ambient light sensors ensure that lighting is always at an optimum level, balancing the house's lighting with natural light flowing from the windows and the ceiling. All the lighting comes from low-power, long-life LEDs. If you think Panasonic's Eco Ideas House is just a marketing gimmick for its visitor centre, think again. Panasonic actually builds homes in Japan through its PanaHome arm. We're unlikely to see PanaHome constructions in the UK, but the Eco Ideas House shows that we're playing catch up in the race to build the home of the future. gadgets in the future Home Samsung Zipel e-Diary fridge LG tried this a while back with limited success, but that hasn't stopped Samsung unveiling its Zipel e-Diary internet-enabled fridge. As well as keeping your food fresh, the Zipel e-Diary has a 10 inches touchscreen mounted in the door. This lets you access all sorts of useful information via its built in WiFi link, so you can view your Google calendar, leave a note for your better half or even check the latest weather - because looking out of the kitchen window is just so last century. There's no word on whether the Zipel e-Diary will ever reach the UK, but in South Korea they sell for around 2.5 million won (approximately ukp1,400). microsoft Kinect for Xbox 360 Kinect is Microsoft's answer to the motion control offered by Nintendo's Wii games console, although Kinect doesn't require a controller. Rather than sitting on your sofa with a controller in your hand, you stand in front of your TV and actually do what you're meant to be doing onscreen. We've had a play with it and, while it feels odd to start with, it's surprisingly effective. With Sony working on a similar project called Move and Nintendo keen to stay ahead with its successor to the Wii, though, it looks as if motion controls are the way forward for gaming. apple iPad Apple's iPad may be just an overgrown iPod Touch, but no home of the future will be complete without one on the coffee table. That's not to say you'll use it much. After all, it doesn't do a lot that other devices in your home will already do, and probably better. It's not about what it can do, though; it's about how good it looks on that designer coffee table. An iPad isn't so much the icing on the cake, but more the cherry on the icing - it doesn't add much to the overall experience, but it looks so pretty. 3D TV Unless you've been hiding under a rock for the past year, you'll be a aware that 3D is the biggest buzzword in technology at the moment. Whether it's the endless posturing about the importance of James Cameron's Avatar or the fact that every TV manufacturer keeps banging on about how 3D will change our living rooms, 3D is big news. Early adopters are kitting out their houses with 3D TVs and Blu-ray players. Blu-ray 3D discs are thin on the ground at the moment, but Sky has already launched the UK's first channel dedicated to 3D content - appropriately called Sky 3D. Only time will tell whether 3D TV will really catch on. Technical telepathy: 09969636745 I am more inspired by Newton's apple tree than Adam's forbidden apple. Get numbers right this time, help the census with correct disability info!
