The problems with smart buildings

A thought provoking and interesting article.

Is part of the problem - at any rate for houses - the lack of a useful and practical universal protocol? Something that would do sensible things by default - things like:

• Turn on some heating if it is less than a defined temperature at a defined time in the morning, and turn it off if the movement detector detect that no one is home;
• Turn on an electric blanket by defined criteria, such as time, is anyone home, is it cold enough to need an electric blanket;
• Turn on a low level light if there is any movement detected in an en-suite bathroom;
• Draw the curtains shut if the ambient light outside is below a defined level;
• Turn on and start recording every computer camera if movement is detected and neither my car nor my partner's car is in the garage, or there has been no movement in the house for a defined time;
• Turn off particular lights if there is no movement in a particular area;
• Make sensible decisions about whether to keep the water in the grey water tank to fill the loo cisterns, or to water the roses.

I have lived in houses built in the 1840's and also those built much more recently. If I understand Bluetooth technology, all these sorts of things, which would save energy and improve quality of life, could readily be retrofitted to any house, including the millions of old and loved houses around the world. I would hate the idea of having to knock down a beautiful redbrick house for the sake of supposed energy efficiency.

And if I understand the world of apps, it would be relatively easy to develop apps which would run on any PC or tablet to detect every smart device in the house, and to control its behaviour without having to call an engineer. So that if you want to retire to bed at 3.00 pm with a vodka and Calpol and your electric blanket on, you can.

This sort of stuff has been standardised for music systems (well, not the 78s): why not for other stuff? If there were a standard protocol, presumably suppliers and programmers would be onto it like rats up drainpipes?

All these things are possible, and the 'z wave' communications protocol should allow integration of different devices - the problem is setting it all up, which still requires an engineer and so is expensive. But it is only a matter of time before the controls go online and are genuinely programmable by the user. Whether this will make homes more efficient or not is another matter.

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