Environment

Energy efficiency improvements at our house

Our brand sparkling roof-based solar power installation is finally online 🙂 It was a multi-month project. I am following the footsteps of my friend Jim Webber and my parents in starting to harness some of sun’s power for our electricity needs. As we move our household to electric vehicles, that’s going to be even more important. We are taking our first modest steps with a 15.6 kWh per day system. It should be enough for 1/2 or 1/3 of our needs. Every bit counts though.

First few hours of our solar panel energy production.

I have also replaced all our light bulbs in our house (more than 100) with LEDs. Even though I bought most of the light bulbs as part of new in-ceiling retrofit fixtures, I was also able to take advantage of Puget Sound Energy’s free LED installation as part of their free home energy assessment program. If you are connected to PSE, you should take advantage of the program.

For few months now, we have also been using the Ecobee 4 smart thermostat with presence sensors around the house and schedules. It replaced an older, less “smart” thermostat. I am very pleased with it.

Next in my “todo” list in my project to reduce our energy consumption is to add presence sensors and smart home light switch automation. After lots of research and tests, I have decided to install Lutron’s RA2 Select system. As part of my tests, I have already automated the outside landscape lights with Alexa routines. Alexa routines are also used for the outside house lights together with the Ring camera’s presence detection events. This way, the outside house lights automatically turn on when people are detected. BTW… all the Ring cameras have their own small solar panel.

Finally, we are also going to reduce our water consumption for our back yard. I’ve been geeking out with an iPad app and design explorations and we are now ready to start in a couple of weeks (contract signed). Bonus… a brand new fancy bar with integrated BBQ for many upcoming evening parties. You should plan a visit 🙂

Backyard designs (2 view of the current layout and 2 for the new one).

Savas Parastatidis

Savas Parastatidis works at Amazon as a Sr. Principal Engineer in Alexa AI'. Previously, he worked at Microsoft where he co-founded Cortana and led the effort as the team's architect. While at Microsoft, Savas also worked on distributed data storage and high-performance data processing technologies. He was involved in various e-Science projects while at Microsoft Research where he also investigated technologies related to knowledge representation & reasoning. Savas also worked on language understanding technologies at Facebook. Prior to joining Microsoft, Savas was a Principal Research Associate at Newcastle University where he undertook research in the areas of distributed, service-oriented computing and e-Science. He was also the Chief Software Architect at the North-East Regional e-Science Centre where he oversaw the architecture and the application of Web Services technologies for a number of large research projects. Savas worked as a Senior Software Engineer for Hewlett Packard where he co-lead the R&D effort for the industry's Web Service transactions service and protocol. You can find out more about Savas at https://savas.me/about