Smart Home Blog

The EnOcean Alliance did a big step to success. It openned a specification for its energy harvesting wireless sensors. What do it mean? It means that more producers can make EnOcean compatible products. It also means that devices produced by different manufactures will have a good interoperability between them. And finally openned specification will help integrators and developers to add support of EnOcean devices in their home automation system.

EnOcean already offers unique feature for its devices. They don’t use batteries. Instead of that they transform electromagnetic, solar energy, thermocouples etc into usable electrical energy. That approach gives you possibility to build green system and save your money and environment.

I’d like to note that LinuxMCE supports EnOcean devices. The implementation is not fully featured so far. But I’m sure it’ll be extended in the future.

Good news for all professional installers and smarthome enthusiasts in Europe. Everspring is the first Asian manufacturer of Z-Wave products which launched its appliances in the European market. Those products include dimmers, switches, ON/OFF modules, flood and temperature sensors, smoke detectors and indoor/outdoor sirens. Unfortunately there is no information about availability and price. But I hope it’ll be reasonable.

[via AutomatedHome]

The bathroom traditionally has less digital stuff them the rest rooms. And GROHE tries to change that producing its digital collection of sink, tub and shower faucets named Ondus. It offers a new, modern way to operate water flow, duration and temperature using icon based touch-buttons. The current temperature is displayed on the rounded LCD display. Additionally the Ondus shower/bath models allow to store preferable shower parameters for each family member.

[via Unplggd]

If you already automate everything in your home then X10 Freeze Sensor might be interesting for you to expand a little bit your system. It’s installed inside your freezer using X10 Powerflash interface and allows to monitor the temperature. So, with X10 Freeze Sensor you’ll able to know about some problems with the freezer before its contents will die.

The X10 Freeze Sensor is available on the Smarthome site at $49.99.

Recently EnOcean announced its new product self-powered occupancy sensor Sensolux. It combines a 360 degrees PIR detector and light level sensor for automated lighting control. The Sensolux uses solar energy to get the power. It needs just a 3 hours of ambient light a day to be fully charged and can work in the dark for 48 hours.

The solar powered occupancy sensor can be used standalone together with a lighting control actuator or can be integrated into a LON or KNX/EIB network. The Sensolux includes a functionality to report its own energy level.

Personally I like the “green technology” solutions. They save our money and our environment. But, in my mind, £147.10 is too much for 360 degrees motion detector. Even it’s solar powered and “green”.

[via AutomatedHome]