Alarm.com Cloud Service May Prove to be Smartest Thermostat to Date
Cloud-based home automation company, Alarm.com is boasting it has produced the smartest thermostat. It's called the "Smart Schedule" system. What makes it so brilliant? It assesses the routines and patterns of a family's lifestyles, and then adjusts the temperature automatically to accommodate the best environment and energy savings.
According to Alison Slavin, co-founder and VP product management for Alarm.com, founded in 2000 and now with 1 million monitored accounts, "For most households, we're able to put together a pretty accurate profile."
Though there's an automated thermostat at the house, since the "smart thermostat" lives in the cloud via Alarm.com's SaaS (software as a service platform) all the tough work is completed by Alarm.com servers which process millions of the family's events. (opening and shutting a window, arming the security system, etc.). The software as a service platform elicits the events from the subscribers to the home security and automation service.
For example, if you armed your security system to AWAY, the device will lower the temperature to achieve maximum energy savings and efficiency, as it registers that everyone has left the house. Of course, you would reprogram the system if you went out on a Starbucks and "pick up a few store items" jaunt, and then returned to spend the day at home. Otherwise, you would be uncomfortable.
Alarm.com advertises itself as offering a unique solution to energy savings. The question remains, how unique is it? There are numerous cloud-enabled "learning thermostats" trending: NEST, and EverSense from Allure Energy to name a few.
However, unlike the other systems, Alarm.com develops and relies on the memory of its home security and automation ecosystem. It gauges family members' activities by identifying the when and the how: when they arm and disarm security; how they leave lights on or open doors, etc. Alarm.com is unique in how it tracks family behavior and builds an energy management scheme around it only if the consumer chooses this.
In research trials of the system, consumers were shocked to discover that their predictable behavior patterns and routines weren't. Oftentimes, individuals do things without conscious awareness because they are thinking of something else or in a rush to go somewhere or do something, or are exhausted and just want to crash into oblivion on their couch or bed without realizing that it is a typical daily routine. Slavin confirmed that the beta testing program was revelatory to 90 percent of participants who thought the energy management program was “very helpful because they had no idea what their activity patterns were."
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