Hi All;
I have recently finished a massive remodel on my home including 100% new wiring, switches, lights, thermostats, etc. All the thermostats are WD-20's. All the light switches are either Vizia+ or Vizia-RF+ (I couldn’t afford to do all the switches as RF - sigh.)
I have:
· WD-20 Thermostats: 7
· Leviton Vizia-RF+ switches (various): 25
· Leviton Vizia-RF+ 4-button controllers (scene or zone): 13
· Leviton Vizia-RF+ 1-button controllers: 2
· Non RF Vizia switches: 64
· WD USB z-wave stick
So, yes, I have a lot of lights, ceiling fans, and switches. As it turns out, my electrical bills are astronomical L. [On the other hand, I have a super-high-efficiency gas fired boiler, radiant heat, super-high-efficiency washer, dryer, dishwasher, fridge, etc,etc – go figure.] I bought a couple “Kill-A-Watt” units to check the usage of plugged devices, but so far no smoking gun. I have ordered a whole-house meter, but it hasn’t arrived yet.
I was wondering if anyone has information on the electric usage of Z-wave devices. Since each switch or controller contains a z-wave chip – which is basically an embedded CPU plus a radio – they must use some power. They are on 24/7/365 and are always listening even if they are not broadcasting. I have a Leviton RZCPG hand-held controller, but I’ve stopped using it because it eats through batteries so fast that it is just stupid – that leads me to believe that some measurable energy is being used. In addition, all of these devices have LEDs (even the non-RF switches.) I’m sure the energy use of each LED is miniscule; however, we are talking 100 devices times 24/7/365.
I scoured Leviton’s web site, but couldn’t find any info on the energy overhead of the switch itself. Google-ing (Bing-ing???) for “z-wave energy use” (etc) turns up endless hits touting the energy savings of home automation, but nothing about the overhead incurred by the switches themselves.
Finally, I was wondering about the cost incurred by ThinkEssentials polling. I had set the polling rate to 1 minute. Since every poll is a system-wide broadcast that forces each of my 45 z-wave devices to wake up and start chatting, knowing the energy use of a poll could be helpful. If the cost to poll one device (averaging out the hops and repeating that other devices will do) is, say 0.5 watt, that is 22.5 watts per poll (times some number of seconds), 1.35kw per hour for polling or almost 32kw per day. Each poll takes some unknown number of seconds, so god knows what the Kwh turns out to be. Anyway, I have lowered the polling rate to 30 minutes – perhaps that will help my bills?
Any information or insights would be appreciated.
Andrew