Smart Home 2030

Picture the scene. The year is 2030. You moved into your new home just six months ago. Everything is calm. The kids are asleep. You hear the hot water bubbling through the pipes in readiness for the day. The sun is coming over the horizon.

Your car is in the driveway. You plugged it in last night when you came back from the supermarket. It only charges when the battery goes below 20% or if you’re due to make a big journey the next day, but it’s a habit of yours now. Get home, plug the car in. You can’t help yourself.

‘Alexa, tell me the news for the day and turn on the lights to 20%,’ you say. The news spills out into the silence of the room and the wall lights come on slowly, so as to not hurt your eyes.

You get up, put on your dressing gown and head to the kitchen for the first espresso of the day. The news is playing in the kitchen when you get down there; the occupancy sensors know you’ve headed downstairs so route the radio to that room.

The display panel on the wall tells you that the weather is going to be cold but beautifully sunny. The solar panels are just starting to produce energy which is helping to finish topping up your car in readiness for the school-run. The car has over 300km of range now – you could drive to the city, to the shops, to see your parents and get back, all without needing to charge the car. You remember the days of petrol shortages and panic buying - a distant dream.

The in-house battery is full and discharges when needed to provide electricity for your cooker; the local energy supplier decides the best time to charge it. You’ve found that your energy bills are lower than expected because the house automatically balances between grid and battery without you even noticing. The newsreader’s voice catches your attention; for the first time ever, the power requirements of the nation are being met solely by renewable energy and the batteries in peoples’ houses mean that no new conventional power stations will need to be built. 

The heating in the house is coming to life, you feel the warm floor beneath your feet. The interactive panel on your wall is telling you that when the heat pump struggles to keep up with demand, nearly 70% of the incoming gas today will be green hydrogen.

You’re at the door, dressed, with a cup of coffee in your favourite travel mug. – it’ll keep itself warm for nearly 5 hours. ‘Come on, let’s go,’ you say to the kids. Thunderous footsteps come down the stairs. Coats, shoes and a slice of toast later, and they’re running to the car. The seats have been warming up for 15 minutes already. You didn’t even tell your car to do so, but the house calendar system knows it’s a school day, the temperature sensors know the seats are too cold to sit on comfortably, and that you’ve all got up at the expected time.

You don’t even have to get your key out of your pocket. The central locking system senses you’re heading out and that there is no other movement in the house, so it closes all the windows, locks all the doors and sets the alarm. Your CCTV system automatically switches to motion detect on the driveway and in the garden. The home heating system switches to background heat mode to conserve energy.

This exciting vision of a smart home is coming soon, and some of the smart home technology able to realise it is already here. The only thing missing is the orchestration of companies to ensure everything works together and works together well.

Companies involved in the powering of smart homes will pool and share data to maximise energy efficiency and increase profitability across a village or city. They will also use this data to up-sell their own services or those of third parties such as telecommunications. Finally, the most obvious benefit will be for these companies to orchestrate power production, storage and consumption, thus hastening the journey to Net Zero.

We haven’t quite reached full power yet. But Critical Software is leading the charge.  

In readiness for this transition, we architected ConnectaX. It enables communications between smart meters and any other kind of device such as in-house batteries, EVs, CCTV, home assistants, heating ventilation and air conditioning, solar panels or heat pumps.

Want to be the smart guy when it comes to the smart home revolution? Speak to one of our smart home specialists to find out how we can help.