Energy and environmental impacts of home automation components

Abstract

Life Cycle Assessment is applied to estimate the life cycle energy and environmental impacts of five components used in the home automation systems: an electricity meter, an actuator with an integrated current sensor, a web server audio/video, an interface with infrared emitter, a multimedia touch screen. For each component, the impacts related to “one unit of product” (selected as functional unit) are assessed following a “from cradle to grave” approach, including the manufacturing, operation and end-of-life steps. The results showed that the operation step gives a contribution higher than 54% on primary energy consumption and variable from about 54% to about 99% on environmental impacts, with the exception of the operation of multimedia touch screen, which causes from 11% to 60% of the environmental impacts. For this component, relevant impacts are caused by the manufacturing step. The end-of-life-step has an effect on energy and environmental impacts lower than 6.5%.