Imagine this: small white fence, nice green lawn, some trees, a quite little and cozy house with two of three bedrooms, a nice handcrafted stone alley, a big red door, flowers everywhere, a swing entrance door.
This might be my home, your home, or everyone else’s home. This is the place where families gather and build memories. Home is everything and you’ll do anything to protect it and have a great state of mind.
In order to protect your home, family and deeds from intruders, you probably you’ll want to install an intrusion detection system that might communicates with a dispatch, maybe a surveillance system, or even some swing doors, or why not, all three of them. You could choose all of them from online shops like spy-shop.ro (if you live in Europe), but before choosing a practical solution try to be smart and also green. Use solution with low impact over our planet and with low consumption. Be smart, be green.
Every single security system energy consumption is roughly associated to the amount of electrical power used to operate it. Usually when a security system is dimensioned the power usage doesn’t represent an important and decisive criteria, but every single consumer added to your system increases the electrical power bill. Spend some extra minutes with your security counselor in order to find the optimal solution in matter of power consumption.
One of the first steps in building a green security system is finding the perfect solution for your home.
Each security system type, from CCTV monitoring, intrusion detection panels and sensors, and the automation system of swing gates have some features that will reduce for sure the electrical consumption.
For example, choose an IP surveillance system over an analogue one because only one IP megapixel camera can cover what three analogues cameras can cover altogether. Also, one IP camera’s consumption is lower than the total energy consumed by analogue cameras.
If you choose an analogue system with 4 cameras and a DVR, and all four channel s are used, and somehow you decide to add more cameras, the DVR must be changed with a bigger one. This also can be translated in more power consumption. Choose wise and go for an IP system. With an efficient server, by only adding an extra camera license, you can expand your system.
Video analytics, smart events, or intelligent video analytics, can reduce video storage. All smart features such as line crossing, intrusion detection, area entrance, object removal, found on camera side, storage solution, server or a standalone recorder, play on important factor in reducing power consumption. By using video analytics the amount of video storage requirements is reduced because only the relevant events will be recorded by server. Moreover, by saving only relevant events, the total space and energy requirements will be reduced. This way storage won’t be wasted with false alarms or many irrelevant recorded hours. In addition, the hard disks can be put on a sleeping mode when the system is not recording, less power consumption. A 16 channel system set to continuously record, the total amount of storage required is 10TB per month, around 625GB per camera. Studies have shown that on a system with video analytics option reduces with more than 50% the total space required.
A couple a months ago H.265 encoding algorithm was launched. Many CCTV manufacturers embraced this codec and add it to their solution, thus, 4K cameras and NVR appeared on market. Comparing to H.264, H.265 is able to send UHD streams at lower bit rate. H.265 represents more than 50% bandwidth reduction over H.264, which reduce total amount of space for keeping recordings, and power requirements.
Solar system represents another energy efficient approach in video surveillance system. Using a small solar panel first a lot of money are saved on electrical bills, helps to slow or even stop the global warming, it provides energy independence, and the last but not the least, it assures the amount of energy required to have a fully functional surveillance systems. It was successfully used in remote areas were the surveillance monitoring was mandatory and there were no local electric chain.
Each small household has an intrusion detection system. Usually it contains, an intrusion panel, detectors, keyboards and siren. When an intruder attends to a monitored home, an alarm is generated. In some situation false alarms are generated by the intrusion panel. Unfortunately, false alarms are the most costly and even frustrating problems facing the alarm community. Money are useless spent in order to send intervention crew to the monitored area only to discover that a false alarm was generated. False alarms combined with real alarms requires electrical power, by reducing or even getting rid of false alarms, the intrusion detection panel won’t generate alarms for irrelevant situations.
Some detectors have false alarm preventing function. These detectors detects motion but only acts and communicates with the intrusion panel starting with the second motion hit in a predefined time. Detectors do not reply to the first motion detection situation, it acts only starting from the next detection. Intrusion detection panels with two crossed zones, in a given time, if one of detectors detects motion and the second one don’t, the intrusion panel won’t generate any alarm at all.
Another function that will reduce the number of false alarms is swinger shutdown function. This function allows to inhibit the intrusion detector for a defined period of time if it triggers false alarms in a given period. All these features, beside reducing the total number of false alarms, will also reduce the power requirements.
There are green certifications such as RoHS under which security equipments are produced. All the parts involved in a security system project should be developed under this directive. This is a confirmation that substances like (Pb), mercury (Hg), cadmium (Cd), hexavalent chromium (CrVI), polybrominated biphenyls (PBB), polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDE), and four different phthalates (DEHP, BBP, BBP, DIBP) are not used in the manufacturing process. These restricted materials are very hazardous to the environment, and are dangerous in recycling also. By using only RoHS certified products your home will be an energy efficient one.
Home is where your heat is. Keep it green!
