Energy Saving Ideas

We are making lighting and plug points in an office environment smart and controllable.
The reason is to figure out ways to reduce energy savings.
The one idea we are playing with is having a presence sensor in all the offices so that it can have the lights on when someone is in the room and immediately turn lights off when dormant. Still have not found a feasible presence sensor that would be good enough for this exercise, any thoughts?
Please give thoughts on any ideas how smart lighting and plugs can reduce energy costs.

Yeah the presence wouldn’t work for that.  There isn’t enough detail in knowing where in your building that the tag is.  It’s pretty much a boolean thing: The Hub either sees it or doesn’t see it.  I suppose it would be possible to do some proximity in the sense of how strong is the signal and therefore guess the distance from the hub, but that would be imperfect at best.

Your better option would be to put motion sensors in the areas that you want to control this.  This isn’t perfect either… for example if someone is working in an office and doesn’t move much the lights might go out on them, but it’s be a lot more accurate than the presence tags.

Now the question is though: Does the power required by the Motion Sensor + the cost of the motion sensor amount to less then the power consumed by the lights in the times when the lights would be on and no one in the room using them?

I could be wrong here, but I think that when Tyrone is talking about a Presence sensor, I think he might be referring to it in the general term, rather than the SmartThings term.  I am guessing he is asking if smarting things has a presence sensor in the works??

I have read elsewhere (not sure where), where some presence sensors are so sensitive that they can detect a moving chest (eg, someone sleeping).  Something this sensitive in a room would keep lights on while someone is in there, and turn them off after X period of no motion.

This is one player who is doing this in the commercial field.  Check out the video from about the 1:40 mark on-wards.  There was another place I read about as well (but can’t find the link), where they were doing something similar using only LED bulbs all wired directly to the network switch - as were the light switches and presence sensors.  The were all powered over Ethernet could be controlled however/wherever you wanted.

I really hope SmartThings creates a presence sensor, or there is a product out there which will partner with SmartThings.  This is assuming that the SmartThings motion detector is not this accurate??

I think this might have been the article I read about the differences between motion sensors and presence or occupancy sensors.