Ata Touch is all about sustainability over every aspect of our home automation systems. When you look for something to be sustainable you need to consider whole-of-life of a system as well as ensuring the lowest impact on the environment.
With the focus on minimising energy consumption and eliminating carbon emissions, New Zealand’s predominately renewable electricity source makes absolute sense to ensure every energy-consuming product in the home is powered by electricity, not by fossil fuels which pollute and are finite.
Ata Touch heat pump technology addresses all these points using a single heat pump to do multiple energy-saving tasks like heating, cooling, water heating, hydronic underfloor heating, spa pool heating, and pool heating. While heat pumps require a refrigerant gas, it is contained and used over and over providing energy of three and half times the output to the input.
Scheduled climate control for energy reduction
Ata Touch takes this technology and further manages energy, putting heating where and when it is required with zone-controlled technology. Heating in the winter and cooling in the summer with natural ambient decay as opposed to over-heating and over-cooling. Scheduling ensures you only climate control when needed and away mode shuts down non-critical energy consumption.
Super intelligent lighting
When Ata Touch created its lighting solution it again looked at the most sustainable way to achieve these. Its approach was to fly against convention and go 24VDC LED, eliminating light drivers altogether. We also wanted a far more advanced light distribution, hence a diamond cut prismatic diffuser to spread the lighting. The outcome was an ultra-thin light source that didn’t penetrate the ceiling, spreading light 170° and managed from a simple current-limiting device. No drivers to fail and making them infinitely dimmable. It is hard to get any better.
You now start to get a range of energy-efficient devices in the home with a level of automation that allows you to manage and conserve energy even further, with scheduling and technologies to minimise current while not compromising lifestyle. These key items make up 72% of your energy usage.
Choose energy efficient appliances
The remaining 28% consists of vampire loads like audio/video as well as cooking and household appliances. Choosing cooking appliances wisely such as inductive hobs and convection microwaves help reduce energy. Whiteware products that support DRED technology can be integrated so when off peak power is available these devices can be loaded and ready to activate. The ability to isolate vampire loads (devices that sit on standby most of the time) can also help minimise energy consumption.
Thoughtful, future-thinking technology
When Ata Touch designs a product, it’s designed to last forever. It eliminates mechanical devices as much as possible and makes devices solid state. Unlike commercial products, we tend to over engineer, so things just keep on going with very little degradation. When we integrate with a third-party product, we choose carefully to ensure it is up to the task and then integrate with the same level of care, all the time trying to segregate the systems to ensure both products are protected.