Evaluating the carbon impact of smart homes with a Home Assistant plugin

Details

Supervisors

Barbette, Tom

Faculty

Ecole polytechnique de Louvain

Degree label

Master [120] en sciences informatiques, à finalité spécialisée
Master [120] : ingénieur civil en informatique, à finalité spécialisée

Abstract

The increasing adoption of smart home technologies has raised important questions regarding their actual environmental impact. While smart homes are often promoted as a way to reduce energy consumption, most existing studies primarily focus on operational energy savings and tend to overlook the embodied carbon footprint associated with the production of connected devices. This thesis presents the development of a Home Assistant component designed to estimate and visualize the carbon footprint of smart home environments. The proposed system combines two complementary aspects of environmental impact: the embodied carbon footprint of Internet of Things devices, and the carbon emissions associated with their electricity consumption during use. To estimate embodied carbon footprint values, the integration relies on a simplified adaptation of the framework proposed by Pirson and Bol (2021), allowing non-expert users to characterize their devices through a structured questionnaire. The resulting estimates are integrated into an interactive dashboard providing visualizations, recommendations, and environmental indicators directly within Home Assistant. The proposed approach aims to make environmental impact information more accessible to smart home users while reducing the manual effort required to estimate the carbon footprint of connected devices.