Energy and environmental impacts of home automation components

Life Cycle Assessment is applied to estimate the life cycle energy and environmentalimpacts of five components used in the home automation systems: an electricity meter, anactuator with an integrated current sensor, a web server audio/video, an interface withinfrared emitter, a multimedia touch screen.For each component, the impacts related to “one unit of product” (selected as functionalunit) 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 primaryenergy 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% to60% of the environmental impacts. For this component, relevant impacts are caused by themanufacturing step.The end-of-life-step has an effect on energy and environmental impacts lower than 6.5%.