TL;DR: Use AI, save money on electricity.

I've discovered a way to save both energy and money for our short term rental. It's all about getting serious with automation and utilizing the power of AI.

Here's a tale of how I cut down around $200 off our monthly electricity bill for our primary short-term rental (STR) property in just 4 hours! With the right scaling, this could translate to an extra $10k annually.

Step 1: Let's Talk to Our Property Management System (PMS)

Our first step was to create a basic app that pulled reservations from our PMS. For this task, I used Sourcegraph's new AI pair programmer Cody.

If you haven't used it, imagine having a super-smart intern that could write 90% of your code and didn't ask for coffee breaks. This AI tool generated code to pull reservations from our Lodgify property management system.

I like the NestJS framework, that was the only parameter I gave it beside describing what I wanted from it for business rules.

Step 2: Befriending Google Nest

We have Google Nest thermostats, which you can programmatically control, because why not? Again, our AI friend generated almost all of the code to talk to these devices.

It's almost like the AI is telling the thermostat, "You're going to adjust the temperature now, or we'll have a 'heated' conversation!" Sorry I'm full of dad jokes.

Step 3: Creating a Sensible Heating/Cooling Schedule

One major problem with thermostats is that they are designed for people living in the property full time, and our guests have other plans (mainly sightseeing and hiking). We tailored our system to switch to eco mode precisely at checkout, and then back to active cooling the night before a guest arrives.

This way, our guests are greeted with perfect temperatures without wasting energy on an empty house.

Step 4: Deployment

After a few commands, our app was deployed to Heroku with a database. No worries, the AI provided all the instructions on how to do this, probably much better than most Stack Overflow answers you'll find.

Step 5: Watchful Monitoring

The great thing about this whole setup is that it's effortless to monitor. We were able to see the usage savings in just two weeks in the Google Nest report, which then reflected on the next electricity bill we received. It was like a magic trick – but with code!

Of course, there's always the need for human intervention. Guests sometimes want to come early or leave late, and AI hasn't mastered the art of predicting human whims just yet. Manual overrides are always an option if needed.

I will admit that my tech experience definitely helped in this endeavor. But with the AI doing most of the heavy lifting, I was more of a project manager than a full-stack developer in this instance.

In essence, this quick project demonstrates the powerful capabilities of AI in optimizing resources, even in a domain such as property management. The solution is scalable, meaning the more properties you have, the more savings you can make.

In a nutshell, my short term rentals are now not only making money for me when guests stay over, but also when they're not around, thanks to the power of AI and some good old developer know-how.

If that's not winning, I don't know what is.