The phrases “smart home” and “smart house” are being used a lot lately, and both allude to the concept of home automation…but what exactly is home automation? To put it simply, it allows you to control and monitor everything in your home from one device, such as your smartphone. Some of these devices even learn your habits to help adapt your home’s automation to your own needs and schedules.

Benefits of Home Automation

Choosing to invest in home automation is more than just being able to do something “cool” from your phone. Home automation provides quite a list of benefits to homeowners.

• Safety & Alerts:
  • • You can monitor your security system. Set up alerts to let you know if there’s motion around the property, or when someone enters your home.
    • Check to see who’s at any entrance through the cameras set up at each door.
    • If you’re arriving home alone one evening, you can turn your lights on before you’re home so you feel comfortable pulling up and getting out of your vehicle.
    • If you have a water leak or the smoke detectors go off, you can have your phone alert you that there may be an issue in your home.
    • You can set up an alert that tells you if you left a door unlocked or your garage door up. Or just set a time that your doors lock and garage door goes down every day so you don’t have to worry about it.
    • Have you ever gone on vacation only to come home and find out your A/C quit working? You can set up alerts for that too.

• Convenience & Money Savings:
  • • Dim the lights or turn lights on/off from your phone.
    • Adjust the temperature in the house from your phone. You can even set these changes to occur at certain times of the day, such as warming up the house right before you have to get out of bed in the morning.
    • Control the volume on the TV or audio system from any room in the house.
    • As these devices learn your habits and preferences, they can adjust to save you money on utilities too. Keep energy usage to a minimum when you’re least likely to benefit from it (like while you’re working or on vacation).

The benefits of home automation don’t end there. It’s a home upgrade that you won’t regret.

What Can You Control With Home Automation?

With today’s technology, you can control almost anything with home automation. If there’s a way to connect it to the network, it can be controlled and monitored. And the best part is, it can be controlled and monitored from anywhere your phone has an internet connection – even if that’s halfway across the world. Here are some of the things you can control:

• Lighting
• Thermostats/HVAC
• Security Systems & Cameras
• Irrigation Systems
• Home Theaters & Other Entertainment
• Appliances
• Phone Systems
• Garage Doors & Door Locks
• Sensors

Don’t limit yourself on the options you have with home automation. You can even get motorized blinds that plug into an automated outlet. Then you can avoid that sun in your eyes that happens at the same time every day by scheduling your blinds to close right before it happens. Get creative with ways to make your comfort and convenience even easier.

Where Do You Begin?

As you think of ideas, write them down. You may already have an idea of the things you want to automate in your home. Once you have an idea of what you need to have done, call us to begin designing your experience. Give us as much information as you can to help us plan your home automation experience. Once we’ve had the chance to go over your ideas, one of our System Design Specialists will be in contact with you to go over the next steps to making your ideas a reality.