Archive for the ‘automated lights’ tag
Smart Home (Home Automation)
How many fans of Smart Home Technology are out there? My assumption is you found this page which probably makes you a fan however what about your friends or family? Any of them using Smart Home Technology? My guess is probably very few. For the record, I have been an avid fan for over 10 years now and have automated many of the basic functions around our home. If you’re like me, most of my friends and family just smile when I bring this up and hope the pain and suffering is not too long!!!
Smart Home Technology allows you to automate many of the functions that you typically do manually around your home. Turning lights on at dusk and turning them off at dawn or before are some of the basic functions you can perform with this. Turning on your alarm or being called by your home if the alarm is tripped are other basic examples of Smart Home Technology. You can take this up quite a bit in both service value and/or complexity. It doesn’t have to be both however many times it does include both increased value and complexity. You can start to link events and actions but before we go there, back to my story.
My experience started while we were building our latest home which featured an option for Smart Home Technology. Given everything that was going on at the time (new home, another baby and general chaos at work) I had little time to really investigate all the capabilities of this technology. I knew, as a techno-geek, that it sounded very helpful (and cool) so I installed an Omni Pro package to get started. I quickly found Smarthome and became one of their most frequent online customers. Things started off with the basics – mainly automating lighting both inside and out using Switchlinc products.
I was given a copy of HAI software to control my system which at the time was clearly dated. It reminded me of a Windows 3.1 program and this was in the late 1990’s. As a former programmer I was expecting quite a bit more from the program and it’s capabilities. Either way, I jumped in and started to figure out some complex scenarios like:
If night time and the fire or security alarm is actived – turn all lights on
If dark and garage door is opened – turn on kitchen lights
If dark and backdoor is opened – turn on basement lights
Strange noise at night – turn all the lights on from the console
I won’t bore you with all the other permutations but you get the drift. This was interesting for a while however I was looking for much more. I then added a pair of OnmiStats (we have 2 zones) for thermostat controls. These gave us the option to control at the thermostat and also from the OmniPro controller. In addition, we also could call into our home if we forgot to raise or lower the temps plus allowed us to turn on our systems while we were away for extended periods. Good stuff!!!
Over the years, we continued to add devices and to increase the complexity of the programming enjoying the various products and enhancements in the market. Fast forward to the end of the year 2009 and we’re now using the our iPhones to interface with our home and all things are good.
I can’t wait to see what happens over the next 10 years in this space!!! How are you using Smart Home Technology? Any Insteon users out there? Hope you enjoyed the article.