Home Automation Info

The benefits of home automation lie in the achievement of your desired lifestyle in the home environment. A desired lifestyle usually embodies the factors of: simplicity, convenience, comfort, entertainment, efficiency, connectivity, and safety for the whole family.

Lets examine the achievable lifestyle factors for each home subsystem:
• Home Entertainment Center
  Automated controls for your entertainment centers address simplicity and convenience in the delivery of entertainment content. The universal remote functionality replaces a myriad of individual device remotes and provides the ability to control the entertainment activity by emitting multiple commands with the press of a single button. A consistent operational interface is provided when the same universal remote is deployed in multiple entertainment centers. These systems are enhanced when the universal remote provides connectivity to your home computing resources to retrieve media (e.g. digital photos and music) to play on the entertainment display.
• Climate Control
  Controls for your heating and air conditioning (HVAC) systems, in the form of programmable thermostats, address comfort and efficiency by maintaining a schedule consistent with your family’s presence in the home. Convenience is achieved when the automation system can detect motion and change the temperature set point based on the garage door opening in combination with the time of day. Or detect open doors or windows and shut down the HVAC system until they are closed.
• Lighting Control
  Lighting controls also provide convenience, comfort, and efficiency by controlling when interior/exterior lights are turned on and the brightness level. Lighting scenes are merely the combination on/off and brightness level settings for multiple lights in the home to achieve a desired environment for a given situation or occasion. Once a lighting scene is defined, it can be invoked by time of day, motion or contact sensing, or the push of a single button at a convenient place in the home.
• Security System
  Security and alarm systems normally address most of the safety issues in the home environment. However, adequate lighting at night can prevent unwanted accidents such as falling down the stairs or add to the burglary deterrent by flashing exterior lights when motion is detected. Convenience improves when security sensors can also be used to trigger climate and lighting scenes when the alarm system is disarmed.
• Home Data Network
  Increasingly home automation systems are being designed to utilize the home data network to pass control information or stream digital media as mentioned above. This infrastructure subsystem will play a larger role over time allowing the integration of entertainment, computing, and control devices with appliances into a coordinated home network with the potential to improve all of the other lifestyle factors previously mentioned.

Note efficiency translates into dollar savings in energy cost for your home. A simple example is turning on outside lights to 80% brightness at sunset to save 20% of the electricity usage for this one typical lighting scene.

With complete home automation systems, described in more detail later, you have the greatest opportunity to meet all your lifestyle factors by coordinating the operation of each of the above subsystems into one cohesive system.