Home Automation Tips

A fully automated smart home is a thing of beauty. It’s a delicate ballet of sophisticated systems working together for a common goal: a more efficient, more comfortable and more user-friendly home that improves your quality of life.

Every home automation system needs a space to house the centrally-installed control equipment. This space needs to be able to accommodate a small server-rack cabinet and, ideally, be close to your existing distribution board.

Ideally, smart homes are created either during a house’s initial construction or retrofitted during extensive renovations. Because of this, many people dismiss installing a home automation system as ‘too much of a hassle’ or ‘too disruptive’. While the best results will always be gained from a holistic and complete automation solution, there are ways to install automation components in an existing home without the hassle of major renovations.

What about wireless?

When you talk no-hassle installations, the first word on everyone’s lips is wireless, but at this point in time, when it comes to home automation, you’re still much better off running physical cables. Wireless technologies are constantly improving, and will become a viable option in the future, but currently, they don’t have the same consistent reliability that more traditional installations do.

Many homes have an existing area where services such as the alarm system, CCTV, DVR, DSTV decoder and router are fitted – that would be the obvious choice for your automation controls as well, space permitting.

In some homes, retrofitting cables can be impossible, but there are ways to automate without having to tear down your home. 4ward-design shares five top tips to help you do just that:

1. Define your needs and expectations 

Accurately comparing quotes can be tricky, especially when the costings are based on poorly defined requirements. For this reason, it’s essential that you sit down and think about what you want to achieve before approaching any audio visual or automation companies.

Think about what you’ve seen in other homes, what you liked and what you didn’t, and how those control elements would fit into your lifestyle.

2. Consider your design

Once you’ve defined the elements in your home that you’d like to be able to control, it’s time to formulate that into an actual design. 4ward-design recommends appointing a professional AV/automation company to handle the technical design phase, even if it’s not the same company that you choose to do the supply and installation. This ensures that you get a well-considered and professionally detailed system, and gives the installation team all the relevant on-site info and detailed instructions for correct conduits, routes and outlets. It also means that they have an informed go-to contact should any queries arise.

3. Select your control space

4ward-design is a huge fan of systems like Crestron, Control4 and KNX, which are modular and allow for upscaling at a later date.

Every home automation system needs a space to house the centrally-installed control equipment. This space needs to be able to accommodate a small server-rack cabinet and, ideally, be close to your existing distribution board.

Many homes have an existing area where services such as the alarm system, CCTV, DVR, DSTV decoder and router are fitted – that would be the obvious choice for your automation controls as well, space permitting. If not, garages are often good options, as are the unused spaces beneath stairs.

4. Relocate services if necessary

There are situations in which not all of a home’s services are located in the same place, and in these cases you’ll need to weigh up the cost and hassle of relocating them to a central position. If this is not an option, you’ll need to accommodate at least one CAT6 data cable running from your automation control system to each of the services, wherever they are. That can add up to a lot of cables, and concealing them isn’t always a simple matter.

5. Choose your hardware

Once your cabling is in place or your services have been relocated, it’s time for the fun stuff – selecting the hardware that will suit your lifestyle the best. 4ward-design is a huge fan of systems like Crestron, Control4 and KNX, which are modular and allow for upscaling at a later date.

They are top quality products and give slick results, but they don’t come cheap, so do make sure that your budget is realistic. As we like to say, you can’t build a Bentley on a Toyota budget.

For more information, visit www.4ward-design.com.  Article Sourced from Property24 website.