The smart home market encompasses many different product groups from lighting, heating, shading, security, smoke/CO detection, audio visual, door entry, CCTV, Home Cinema — the list goes on. The Smart or intelligent home aims to use the Internet of things (IoT) to bring these all together in a seamless fashion, so ultimately you can control or monitor any activity in your home or property and your property can interact with yourself and other devices (for example your car: it may be that the gates or garage door opens automatically based on your geographic location).
As a customer or end user unravelling the numerous complexities of the design of a smart home can be totally overwhelming.
Household Automation has been automating properties since 1999 and is able to best advise on all aspects of automation, weather you are looking to design a product group specific ‘stand alone’ system (such as a lighting system) or a complete integrated home automation set up.
Design
The trend in wall furniture ( items such as switches, thermostats, door entry or security panels etc. ) is for simplicity. Anything other than a button press to switch something on or off is removed from the wall furniture and placed in a convenient app that can be accessed from any location ( so for example lighting scenes or heating timers). Areas that require multiple functions such as lighting, heating, blinds, windows remain simple switches but are clearly labelled. This leaves more room for choice when it comes to aesthetic design – wall furniture may be different colours, materials, finishes but will have the same theme weather a thermostat or a light switch.
When designing systems we are always looking to the future:
- Longevity of the product range and system design that we recommend: – there are so many new products in the market place, our product recommendations come from well established links with companies that have a history of product enhancement.
- A consciousness of points of failure, we would not want your whole house to become inoperative just because your Internet connection was down!
- Longer term monitoring ( for maintenance) and fine adjustment ( for maximum efficiency – lower energy costs).
Installation
Household Automation offers an installation service, our product design encompasses bespoke purpose built modules that can be sent to site for installation by your electrical contractor.
Service and maintenance
We use monitoring software to provide graphical representation of activities within the property. This has proved particularly useful when it comes to energy conservation as the graphs enable us to diagnose and adapt the system to accommodate long term trends in energy usage.
Andy Ellis is the founder and managing director of Household Automation Ltd, www.household-automation.co.uk and its sister company Knxion Ltd, www.knxion.co.uk providers of building automation consultancy, design, installation and aftercare services to clients who are involved in building residential and commercial properties. For further advice don’t hesitate to call us on 0330 2232101.