Top 30 Home Automation Companies :

What is Home Automation?

Home automation is arguably one of the most misunderstood subjects by the average homeowner. This site was specifically created to help de-mystify this topic by presenting bite-size jewels of information which can be digested in story book fashion or in reference book mode.

By understanding the benefits and applicable technologies available today you will have a greater appreciation of this topic and be able to form considered opinions regarding its applicability to you. If indeed you can grasp and relate to the lifestyle advantages available by deploying home automation systems in your home, this site will be an ongoing reference to help you make the product and vendor selections to meet your automation objectives now and in the future.

The following segments of this overview offer a definition of home automation to enable you to frame this topic, to know what it is and is not. From there we move on to identify the benefits available by installing this technology. And finally, this opening section wraps up with a discussion of the future direction of home automation to help you determine if the future of this industry is moving in a direction consistent with your needs for yourself and your family.

Benefits of Home Automation

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:

Entertainment

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

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

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

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 whole-house 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.

Future of Home Automation

Predicting the future of just about anything is very risky business. Home automation is an industry that largely started with X10 devices in 1980. Today, we believe the future of home automation will very much ride the digital age and develop along with the computer and networking systems in the years to come. Initially it appeared, companies such as Microsoft and Exceptional Innovation with their Life/ware software were positioning the Windows Media Center PC as the heart and sole of a complete solution for home automation relying on web services to seamlessly interface with lighting controls, climate controls, security panels, and IP surveillance cameras to compliment the digital media management capabilities of Windows Media Center. However, Exceptional Innovation stopped selling their systems for residential installations, and Microsoft Media Center capabilities have disappeared in the Windows 8 OS.

Today the "Internet of Things" has emerged as the picture of our connected future depicted in the following graphic.

The above graphic from Control4 shows access to your smart home system from anywhere in the world, which thousands of Control4 homeowners have been doing for the last few years.

Advances in home networking technology using both wired and wireless Ethernet have enabled the addition of more devices to the network at an affordable incremental cost. Those building new homes today should consider installing Cat6 wiring throughout the home to support a Gigabit Ethernet bandwidth which will improve the performance of digital video streaming among devices in the home. To view our recommended home network topology for smart homes click here. The IEEE 802.11n standard for home WiFi networks will likewise provide similar improvements in wireless bandwidth. Even though the 802.11n specification is still in draft form, pre-n home wireless routers delivering up to 300 Mbps bandwidth have been available for the last few years and offer significant advances in signal strength throughout the home. This improvement in bandwidth bodes well for existing homeowners wanting to retrofit a home automation solution without knocking down walls or tearing up drywall.

Coupled with the above advances in Ethernet technology is the emergence of radio frequency (RF) communications protocols such as ZigBee (IEEE 802.15.4 standard) and Z-Wave developed by Zen Systems. RF communications has speed advantages over Ethernet for small amounts of information which is typical of the command sequences required for controlling lights or thermostats. We chose to highlight the industry leading Control4 product line specifically because the system architecture is built on a communications infrastructure that utilizes the strength of Ethernet for digital audio/video streaming and ZigBee for control information between the system controller and other devices and user interfaces in the system. These mature RF protocols also enable wireless contact and motion sensors to be deployed in security systems. An example is the ZigBee-based sensors from Card Access (www.cardaccess-inc.com), which also improve the attractiveness of security features for existing homes.

Analogous to the computer and networking industries, the degree to which smart home functionality will become mainstream will depend on the systems and software developed to enable a "plug n' play" environment where a homeowner can purchase lighting devices or thermostats that can easily be added to a proprietary home automation system without engaging a custom installer/integrator.

One reason X10 technology enjoyed a 30+ year ride was the simplicity of adding X10 devices in your home at a cost affordable by all homeowners, and the larger variety of X10 devices previously available allowed the homeowner to address some areas of control the new technologies could not. But now that X10 product manufacturing has been discontinued by companies such as X10 USA, homeowners will have to transition to one of the RF-based technologies. This transition is probably best managed by replacing failed X10 devices with Insteon equivalents from Smarthome which can be assigned an X10 address and controlled by X10 devices in addition to other Insteon devices.

More recently we've discussed the potential of home automation from the cloud which could have the ability to extend smart home technology to a much larger market if a central server with a thin home controller client architecture was developed and deployed. While Apple and others are touting the "cloud" as a repository for all your media, it's not clear any of the top HA companies are looking at the central server/remote client approach.

With the proliferation of household appliances available with an Ethernet connection to add to the audio/video devices also having this connection, clearly a new level of "automation" would be possible in the future if the "plug n' play" capability enjoyed on today's computers is extended to these other home devices. This of course will require manufacturers to see a compelling reason to include the appropriate chips and firmware in these appliances to enable recognition by other controllers on the home network.

With the speed of the digital age this incremental cost may be insignificant when combined on a chip providing other essential functions. So check back with us in 2020 to see how the industry has done!

Home Automation Technology

Our view of home automation technology starts with the X10 signaling protocol, which hit the retail market circa 1980. Prior to X10, automation control systems were typically point-to-point hard-wired systems installed almost exclusively in very high end homes.

The home automation technologies available today still include X10 and hard-wired systems. But also include enhanced powerline (i.e. for home electrical circuits), ethernet, and wireless technologies. This segment explains each of these technologies and how they are typically used within a home automation system, along with the advantages and disadvantages of each.

In addition to providing enhanced performance, reliability, and functionality, the newer technologies bring whole-house automation into the realm of affordability for any home 2000 sq ft and up. Realistically, even an apartment dweller can take advantage of these products for high return solutions in any of the home subsystems discussed on this site.