Home Automation For Dummies

Dwight Spivey

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781118949641
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Hardware
• Index: Computer Science

The easy way to control your home appliances

Do you want to control common household appliances and amenities from your smartphone or tablet, wherever you happen to be? Home Automation For Dummies guides you through installing and setting up app-controlled devices in your home, such as heating and air conditioning, lighting, multimedia systems, game consoles, and security and monitoring devices—and even suggests popular products to consider.

The saturation of the mobile market with smart devices has led to an upsurge in domestic devices, such as thermostats, refrigerators, smoke detectors, security systems, among others, that can be controlled by those devices. Both Google and Apple offer fully-integrated solutions for connecting mobile devices to home theater and audio systems, and now Google has branched out into smart thermostats and smoke detectors. If you've caught the bug and want to get your feet wet in this cool new phenomenon, Home Automation For Dummies gives you plain-English, step-by-step instructions for tech-ifying your home without breaking a sweat.

• Provides clear instructions on remotely controlling your home appliances
• Shows you how to set preferences to automatically adjust lighting or temperature
• Explores digital "life hacks" that explain how non-app-ready appliances can be controlled via smart phones using third-party go-betweens
• Covers an emerging segment of the industry that was one of the primary focuses of this year's Consumer Electronic Show

If you're looking to find new ways to simplify and better control your home environment using app-driven devices, your phone, or tablet, Home Automation For Dummies makes it easier.

Part I

Introducing Home Automation

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In this part . . .

• Discover the “smart” way to automate your home with Wi-Fi and smart devices.
• Understand the benefits of automating your home.
• Know what you'll need to get started with smart home automation.
• Determine what tasks in the home you want to automate.

Chapter 1

Home Automation 101

In This Chapter

Examining changes in home automation over the years

Benefitting from automating your home

Understanding home automation technology

“How do we make life better?”

“How do we make more time for what really matters?”

“Why can’t television commercials for technology companies incorporate music that doesn’t involve finger snaps, hand claps, xylophones, and ukuleles?”

Those three questions haunt me every day, as I’m sure they do you, gentle reader. However, only the first two issues are ones that I think mankind will actually be able to do anything about in the near future. That said, I concentrate on those in this book.

People have always had to work, and we’ve always tried to find ways to make that work easier, whether by developing better tools and technologies to do the work or by making other folks or things do the work for us. Sick of digging up dirt with your bare hands to plant seeds? Let’s invent the plow and make our cattle do the heavy lifting. No longer want to beat your clothes with a rock in the nearest creek? We’ll invent the washing machine, then. Don’t want to carry ten jugs with you to the river to gather water? By George, I think aqueducts and plumbing might be a good idea. We are always on the lookout for ways to do tasks better or shirk them altogether — and that’s a good thing, if you ask me.

Home automation is yet another step in this struggle for making life better. Some folks may scoff at the idea that automation means life is better, but I’ll bet those same folks don’t mind using a gas or electric mower when it comes time to cut the lawn. I’ll wager a pretty penny that they really appreciate their automatic dishwashers and their refrigerators, too. Time marches on — and so does technology.

Defining Home Automation

Let’s see . . . if I were to give my own definition of what home automation is, I’d first look at the definitions for each of the two words that make up the phrase. For that task, I consult the Merriam-Webster website (www.merriam-webster.com):

• home (noun): the place (such as house or apartment) where a person lives
• automation (noun): automatically controlled operation of an apparatus, process, or system by mechanical or electronic devices that take the place of human labor

Combining the two definitions, I initially conclude that home automation is the act of automatically controlling tasks within the home that are normally performed through an act of human labor. While this sounds neat and orderly, it actually isn't so (but it’s getting there, and quickly). Home automation has been around for a long time, but it’s beginning to really take off for consumers at all price points in this Internet age.

That said, and before I get too far ahead of myself, let’s take a brief look at how home automation has been achieved in the past and how it's getting done these days.

Doing it the old-fashioned way

“Is there an old-fashioned way of doing home automation?” you ask. My reply: “Yes, indeed.”

Before I get too far afield, allow me to define what I mean by “old-fashioned” in terms of home automation: spending thousands (and sometimes tens of thousands) of dollars to implement customized automation solutions within a section of your home (such as the entertainment room seen in Figure 1-1) or throughout the entire space.

Image courtesy of Home Entertainment, Inc.

Figure 1-1: This entertainment room is fantastic, fun, beautiful, and by no means inexpensive.

Home automation has been around for quite a while, but some of its technology tended to be available primarily for folks with fat bank accounts. Why? Glad you asked.

• Home automation used to be a specialty premium service, requiring a great deal of money to manufacture.
• Installing a home automation system often required extensive rewiring and other electrical work.
• Ongoing support and maintenance of a customized home automation solution was (and in some cases, still is) expensive by nature.
• Systems were truly customized to the individual home, creating higher costs.

These are just some of the reasons for the super-high cost of past systems, and for the still-high costs of similar comprehensive home automation solutions today. Controlling your entire home’s lighting just wasn’t something that most of the housing market was doing until recently. Also, old-fashioned home automation was something you did within the confines of your home; rarely were you able to handle tasks remotely. Some home automation technologies, such as intercoms and garage door openers, were never as expensive as others to implement, and therefore more prevalent in homes. However, they were the exception rather than the rule.

Before I finish this section, I want to make it understood that I see nothing wrong with whole-home, customized automation, and many companies today excel at it (and bully for you if you have the moola to do it!).

If you are interested in this particular type of home automation, by all means, visit the websites for these wonderful companies that are more than capable of helping you make your home automation dreams come to life:

• Home Entertainment, Inc.: www.homeentertainmentinc.com
• Crestron: www.crestron.com
• Savant: www.savant.com
• Control4: www.control4.com

Self-installing a home automation system

I’m certain some of you handier folks reading this book (for which I humbly thank you, by the way) are thinking about implementing the type of whole-home system I just described yourself, and that’s certainly a possibility. However, depending on the extent you want to automate your home, the time needed will be great, the work involved will be monumental, and the cost will still be up there a bit. I’m not trying to discourage do-it-yourselfers at all, if that’s truly what you want to do, but if you think you might be even the slightest bit concerned about my earlier caveats, either let companies that specialize in these kinds of installations handle it for you, or please do read on with an expectation that you can learn how to automate your home without tremendous headaches and hassles.

Automating homes today

I don’t know about you, but most people would jump at the chance to automate more things in their lives if doing so were affordable...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: Introducing Home Automation
• Part II: Automating Inside Your Home
• Part III: Automating Outside Your Home
• Part IV: Taking Command of Your Home Automation Systems
• Part V: The Part of Tens
• About the Author
• Cheat Sheet
• Advertisement Page
• Connect with Dummies
• End User License Agreement