About Home Control...

What’s the best reason to invest in a home control system? Simply put, it will make your home life remarkably easier. You can press one button and have the lights brighten, your favorite music come on and the temperature be set at the most comfortable level. A home control system can save you from juggling multiple remotes in the family room and from running around the house adjusting various buttons, dials and switches.

There are certainly sophisticated systems that can handle complicated tasks. But any good home control system, no matter how complicated, should be simple and intuitive for the entire family to operate.

Features and Benefits...

Reliability—A powerline-based system is better equipped to overcome the things that can affect electrical signals within a home. If you plan on having home control in more than one room, look for a multizone control system. These allow for different controls in various parts of the home.

Scenes & Macros—More extensive systems are capable of enacting housewide and local “scenes,” which may also be called “modes” or “macros.” These allow more than one event to take place in sequence, such as a goodnight scene that turns off all the lights and arms the security system, or a party scene that turns on lights and music for entertaining guests.

Astronomical Time Clock—Another great feature to look for is an astronomical clock that allows your home control system to work with a timer that automatically modifies its commands for daylight saving time. With a system containing an astronomical clock, you can set your outside lights to come on at dusk, even though the time the sun sets changes slightly with each passing day.

Means of Control—Home control systems are typically operated by either touchscreens or keypads. The less expensive keypads are generally located on the wall near a room’s entrance. Each button on a keypad can be programmed to engage a scene or operate a single device in that room.

The most expensive home control systems generally use touchscreens that allow users to scroll through pages of controls, each one for a separate system such as lighting or audio/video. Touchscreens feature LCD screens and can be located on tabletops or on walls. Some models can display video from a DVD, satellite receiver, or security camera. Others offer either one-way or two-way wireless radio-frequency (RF) control. More expensive two-way RF confirms that the signal has been received by the controller.

Remote Access —High-end systems offer more remote home control, either through cellular telephones, devices such as Pocket PCs, or the Internet. Some systems allow users to control devices in their homes by logging onto secure Web pages. And more systems today are integrating with the Internet to take advantage of the information there, such as weather reports to control lawn sprinklers, for example. These days homes are becoming more time consuming to operate with the increased number of switches.  Your home can be run much simpler and more energy effcient when you incorporate all systems into one convenient home controller.