The benefits of smart home automation

The honest question is what changes in the rooms you already live in. Not what the system can do — what it stops asking you to do. So this is a walk through a Kansas City metro house one room at a time, with the before and the after in each. Nothing here is a demo feature. It is the part of the work that shows up after we leave.

The kitchen

The kitchen is the room that gets used hardest and lit worst. Before: one bank of switches nobody can read, the island on the same circuit as the cans, the pendants either off or too bright for a Tuesday morning. Somebody walks the room twice a day turning things on and off.

After: the room has three or four levels instead of on and off, and it picks the right one on its own. Music starts here and stays here rather than waking the whole floor. The doorbell camera comes up on the screen in this room, because this is the room people are standing in when someone knocks. The kitchen is usually where a household first notices it has a system.

The entry and the mudroom

This is the room that carries the biggest change and gets the least attention. Before: leaving is a lap of the house and arriving with full hands is a fumble for a switch in the dark.

After: one keypad by the door takes the house down on the way out and brings the path back up on the way in. The value is not the button. It is that the house stops depending on somebody being careful, and that the person who used to do the lap gets that job back. On a garage entry we light the path the groceries take and nothing else, so nobody upstairs is woken by an arrival at eleven at night.

The primary bedroom

Before: two lamps, a ceiling fixture, a thermostat down the hall, and a last walk through the house to check the doors. After: a keypad at the bed answers all four. Doors that were left unlocked lock. The lights somebody left on downstairs go off. The room drops to the temperature this household sleeps at rather than the one the whole house is held at.

Blackout shades in this room are the single upgrade owners mention most, and the reason is not the shade. It is that the shade is on the same clock as everything else, so it opens ahead of the alarm instead of being one more thing to remember at night.

The family room and the media room

Before: four remotes, a soundbar that lost its pairing, and one person in the family who is the only one who can start a movie. Everyone else waits for that person.

After: one press takes the room to the light you watch in, wakes the display, wakes the sound and picks the input. That is the whole change, and it is the one that gets the most use. The test we care about is not whether it impresses a visitor. It is whether a twelve-year-old and a guest can both start something without being taught.

The home office

The office is a network room before it is anything else. Before: a call that drops when someone upstairs starts streaming, and a router in a basement corner doing the work of four access points.

After: a wired drop at the desk, an access point placed for this room rather than for the square footage of the house, and cameras and locks kept off the lane the calls ride on. Nothing about that is visible, which is exactly why it gets cut from bids and then blamed on the automation later.

The lower level

In this metro the basement is where the theater, the golf simulator and the guest suite end up, and it is the part of the house with no daylight to tell it what time it is. Before: a stairwell light on all day and a room that is cold until an hour after you sit down in it.

After: the level is its own climate zone and cools or warms ahead of use rather than during it. Stair and hallway lighting comes up on motion at a low level after dark, so nobody carries a laundry basket down in the dark and nobody leaves the whole level lit overnight.

Outside

Before: a patio that is unusable half an hour after sunset, a speaker dragged out of a cabinet, and floodlights that either blind the yard or do nothing.

After: the outside of the house is on the same system as the inside. Landscape and patio lighting comes up at dusk and steps down late. Audio plays out here at a level set for the fence line rather than for the room it started in. Cameras on the drive and the side gate report to the same place the doorbell does, so there is one thing to check rather than three.

The mechanical room, and the house with nobody in it

This is the room nobody counts as a room, and it is where the least glamorous benefit lives. A sensor behind the water heater finds water on a Tuesday morning and says so while it is still a towel and not a floor. Smoke and carbon monoxide alarms sit on the same system, so one alarm in the basement wakes every alarm in the house and lights the way out.

While the house is empty, a camera at the side gate sends one alert with a picture rather than an alert every time the wind moves a branch. None of that is interesting to demonstrate in a showroom. A good share of the people who call us are calling about it.

What it does not do

It does not make a house cheaper to run in any figure we would put in writing. We do not quote savings, and we are careful around anyone who does. That number moves with your habits, your equipment and your utility, and we control none of the three. The same answer goes for resale. A wired house that works is easier to hand to the next owner than a drawer of orphaned hubs, and that is as far as we take it.

It does not simplify a house on its own, either. Every device you add is one more thing with an opinion. What removes complexity is putting them under one roof, and that is a decision somebody has to make on purpose.

It also does not repair a house that was wired thin. Automation sits on top of the network. When the network is undersized, the automation is what appears broken.

The room that decides the rest

If you only do one room properly, do the one you walk through most. In most of these houses that is the kitchen and the entry beside it, because that is where the household actually turns around. A system that handles those two well is a system people use. A system that starts in the theater tends to stay in the theater.

Everything above is available a room at a time. What is not available a room at a time is the wire and the network under it, which is why we walk the whole house even when the work is going to start in one corner of it.