★Residential · Service

Smart Home Automation · Kansas City.

What you are buying is subtraction: fewer apps, fewer decisions, one owner. IntegrateIT designs and installs whole-home automation across the Kansas City metro from Overland Park, Kansas — on Control4, Crestron Home, custom Crestron or Lutron HomeWorks, with lighting, audio, climate, shades, security and locks answering to one interface. Existing Savant systems serviced and taken over. Phone: (913) 804-7575 or office@integrateit.tech.

Below: what a platform replaces and when you should not buy one, how we choose between the four, why scenes are the product and devices only parts, what an older Kansas City house takes away and what new construction gives back, and what has to be true for the system to still be good in year ten.

The pile of apps, and the honest case against us

Most houses arrive at automation by accretion. A smart lock one Christmas, some bulbs the next, a thermostat when the old one failed, a doorbell after a package went missing. Each one works. Together they are nine apps, nine accounts and nine companies, none of which has any obligation to the others. Nothing there is broken, exactly. It is unowned, and unowned systems degrade quietly — a bulb that stops responding, a routine that half runs, a cloud service discontinued with sixty days notice.

Here is the honest argument against hiring us. If your house is modest, two adults run it, both of you enjoy the tinkering, and nothing in it needs to work when you are not there to nudge it, a well-chosen pile of devices is a reasonable answer and you should keep your money. We would not pretend a professional system is the only path to a light turning on at sunset.

What changes the calculation is scale and consequence. A larger house with sixty lighting zones, motorized shades on three elevations, a theater, cameras, a pool and people who are not the household using it — a guest, a sitter, a housekeeper — is where a platform stops being a luxury and becomes the only way the house stays legible. The processor runs locally, so the logic does not depend on somebody’s server, and one company answers for the whole of it rather than nine vendors who have never spoken.

Choosing the platform, honestly

We are authorized on all of them, which is what lets this be a real recommendation rather than a pitch for the one line we carry.

• Control4. The right answer for most homes, and the platform we build on. Broad device support, a mature app the household actually learns, and a dealer ecosystem deep enough that the system stays supportable. We are a Control4 Platinum Dealer with a Control4 Certified Showroom, which is what gets us advance firmware and priority escalation when a system needs it.
• Crestron Home. Crestron hardware with a packaged, standardized programming model. Right where the house wants Crestron-grade equipment and conventional behavior, without the cost and the ongoing commitment of a fully bespoke program.
• Custom Crestron. For the house where the interface and the logic should be written specifically for it. The most capable option and the most demanding — it wants an owner with real opinions about how the house should behave, and in-house programming talent for the life of the system. We are an Elite Partner and we do that work ourselves, which is the only way we would take it on.
• Lutron HomeWorks in the lead. Where lighting and shades are the whole ambition and AV is secondary, a Lutron-led system is simpler and better than adding a second platform on top of it. Our lighting page covers that case.

Savant deserves a clear sentence, because homeowners ask and vague answers read as evasion. We are not a Savant dealer and we do not sell new Savant systems. We do service, maintain and take over existing ones whose original installer is gone, which is genuine and frequent work — details on our Savant service page. Adopting an orphaned Control4, Crestron or Lutron system is the same conversation, on system takeover. A head-to-head comparison of the three flagship platforms is in the journal.

Scenes are the product. Devices are parts.

Nobody wakes up wanting to operate a shade motor. They want the bedroom to be usable at six in the morning in January without turning on a light that hurts. So we design by day rather than by device: what should the house do at wake, in the working day, in the evening, at a movie, at goodnight, when everyone leaves. Each of those is one press, and each one reaches across lighting, shades, climate, audio and security together — the away press that arms the alarm, sets back the climate, drops the shades on the sun elevations and pauses the irrigation is doing five vendors’ jobs at once.

One rule separates systems that get used from systems that get resented: every important scene needs a physical control, not only an app. A keypad by the bed, at the garage door, in the kitchen. Guests do not have your app. Children should not need one. Phones die. Voice — Josh.ai runs local to the home for exactly this reason — is a fine third path, and a wall you can press is the one that never fails.

Underneath the scenes sit the subsystems, installed as one scope: Lutron HomeWorks or RA3 lighting with tunable-white circadian scenes; distributed audio on Sonance and Triad architectural speakers with Sonos zones where they fit; motorized shades; multi-zone climate on per-room schedules; pool, spa and irrigation folded in; Paradox intrusion with Ubiquiti cameras and access; keypads finished to the designer’s specification; and a theater with Trinnov processing where the house has one. What holds it together is the network, which is why we build that first — a properly engineered network is the difference between a system that responds instantly and one that feels haunted.

What an old Kansas City house takes away, and what a new one gives back

The pre-war and mid-century stock in Brookside, Prairie Village and Mission Hills imposes three constraints that decide the design before anyone opens a catalog. Plaster over lath does not want to be opened and does not close invisibly. Many of those houses have no attic above the rooms you need to reach and no chase between floors. And the wiring predates the practice of running a neutral conductor to the switch box, which rules out a great deal of conventional wired dimming without opening walls you would rather leave alone.

So in those houses lighting goes wireless — Lutron RA3, and no-neutral devices where the box demands it — keypads sit politely inside original trim rather than replacing it, and wire gets pulled only where the house offers a genuine route. The result is a real system that respects the house, and honestly a narrower one: some things a fully wired install does easily are not available, and we would rather say so on the walk than at trim-out. The long version is in adding a smart home to an older house.

New construction in south Overland Park, Leawood, Stilwell and Loch Lloyd has none of those constraints, and the same budget reaches considerably further because nothing is being worked around. Keypad locations are decided on the drawings, speaker and shade pockets are framed rather than retrofitted, conduit goes in for the cables nobody has invented yet, and the network is wired properly the first time. That is why we push to be involved at design development rather than at drywall — the same argument that runs through our new-construction low-voltage work.

When to bring us in on a build

Design development. Not at drywall, and not at the point where somebody notices there is no speaker wire in the great room. The plan review is the cheapest hour on the whole project and it is the one that decides what the house will be able to do for the next twenty years — so it happens on paper, before anything is expensive to change. We read the architectural set and the reflected ceiling plan, and the drop count comes off the room list rather than a per-square-foot rule, because two identical houses can land well apart on it.

What gets settled there, in order: access points, in-ceiling speakers and camera positions on the ceiling plan, where they fight with can lights, registers and beams — free to resolve on paper, expensive to resolve on a ladder in front of the framer. Then the structured-wiring panel and the rack, which want different things and on a walkout lower level are usually two different rooms. Then every exterior and cross-building run — gate, driveway, pool house, detached garage — because those want conduit buried at depth while there is still a trencher on site. Then the specialty rooms, because a theater, a golf bay or a wine room carries clear-span and ceiling-height requirements that have to reach the framer rather than only the electrician.

After that the build schedule decides, and the coordination is with two trades. Blocking goes in while the framer is on site; it costs him minutes and costs everybody else days if it is missed. Speaker back-cans go in while the joist bay is open, because retrofitting one is a drywall job rather than a speaker job. Shade pockets are a framing decision with a low-voltage consequence, and they get decided at plan review or they get decided badly. Lighting and shade control need low-voltage pathways the electrician does not run, so that is a conversation rather than an assumption. And we mobilize once, in the window between MEP sign-off and insulation — the same week the electrician roughs in power. Ducts win every conflict; we route around them. The full sequence, stage by stage with what has to be true first, is on our new-construction low-voltage page, and the version written for the builder — pre-wire spec the week the project signs, fixed price, one crew, one project manager — is on how we work with builders.

If you are already past that window, it is narrower rather than closed. Wire is inexpensive during framing and expensive after drywall, because every run becomes a fishing job — so pre-wire what you can even for systems you are not buying yet, and put conduit anywhere a future pull is plausible. The home automation guide covers the pre-wire rule of thumb and the honest timeline for a new build against a retrofit.

What keeps working when the internet goes down

The house keeps working. The services stop. That is the whole answer, and it is worth being precise about which is which, because “it runs locally” gets said about systems where it is not true.

What keeps running. Lighting scenes, keypads, shades, climate and distributed audio execute on a processor sitting in your own rack — a Control4 controller, a Crestron processor, or the Lutron HomeWorks processor in the equipment closet. The switch by the bed, the goodnight press, the astronomical-clock schedule that drops the shades at dusk: all of it behaves the same the day the connection dies as the day before. Local voice runs in the house too, which is why Josh.ai is the voice path we specify rather than a cloud assistant.

What stops. Anything that is an internet service by nature: streaming accounts, remote access from your phone while you are away, cloud-hosted cameras, cloud voice assistants, and any integration whose brain is somebody else’s server. We would rather write that down than let you find it out in an outage.

Two caveats we will not skip. Local control still needs the local network alive — a switch or router losing power is a different failure from the connection dropping, which is why the rack goes on battery backup where the build allows and why the network is built first. And if an existing system dies completely the moment the connection drops, that is a finding rather than a feature — usually something load-bearing built on a cloud dependency it never needed. That diagnosis is part of what a repair visit is for.

Designed for year ten, not for the demo

Automation systems rarely fail as hardware. They fail as abandonment — the integrator disappears, nobody has the documentation or the credentials, and a system that works perfectly becomes untouchable because no one can safely change it. We have adopted enough of those houses to design against it: the logic runs on local processors, the documentation is handed to you, and you hold the credentials rather than us. If you ever replace us, you can. That is the point.

Then we stay. Every install carries a five-year workmanship warranty, the equipment carries its manufacturer warranty, and you have our support for as long as you own the system — which is a longer commitment than the industry norm and the reason we are careful about what we put in. What actually drives the number is broken down on Control4 cost in Kansas City, and the failure mode we design against is described at length in why most Control4 installs fail at year seven.

Common questions