Build A Better Smart Home From Scratch

Building a new home is an exciting time for a family. Just like buying a new car, you get to be the only people who have a say in the configuration from the very beginning. You get to explicitly specify what it looks like, how many rooms it has, what those rooms do, and best of all, the optional equipment it contains!  Buying a used home, again like a used car, is all about finding the best option available that suits your “wants and needs” criteria. Certainly they both can be fun processes, but when you get to build something from the ground-up, you inject your own personalized touches and characteristics that truly make it your home sweet home.
 
With so much effort put into figuring out where plumbing needs to go for sinks and bathrooms, and where electricity needs to be run to for appliances and lighting, it is easy for a smart home enthusiast to overlook their most important objective: where all of the home technology goes! There is no better time to plan your smart home than when building a new home. Having the ability to create the hardwired infrastructure that will support all of your family’s technology needs is a time you should leverage to plan exactly how to use your smart home.
 
So where are the best places to start? Well, that depends on what you and your family will benefit the most from. From a logistical perspective, areas of most benefit to be completed during home construction are where you want to reduce wall clutter and produce a seamless and clean installation. Hardwiring smart devices after the fact can lead to a less than desirable outcome. So lets touch on three of the most commonly pursued solutions for a new smart home construction:
 

Smart Lighting:

When building a new home, Control4 gives you the ability to install a centralized lighting system. Think of it as an electrical panel specifically dedicated to just your whole-home lighting. Centralized lighting allows you to move your lighting controls elsewhere, like a closet or a utility room, allowing you to replace banks of multiple switches with stylish and elegant keypads.  Gone are multi-gang rows of light switches where you have to train people on which switch controls what individual light, and enter a single, clean and compact control keypad that controls any configuration of individual lights or an orchestrated scene of multiple lights throughout the home.
 

Multi-Room Audio:

Getting to listen to your favorite music throughout the home is a phenomenal experience for everyone in the family to enjoy. It’s a great idea to think ahead and plan on adding 2-channel audio for music in bedrooms, eating areas, and multi-purpose rooms, or even 5 or 7-channel audio for watching movies in the family room or media room. This allows you to install discrete speakers of your favorite brand without unnecessary clutter and also gives you the ability to drastically reduce the amount of equipment needed in each of the rooms you want to have audio in. With a Control4 multi-room audio system, you have one centralized multi-channel amplifier and audio switch that does all the heavy lifting while tucked away in an area of your choosing. The result: seamless and spacious sound filled in every room your family wants.
 

Security:

One of the most overlooked integrations in the smart home is security solutions. It is common practice for new homes to have a home security system installed, but the result is something that isn’t very smart and versatile, leaves unsightly and overly large keypads on the wall, and doesn’t integrate the latest in security cameras and recording equipment. When installed during a new home build with Control4, all of your security zones and interior/exterior cameras can be integrated and hardwired back to a centralized system that has a redundant power supply and recording features. Best part about it, when done this way you can easily integrate all of these features with your Control4 home automation, so you can trigger security events and actions from any device of your choice, be it an In-Wall Touch Screen, Tabletop Touch Screen, iOS or Android mobile device, In-Wall Keypad etc.  The result is a home security system that is not only smart and gives you the peace-of-mind you need for your family’s safety, but also is installed for maximum discretion and awareness so that if something unplanned ever does happen, you can be alerted immediately and capture what happened.
 
If you’re interested in more information about smart home technology, fill out the form below. Or click here to find out more information about making your new home the smartest on the block.