Houses just got smarter
From CCTV to mood lighting, today’s high-tech homes give you
total control of your living space .
Jill Macnair
For years there have been predictions about just what 21st-century
living would be like. Robots as house help, anyone? Hover cars and
holidays on the moon? Well, only the robot cleaners are anywhere
near arriving, but the “smart home” — technology
designed to make home life simpler, more luxurious and more efficient
— certainly has.
Plasma and LCD screens, broadband internet and wireless connectivity
have become mainstream, while technology more often associated with
millionaires’ row — remote-controlled gates, CCTV, home
cinemas, and the like — is slipping into ordinary city flats,
traditional country piles and suburban semis. Britain is embracing
a Jetsons lifestyle.
So what is smart technology — or rather, what can smart technology
do for you? The answer is many, many things. It is being able to
use your (hands-free) mobile phone while driving home from work
to run a bath that will be ready the second you walk through the
door; it is getting up in the morning, pressing a button next to
your bed and having the shower already running — at the perfect
temperature — by the time you reach the bathroom. It is pressing
another button and watching your lights slowly ramp up to a level
you have preset, so there’s no stumbling around a dark house
on a bleak, wintry morning.
Was that the door bell? Check who is outside on your nearest LCD
screen, which has come on automatically to show you. Forget about
fumbling in that messy handbag for your door keys: the lock is activated
by your fingerprint or iris. Scan the bar codes of food going into
your high-tech refrigerator before discarding wrapping — your
next shopping list is compiled.
No more dashing for a cuppa during commercial breaks to avoid missing
a scene of your favourite soap: flatscreens in every room mean you
won’t miss a second. Imagine having broadband internet, all
your television channels — digital, Sky and terrestrial —
all your films and your entire music collection in every room. That
music is playing from invisible speakers, buried in the plaster
of the walls.
“We’ve had clients who can lie in bed in their attic
bedroom and part of the glass in the roof above them will slide
back, so they can look at the stars or let cool air in on a hot
night,” says Robin Courtenay, a director of SMC (www.smc-uk.com),
a London-based smart-technology installer. “The roof will
have rain sensors so that it closes automatically if it rains.”
In the living room of Alan Grosvenor’s luxurious three-bedroom
flat in Kent, smart technology means by pressing only one button
he can close the electric window blinds, slowly dim the lights,
lower an 8ft projector screen from the ceiling and electrically
drop a framed picture on the opposite wall to reveal a projector,
transforming the room into a home cinema. Grosvenor knows exactly
how smart technology can make his life easier: he installed the
kit with his business partner, Jason Lawrence; the pair run Sevenoaks
Sound & Vision (01865 241 773, www.ssav.com), a specialist installation
firm.
Christiane Wuillamie’s two-bed mews house in South Kensington
also gives a taste of the future: cabling, installed when she converted
the property, links telephones, computers, a multi-room hi-fi system,
the television and the burglar alarm, allowing her to watch pictures
from security cameras on the television screen. A Sonos sound system
sends a different track from more than 500 albums to speakers in
each room.
“Christiane and her family can network their computers and
their in-house music system, and plug in their laptops in any room,”
says Jason Vaughan, of Kensington Home Technology,
(020 7731 4272, www.kensingtonhometechnology.com), who did the work.
So you can have the earth and more. But how exactly do you get it?
If you want the kind of super-duper pad that would stun even James
Bond, then you should turn to a “custom integrator”
company that will build you a tailor-made home network.
The Custom Electronic Design and Installation Association (Cedia)
has an online members directory (www.cedia.co.uk ). An installer
should provide a complete service: design the system, work with
architects, interior designers and other contractors to project
manage the installation and, crucially, show you how to use it.
They should also provide postinstallation support.
So where do you start? Set aside thoughts of fancy gadgets for a
moment: the bedrock of a smart home is the cabling, hidden in the
fabric of your house. This is connected to easy-to-use control pads,
attached to walls much like light switches: one for each room is
best — try Crestron (www.crestron.co.uk) and AMX (www.amxcontrols.co.uk)
for stylish brushed-chrome versions.
Usually, Cat5, the standard cabling used for data and telephony,
should suffice. Many control pads are compatible with Cat5, but
some, such as those from Crestron and AMX, require specialist power
cables to go with them (your installer will specify), and there
is also speaker cabling, high-quality cables for video signals and
HDMI cables to connect your Sky or digital boxes to your television.
Want to convert your shed into a home office with broadband internet?
Then you will require externally rated Cat5 cables, which will be
contained in a pipe and laid in a trench; normal Cat5 is not designed
to withstand exposure to the elements and will rust.
Once the cabling is installed, you can turn on the radio, play music,
control lights, raise or lower blinds or curtains, crank up heating
in winter, cool the house via air conditiong in summer, take off
the swimming pool cover, activate your spa bath ...
Want to do the run-the-bath-on-the-way-home-from-work trick? Have
your integrator set up your network so you can use your mobile phone
or the internet from any computer, to turn on the taps until the
bath is full, and then cut out.
There are several different ways to construct a system, but by far
the most popular method is to have all of the functions “star
wired” back to a central point in the house, such as a cupboard,
where any bulky equipment, such as amplifiers, is stored. Every
function is individually wired, so even though they are controlled
by a single keypad, if any one system shuts down, it won’t
take the entire network with it.
A good place to start looking at what you can do, and how to do
it, is the T3 Smart Home Show at Birmingham’s NEC later this
month. More than 60 “smart” companies will be demonstrating
the latest in multi-room entertainment; audiovisual equipment; lighting,
communications and security systems; wireless technology; and intelligent
appliances.
So what does a smart home cost? There is no such thing as a typical
installation. It is a bespoke service based on your home’s
size and the technology you install. You can spend as little as
£5,000 or hundreds of thousands of pounds, but installers
generally agree that £35,000 will go a long way towards fully
automating a four- to five-bedroom family home.
For that money, you could control lighting and electrics, have an
audiovisual distribution system that will feed music and images
to every room in the house, and a decent cinema room. A high-end
installation might include a multi-home entertainment system giving
you access to music, films and televi-sion from any zone in the
house; a wired and wireless data network so you can have broadband,
internet and telephone connections anywhere as well; and bespoke
lighting programmes: press one switch and the lighting dims for
a romantic dinner; press another, and the lights will go out gradually
as you leave the house.
Where smart technology really comes into its own is in improving
home security. This does not just entail CCTV monitoring. Lighting
and blinds can be controlled electronically to create the illusion
that people are at home. “Holiday” settings can monitor
your living patterns for two weeks before you leave, then, while
you are away, simulate your usual movements. Forget about outside
flood-lights that come on if an intruder steps on your premises
at night; smart technology will also switch lights on inside the
house, as if the homeowner is getting up to check on things.
All this high-tech kit represents a substantial investment. Will
it add value to your home? Robert Bailey, a high-end, London-based
buying agent, says there is definitely demand for smart homes among
his wealthy clients.
“At this stage you can’t say that smart technology would
add a certain percentage to your property,” Bailey says. “But
if you take an unmodernised flat selling at £1,000 per sq
ft, on the back of adding smart technology you might expect to get
between £1,300 and £1,500 per sq ft.”
If you want to get smart, but don’t want to blow the budget,
install the correct wires and outlets to “future-proof”
your home first and worry about connecting the gadgets later. The
cables can lie in wait under floorboards and behind your walls until
you need them, until you can afford to add technology, or until
new products come on the market.
Today’s nursery, for example, is tomorrow’s home office
if the broadband outlets are already there. There are also off-the-shelf
products available for not much at all, while wireless technology
can provide an alternative to cabling.
One of the dilemmas associated with smart technology is the knotty
issue of how we can have all these timesaving features without damaging
the environment.
“The biggest problem — and the most easy to remedy —
is the needless wastage of energy from devices left in standby mode,”
says Jim Hill, editor of T3 Home magazine. In particular, he is
keen to encourage the sales of devices that use minimal amounts
of energy when left in standby mode.
Smart technology can also be combined with green technology such
as geothermal heat pumps, photovoltaic cells, solar panels and wind
turbines.
Indeed, one of the core ideas behind smart homes — that equipment
turns on and off precisely when you want it — should help
to cut down on energy wastage.
“Climate control for the home should improve energy management
by ensuring the home is not overheated,” says Michael Holmes,
the editor-in-chief of Homebuilding & Renovating magazine. It
is vital, though, to ensure savings are not offset by greater use
of air conditioning, a massive user of energy.
Hugh Whalley, business manager of Siemens Smart Home Technology,
believes Britain’s increasingly erratic climate will encourage
people to control a home’s temperature while they are away
so that they will be more economical in energy consumption.
“Using a mobile phone, the capacity to control your home and
its boiler to cope with a sudden cold snap one day, followed by
16C heat the next, will come into its own,” says Whalley.
He believes that in 10 years’ time every home will have a
cabled system that makes it a smart home. Judging by our appetite
for luxury technology, it seems inevitable. But, as for that hover
car, don’t hold your breath.
Additional reporting, Karen Robinson
- Cedia’s consumer guide to the integrated home is released
next month
Jason Vaughan is co-founder of Kensington Home Technology,
a custom installation company .
