What is a Smart Home?

What really is in a Smart Home?

Many ask this question, and today we will help you with the right answer.

Smart Home has many different definitions. With so many solutions being offered out there that claim to make your home smart, it can definitely be challenging to choose the right one. 

A real Smart Home solution shouldn't be about complicated and challenging control panels to manage your lights and audio devices. It should be the opposite, knowing just what to do, to bring you the enjoyment of taking care of millions of tasks for you and your family continually.

Looking after your lighting, shading, heating, entertainment and more, all by using high automation technology allowing you more time to spend with your family, friends and visitors, this is indeed what a Smart Home should give you.

Your Smart Home should be designed to know what to do, whether it be in the morning or evening, the time does not matters. When you are cooking or just relaxing with your entertainment system, your Smart Home comes with endless possibilities to bring the desired comfort at home. 

It should also mean playing music in your home whenever you want to hear it, even allowing each member of your family to play different music in each of their rooms. Never interrupting one another and allowing everyone to enjoy what they like in their space. 

Music is relaxing, it reduces stress and brings joy. Your Smart Home will help you create moments of happiness in your home through music. The added bonus to waking up to your favourite tune in the morning, or by relaxing to music in the bath after a long stressful day or incorporate sounds for specific moments throughout the day. Activated seamlessly throughout your whole house or just a specific room, or even have it follow you as you walk around the house turning the audio on when entering a room after leaving the other one where the music will now turn off. 

Create the right lighting to give the best atmosphere and mood for every room while enjoying your daily tasks. Home Automate believes a kitchen preparation area with full lighting is a great assistance to avoiding accidents, in contrast to the bathroom with a subdued set of lights to help you relax, this level of intelligence and automated comfort only exist through a real Smart Home.

In your home, your lighting always knows when it is needed and when it is not thanks to intelligent lighting controls. Lights will turn on automatically when you enter a room, or off when leaving it, taking into account the existing level of brightness, helping you save electricity usage.  Of course, you can take control at any time by either using a switch or the smart App provided by your Smart Home solutions provider, it is user-friendly and gives conscious control at your fingertips.

A real Smart Home will always look out and take care of you and your family, protecting your home with a high technology surveillance system to keep watch over you, even while you're asleep. It will also give you the same level of protection while you are at work in your office or just out for the weekend. The system will alert you of any suspicious movement and will sound the alarms in case of an emergency.

An Intelligent Home can also warn you about other dangers at home, not just intruders. Hazards such as water leaks, gas leaks and fire involved situations, lighting up a path to take you and your family to safety in the most quickest and most efficient way possible. In essence will provide you with a peace of mind, and a sense of comfort at all times, for you and your family. Unfortunately, danger could be waiting around any corner. A real Smart Home will assure you of knowing that you will be alerted to any potential threat, thus giving you the time to react accordingly to prevent any harm.

In addition, a smart home take care of your children and keeps them safe. Sometimes they can escape your line of sight and having a smart home with features and applications that can assist your Smart Home system’s Child-safe mode. You can activate this mode whenever desired by simple touches of a button. Even when at home one of the most favourite and accessible features for all parents is having the TV or gaming consoles in the child’s room turn off at a specific time, encouraging bedtime. 

Although this is not the only useful tool as mentioned before, a real Smart Home also takes into consideration the welfare of the elderly. Sometimes staying independent in their own home is essential. Moreover, nobody likes to feel like they are being watched or spied on. Smart Homes offers many different options including passive monitoring helping you pay attention and keep safe those less capable of looking out for themselves, all this by not invading their privacy. 

A great example would be: An elderly father. His routine is to turn the TV on at 8 AM to watch the news, with the help of a smart socket, a text, or email that can be sent to you if the TV has not been turned on within a 30-minute window of 8 AM, thus giving you notifications if something is out of the ordinary.   

Smart Homes are more than just a tool. They help you save energy and assist you with daily activities, providing an efficient living scenario. Your Smart Home will think and act like you, keeping everything under control. At the core of all of this is a Miniserver, the mastermind behind the intelligence of real Smart Home, controlling and processing every smart device in your home. Think of this Mini-Server as the brain giving all the solutions and your home is the nervous system and performer of these solutions.

The Miniserver commands all the conversations between components and smart devices which means it controls the shading, heating, lighting and home entertainment systems. Wired or wireless, or even the combination of both. The Miniserver will also learn and anticipate the habits of each inhabitant in the home, carrying out their wishes and needs to create and provide the perfect environment. All your personal information is protected by several security mechanisms provided by this Miniserver’s especially by the fact that all your details will never leave your home. Considering data privacy is seen as a serious crime, protection of all your information and right to information privacy is paramount in any integrator’s mind when setting up your miniserver. 

A Smart Home will perform millions of actions for the homeowners, allowing you to enjoy the time previously spent on performing tasks which we can now automatically achieve with the help of a Smart Home. It does not matter if it is to control the lights and ambience or give you the perfect experience with home entertainment, you can enjoy all of this while keeping your house safe and your families protected.

Is It Really Possible To Run A Smart House Only With Wireless Technology?

Most families who are looking to turn their home into a smart one, have a hard time deciding how to start a new project. The main reason is that they believe that in order to turn their house into a smart one, they must run a cable throughout the house and basically do a home makeover. In reality, they have the option to go entirely wireless, but, as we already know, it’s a common belief to hesitate about wireless solution's effectiveness.

Hopefully, that concern is something from the past. Many manufacturers have developed a type of technology that allows them to create mesh networks in order to provide good wireless reception in larger houses or property with a complex structure or thick walls.

How Safe Can Smart Home Technology Be?

Protection is very important for the home automation industry and for homeowners equally. Wireless technology, when it's not encrypted can represent the risk of someone attempting to hack your network and get sensitive information from you or your family members.

The good thing is that smart home manufacturers add encryption features to the language that’s spoken among devices. Keeping the communication that your devices have inside the house is vital to enjoying home automation. Make sure to use a provider that can guarantee usage of encryption keys, in order to keep your privileged information, safe.

How Can I Make Sure That My Devices Are Always Updated With The Most Recent Technology?

When smart home technology started to become more popular, the majority of the smart products that were available were not open for upgrades. This means that if back in the day you got the latest model in a smart thermostat, it’s cutting -edge technology status will only last until the new model made its appearance.

It’s important to clarify that even though there are still many smart home devices that are not upgradeable, some manufacturers are betting on constant updates that will keep the devices functional and up to date.

Can a wireless-only Smart House Be As Functional As A Wired One?

Of course, it can be just as functional. Many smart home companies let users enjoy the full potential of their wireless devices, making sure that integration among systems is conducted flawlessly. Companies like Loxone are betting on new technologies that increase wireless device's functionality.

Right now there are new homes that are already smart home-friendly and there’s a whole new market for those houses. If you have a regular house and are looking to start a retrofit project, it requires a whole new approach. If you have a team of home automation experts ready to guide you through this important project, make sure that they can deliver quality and reliability from all the devices and the network they’ll be using.

If you lack the team, or if you’re missing the right guidance, you can talk to one of our specialists who can guide you through properly.