DACS General Meeting
November 2008
Program Review:
Mark Britton - Smart Home Technologies

by Drew Kwashnak

At the November 2008 DACS Meeting, Mark Britton, founder of Media Stratego energetically and enthusiastically demonstrated to the audience all about ‘smart homes’ and residential electronics and gave some good advice to people building additions or a new home.

Women are very influential when it comes to purchasing home electronics, involved in buying consumer electronics 73% of the time! Plus, women look at it for more qualitative benefits such as convenience, ambiance, elegance and service. They want to know “what can it do for me?”

Mark suggests to look at the room as a whole, and not just at the gadgets to set things up. Determine the room's purpose, how it is to be used, what processes are involved in use of the technology and at the operators.

Ideally, the home should be wired while the walls are still open as it costs 4 to 7 times more to retrofit as an afterthought. The wires should converge in some location in the house where the server and other systems are going to reside.

He had three categories of how and for what to wire:

• Wire for necessity items such as phone, cable and internet,
• Wire to enhance resale value for such things as satellite, home networks and surround sound and,
• Wire for its “bling”, or such items as LCD touch panels, home lighting systems, DVD distribution system, cameras, etc.

ZigBee and Z-wave, both offer technology on automating the household. Z-wave has a good overview video on their website that goes over how it all works and gives some ideas on what they can do.

Mark only had time to go over a few of the possible categories of smart housing: Lighting and Energy Management, Security, Heath and Safety, and Entertainment.

For Lighting and Energy Management, Mark talked about compact fluorescent light bulbs and dimmers. Lutron products can retrofit lighting controls using RF. It even includes a page where you can set the dimmer and see how much money this little change can save you, which Mark demonstrated for us.

While the savings from using compact fluorescent bulbs is known to be quite good, nobody really knows just how big of a savings LED lights would have over the compact fluorescent bulbs but it is estimated to be much greater.

Adapters for fitting LED lights into existing sockets are available, so one can replace a floodlight or long shop lights with the ultra-efficient LED version. Also brought up were LED light strips where one can peel and stick the LCD light or a string of them virtually anywhere. The flexible strip is cut to size or expanded upon and can go just about anywhere. One place in which it looked very attractive was inside a glass fronted cupboard.

For safety reasons, these lights could go on when there is an intrusion or when there is a fire in the house. The system can even blink the outside lights to help direct the firefighters to the correct house.

One of the largest benefit of moving all of your DVDs and music to an entertainment server is the amount of space that it will immediately free up. One product on the market that handles all of this beautifully, though expensive, is called Kaleidescape.

Before Mark ran out of time, he took DACS through accessing a dashboard for a real house. From this dashboard, he could see and modify the settings for all the automated components plus it calculated the cost of running a house with those settings and the amount of the savings.

While this may not be quite like the Jetsons’, the capabilities that are available for one to make a house do what one wants are becoming easier and easier.