Decision process and initial setup

Well, I thought I would put up a post detailing a little about why I wanted to get into Home Automation, what I was trying to achieve and how I went about deciding on technologies and products.

Well the easy answer to the question of why is that Home Automation is freaking cool and I am a huge geek.  Seriously, who doesn't want their house to react to them and do things for them?  Wouldn't it be nice if your house just knew when you got up in the morning, turned on your lights, made you breakfast and then turned everything back off and cleaned up after you?  Hell yes it would!  How do you get there?  Well you have to find the technology and put it to use.

I started reading about Home Automation back in 1999/2000 and actually implemented a small X-10 setup in my old apartment that did not work out so well, but that is another story for another day.  After that though I took an extended break from Home Automation, mainly because I was not in a position to implement any of it.  When I moved into my current home last summer we decided that we are going to (Barring anything unforeseen of course) stay here long term.  This means that I get to automate this house :-) .  Well, after almost 10 years of not really spending any time researching I was woefully out of date on the Home Automation technologies so I started reading everything I could find.  Avsforums.com, cocoontech.com, remotecentral.com as well as browsing blogs and Home Automation online stores.  While doing this initial research I was mainly looking for 3 things.  What would I like to actually automate, what were the current and upcoming technologies, and most importantly would my family enjoy the results (Would my family like or hate them is pretty much the determining factor for how far I could take this project)? 

The first thing I tried to do was decide what I actually wanted to automate and how that would provide a benefit to the members of the household.  The first, and probably easiest, thing I looked at was automating the lighting in the house.  Setting up events like turning on lamps at Sunset, turning them off at bedtime and turning off any others at Sunrise.  Turning on porch lights and backyard lights at night and off in the morning.  Closet lights that come on when you enter and off when you leave the closet.  You get the idea.  There are many other areas of home automation, but this was a good starting point.

Next step was to decide how I was going to automate the lights.  I knew that I did not want to use X-10, due to the experience I had with it previously and also due to the fact that the technology had not changed much in the past 10 years.  After doing some reading I decided that my real decision was between Z-Wave (A wireless protocol that creates a mesh network between the devices) and UPB (A powerline technology based loosely off of X-10 but much more reliable and efficient).  After doing a lot of reading, I decided on Z-wave not because I thought it was significantly better than UPB, but because of the broad range of products and support available using the technology.  UPB is more or less limited to light switches and similar devices, whereas Z-wave has many products like motion sensors, door locks, light switches and much more.  Additionally Z-wave has several big name companies supporting it (Schlage, Kwikset, Leviton, Cooper, to name a few).

Once I had decided on Z-Wave, I had to decide how to control it.  There are multiple options here, but since I planned to automate more than just the lights, and do it myself, my choices were quickly narrowed down to hardware control systems (Hard wired alarm and automation panels like the HAI OmnoPro or Elk M1) or software solutions (Software running on a PC and controlling the devices through serial or USB interfaces like Homeseer, Misterhouse, Elve and others).  After spending a lot of time reading forums, websites and talking to people in the Home Automation industry I decided to go the software route, and around Thanksgiving of this past year I purchased Homeseer as my control system.  This will eventually become the brains of my house (As my family always tells me I am certainly not the brains around here).

So now I had some of my technologies picked out and my control software purchased, but nothing to automate.  I was a dog without a bone.  I built a machine, installed Homeseer, got it all setup and then it just sat there.  Around Christmas time I finally ordered my first batch of automation gear so that I could get a couple of small things setup to see how the family was going to react.  I purchased 3 in wall switches (A couple of relays and a dimmer) and several plug in modules for controlling lamps and such.  I talked it over with the family and then installed the first 2 switches in my office on my lights and ceiling fan and the other dimmer in our dining room.  I also put some lamp modules around the house and got them integrated into the network.  Now it was time to setup some events and see how much everyone hates it...:-)

My wife is not a fan of overhead lighting, she likes lamps.  As such each evening she would go around the house and turn on about 5 lamps.  3 of these would remain on all night so that if we had to get up in the middle of the night, we can see as we wander around to take care of children that refuse to sleep, dogs that are barking at shadows or just random annoying things that can only go wrong at night.  So I used Homeseer to automate the process of turning these lamps on and off when my wife normally would.  Each evening a few minutes before Sunset all 5 lamps turn on.  Then at 10 PM two of them turn off and the others are turned off a few minutes after Sunrise in the morning.  Shockingly, this was a big hit.  It works great, and everyone loves the fact that the lights come on at just the right time in the evening, and then proceed to just take care of themselves.

Riding high on this initial success I have automated several more things around the house, setup several different technologies and am working on touchpad control and integration of the multiple sub systems and technologies.  This is a FUN project, and each time I set something up and the family enjoys the result I like it even more.