Smart Homes: Running The House From Your Easy Chair

By Tanjua Damon

Do you ever wish that you could start the dishwasher, have the pool heated, and the lights on before you get home from work? Or when you go on vacation in the winter, do you wish that the house could be warmed up just before you walk in the door? Technology can now grant these wishes with a touch pad command.

Joseph Freeman of Newtown is equipping his house to be a smart home, which means that he will be able to control his entire house to do what he wants it to do by programming a control panel. He is wiring all the household utilities and appliances he wants to control to a kind of command center in the laundry room, which serves as a network hub for an array of touch pads around the house.

Mr Freeman is the owner of J.P. Freeman, a market research and consulting, security and home automation business.

When Mr Freeman started to redesign his home on Birch Hill Road, he decided to make it more technologically savvy and more convenient. As the renovations began, more than a mile of new wire was pulled through the walls of his  4,000-square-foot home. This chore is considerably easier in new construction, but existing homes can be updated by snaking the wire through the walls.

“It’s cool,” Mr Freeman said. “We run a consulting business; through this we get a window on the new world that is coming.”

Control panels can be placed on walls, in furniture, on night stands, wherever the homeowner wishes to have access to programming things such as the dishwasher, lights, heat, entertainment systems, audio, security systems, pools, or irrigation systems. The way this all can be done is through networking. The central control located in Mr Freeman’s laundry room is similar to a circuit breaker box. Everything he wants programmed will be wired to that particular spot in the house to be connected to the main system.

Although smart homes are expensive for the average homeowner at this point, Mr Freeman believes that these types of technological options will be available at a lower cost in the future, following the well established trend of computers and other digital technology. It can cost $100,000 or more to equip a house as a smart home, but it all depends on what the homeowner wants to hook up.

“In time, when something is new it is always very expensive,” he said. “In the future, this is the way people will run their house.”

When asked why he was making his house a smart home, Mr Freeman explained that it is the way technology has taken the world –– by convenience.

“It’s convenient,” Mr Freeman said. “This is just a symbol of they way the office works. We do it all electronically. This is just a microcosm of what happens in business.”

There is a battery backup to the system, but people can still run their household appliances manually even with the technology networked. Homeowners can even program things by phone if they need to.

“People have the ability to control the heating, lighting, security, dishwasher,” Mr Freeman said. “You can even control the water sprinklers in the lawn or the pool water level and heat.” His security cameras will also be controlled by the system.

When installing the wire for these capabilities, RG6 wiring is used as well as fiber optics, which carry more data faster, according to Mr Freeman.

“The big trick today is to build in the biggest wire you can,” he said. “Smart home is a glitchy word for sitting in a chair and putting your finger on the little guys [buttons on the touch pad]. This is the way ideas are going to be in the future.”

Mr Freeman said the only real problem would be if someone had been working on the house and cut a wire, it might take quite a while to figure out where the problem was, but he said the chances are small for that to happen.

Mr Freeman has been working in the field of security surveillance for the last 20 years. He finds this type of work interesting and cutting edge.

“This is a gaga world. Electronics have gone crazy. A lot of it comes from the military,” he said. “For me it’s partly an adventure.”