Installing Smart Home Technology in Your Home
Imagine being in the Caribbean, vacationing with your family, and you know the dog sitter is coming over to walk your pup. You can unlock the front door for the sitter, turn on the living room lights, and turn off the TV you left on to keep your pup company. Then once the sitter returns your pup, you can see the dog’s friendly face in your cameras, make sure the front door is locked, and turn the TV back on. Or imagine you are coming home from a long day at work and it is cold outside, you hop on your smartphone, turn the heater up in your home, light the fire in your living room, have the blinds opened so you can enjoy that snowy view, and turn on some relaxing music before you even walk in the door. That is the magic of Smart Home technology.
In the last few years, smart home technology has become very popular in homes across the nation. Choosing to have smart home technology installed adds a huge convenience and ease factor to your life, as it can all be controlled from your phone or a device from anywhere in the world. Managing your home is simply at your fingertips. It has also become completely customizable, allowing you to create a unique set up that fits your particular needs. The most popular smart home devices installed to focus on controlling your video entertainment system, home speakers, and security systems.
The price of the Smart Home purchase and installation depends on how intricate of a system you are looking for. The best option is to add the Smart Home technology either during the construction stage of your new home, or during a large remodel, otherwise it typically requires opening up some of your walls to run all the new wires. Smart home technology can run off of Bluetooth, but you really want to add a hardwire to your home in order to back up the wireless technology in case there are glitches in the Bluetooth software, which tend to happen every now and then. If you were to add the hardwire to the home after it is built, it will require more demo of the home, making it more expensive and time-consuming. Depending on the size of the home, the amount of demo needed, and the amount of technology added to the home, the price can range anywhere from $70k to $180k.
With the purchase of Smart Home technology rapidly growing, it’s clear the price tag is worth the experience. You will be able to control so many features of your home with a voice command or touch of a screen. Even when you aren’t physically at your home, maybe on some faraway vacation, you can check in on your home. You can control simple things such as lights and music levels as well as larger items such as a jacuzzi or your security system. The goal of smart home technology is to make your life easier and also put your mind at ease. You can always ensure that lights are turned on, TVs are off, and even that the house isn’t too cold when you return from a day out. The upkeep of your technology is little to none as you will only need to do software updates, and most of the technology providers include that complimentary for you. Since technology is always changing, updates will be needed regularly, but having a hard-wired home makes this easy and manageable.
Think of it like this, when you install a nice stereo system in your living room, you install all the wiring, the speakers, and the stereo box itself. Then when you want to upgrade your stereo system, all you have to do is replace the stereo box itself, you don’t have to reinstall the speakers and the wiring each time. The same is true for a smart home, once you have all the hardware install, the new technology all lives in the “brain” and that can easily be swapped out 3-5 years from now if you want a completely new updated system. Otherwise, the software updates have great new additional features added all the time.
Adding smart home technology doesn’t just improve your everyday lifestyle, but it also will increase the value of your home when you go to sell it. Having smart home technology when you go to sell can increase the value of your home up to 5% and will make your home more desirable as more and more buyers are looking for homes with technology already installed.
Deciding to install smart home technology can be a time and money investment, but in the long run, it will make your life easier and add value to your home over time. If you are interested in the steps it takes to get smart home technology installed, please feel free to reach out to us for more information!