Control Home Lights with Your Smartphone
A Safer and More Welcoming Home Home Automation Light Control
It’s a snowy mid-winter night and you are returning home from a long trip. You’re anxious to get home. Your house is dark because you turned out the lights to save energy. You’re worried about slipping and falling in the dark.
Not to worry! You grab your Smartphone and connect with your home automation hub. You tell your hub to turn on your porch lights. The lights come on and you come home to a welcoming and safer home.
You had the foresight to install home automation equipment. You discovered that the convenience of home automation is now available to the home do-it-yourselfer, and you did it yourself.
No longer are you at the mercy of home automation installers and high-priced equipment. Reliable and low-priced home automation products are now available for the do-it-yourselfer.
All the above appealed to me as I like to do my own home improvement projects. After some extensive research, I decided to install my own home automation system. I started with light control. And I settled on Insteon as my preferred home automation system. Here's how:
The Best Way to Start Your Home Automation System
How to begin your home automation - Start with lamp control.
Let’s say that you want to control your home lights with your computer or Smartphone. You already have an Internet router and a modem installed in your home.
If you are a home do-it-yourselfer who can read and carefully follow instructions, you can install a home automation system.
What you need is a hub that connects with your router, and a smart plug-in module for your lamp. The hub receives your instruction via the web, and transmits it to the plug-in lamp module. The module turns the lamp on or off, or dims the lamp to your desired light level. It’s that easy.
I chose an Insteon home automation system for my home. Insteon has long experience in home automation. The Insteon system is "dual mesh" -- meaning it sends commands from a Hub over BOTH radio and powerlines in your house. That makes it extremely reliable and available to both radio-controlled and wired Insteon responder units, such as the dual based lamp dimmers that come with the Insteon Starter Kit.
Use your Insteon Hub as a Timer toTurn Lights on and off Automatically
Once your set-up is in place, you can "tell" your lamps to turn on automatically, say at 5:30 pm, and off automatically after bedtime. Now you don't have to worry about doing this manually. You can even use "sunrise" and "sunset" times to control your lamps.
You'll really appreciate the timer featureWhen you expand your Insteon setup to include your porch and post lamps. I I I My setup turns these lights on and off automatically at whatever time I specify. When we drive up to our home, the lights are on and a safer, more welcoming home awaits us.
Control your home lamps with your iPhone
Expand your starter home automation system when you are ready to automate other tasks
The beauty of starting small is that you don’t have to invest your time and money (even for low-cost equipment) until you are ready. You can install a Insteon Starter Kit -- light dimming lamp control system, and expand it as you desire. You can add heating and cooling control, floodlights, garden lights, garage doors, room lights, fountains – and more.
The key is compatibility. There are several different home automation technologies out there. Make sure each component you buy is compatible with all your other components.
Take a look at the following video. It shows how the the SmartLinc - INSTEON central controller can work for you.
You’re missing out on home safety and convenience if you haven’t installed a home automation system.
