It’s not
every day you get invited to visit the future.
Then again,
it’s not every day I get invited to a steak night, and that is really where
this ‘discover smart homes’ journey (and so this blog) began. As a very nice
steak settled in my stomach I began talking to a man called Darren, an electrician
who, it emerged, is right at the forefront of bringing what he called ‘smart
homes’ to South Wales. I had never heard of such a thing. I have also never
held any great interest in electronics, household or otherwise, so I may well
have been the least qualified person in the room to be engaged in a
conversation about rewiring homes to make them more intelligent and efficient. But
what a degree in English Literature fails to teach you about wiring a plug it
makes up for in giving you the ability to put together a fairly cohesive blog.
As it turns out, that was something Darren was looking for.
Barely one
week later, I found myself sat next to Darren in his van on my way to visit one
of his most recent projects: a newly built retirement property he was wiring to
make life as easy, simple and comfortable as possible for the couple who had
built it. I was there to spend an evening experiencing life in a smart home, in
order that I would be better placed to write a blog about it. From a (complete!)
layman’s perspective, of course.
After one that
one evening, I can honestly say that Darren’s clear excitement for what he is
delivering is very much warranted. I began this blog saying I had been ‘invited
to visit the future’. I hope that as you read on you can see why.
‘Could my music follow me around the house and come on automatically if I walked from say, the bedroom into the bathroom?’
My brief for
the evening was to witness and write about just how well a smart home can be
designed to fit around its particular owners, but as Darren began to point out
all sorts of the specific features he had installed in this house, I found it
very hard not to interrupt him with the ideas for my own home which kept springing into my mind. Perhaps that is the
very first thing to say about life in a smart home; whatever you can imagine
would make your home life more comfortable, more efficient or more fun, Darren
can translate into reality.
‘Could I have
waterproof speakers in the bathroom ceiling?’
‘Of course!
And they could – ‘
‘Could my music follow me around the
house and come on automatically if I walked from say, the bedroom into the
bathroom?’
‘Yes, that wouldn’t be a problem. They could come on when
motion sensors see you enter the room, or when the shower is turned on.’
‘Would there be a way of being woken up by particular music
at particular times?’
‘Well, the couple who will be living here have had the
system set up so that they can be woken up by their favourite radio station,
have the lights come on between their bedroom and the bathroom, and have the en suite
bathroom already heated to a particular temperature, ready for them to move
through for a shower.’
Waking up has never sounded so easy. To say I felt ‘like a
child in a sweet shop’ is a bit of a cliché; really, I felt like an adult in a
smart home.
Downstairs, Darren led me into an expansive, open plan
kitchen-dining room-lounge. Here, fitted lights across the ceiling, hanging
lights over the kitchen worktops and hidden strips of colour-adjustable LEDs
all work together to create a myriad of settings and moods (called ‘Scenes’ in
the system app).
What these ‘Scenes’ enable you to do is tailor the ambience
of a room to particular situations, arranging for the lights in each area to be
‘just so’ before saving your chosen settings on the app. Again my head began to
fill with the possibilities. If I were cooking something fresh and summery, I
could arrange for the actual colours and lighting of my room to help bring a
sense of zest and brightness. In winter I could add a log-fire glow when
serving up comfort food. I could easily illuminate the entire room for a large
party but with a flick of a switch or a tap on the app instantly create the
impression of being in a more intimate, cosy lounge if people wanted to stay
later to watch a movie. The zonal lighting system and the adaptability of the
‘Scenes’ is able to create distinctive settings and what one might term ‘room
identities’ in a way I have not seen before in open plan houses. Again, the
home experience it is possible to create seems to be as expansive or particular
as each owner’s imagination.
Thankfully however, not just my imagination. Darren, being so experienced with the system he
uses, has an extensive knowledge of just how it can be used to look after
aspects such as home security, safety and energy-efficiency. He has thought of
ideas which would never have occurred to me, but once explained left me
wondering why on earth such practical features are not being fitted to every
home.
In a smart home, where all the electrics communicate through
one server, smoke and security alarms become even safer. It is important to
mention here that thanks to operating on a different circuit, the standard alarms
will continue to work even if power to the main system is somehow lost.
However, it is as part of this wider network that the alarm systems really come
alive. I know that with the isolated smoke alarms in my own house, a fire in
the kitchen would only trigger a single alarm; in a smart home isolated alarms
become a thing of the past. Should a fire be detected in a smart home, not only
do all the alarms sound but the lights come on around the house, and can be
programmed to flash on and off if desired. Should the couple who own the house
I visited happen to be deep sleepers, or hard of hearing, such a sensible
feature could prove invaluable in catching (especially night-time) fires early.
'As funny as it is to imagine an intruder being hounded out of a house by Justin Bieber declaring to the world that ‘it’s too late to say sorry now’, the situation is unlikely to ever come to pass.'
The security alarm goes one better, however. If an intruder
is detected, not only will the alarm sound, the alarm light be triggered on the
outside of the house, and all the lights inside the house begin to flash, but
all the audio systems in the house are programmed to come on at full volume and
blast a burglar with whatever music or noise the owners choose.
Darren recommended Justin Bieber.
As funny as it is to imagine an
intruder being hounded out of a house by Justin Bieber declaring to the world
that ‘it’s too say sorry now’, the situation is unlikely to ever come to pass.
A smart home is designed to reduce the chances of a burglary occurring in the
first place, through utilising something Darren tells me is called ‘Presence
Simulation’. Motion sensors (which are primarily used to automatically switch
on lighting and heating) throughout the house I visited will ‘remember’ the
owners’ movements throughout a normal week. Should they go away for any length
of time, the system will mimic those exact movements by switching the lights on
and off at the correct times. Short of borrowing a trick from Home Alone and placing full-sized shadow
puppets in the windows, I think you would be hard-pressed to find a better deterrent.
As we moved through the house, it became almost funny to
hear how casually Darren would mention clever features he had programmed into
this particular system. To him it may now seem the most obvious thing in the
world to have nearby relatives automatically notified if the retired owners are
known to be in but the fridge has not been opened in twelve hours, but to me
the idea was new and frankly, genius. I think it was at this point that I began
to see this particular smart house in a new light. Yes, the adjustable LEDs and
the clever app are very, very cool, and the money-saving functions are enticing
(more on that shortly), but here was a feature that was genuinely so sensible
and potentially health and life-saving, that I began to wonder why it was not
being fitted in every home. Of course, the idea did cross my mind that the
one-in-a-million day might arise where nobody uses the fridge, but the system
is so customisable that other triggers even more fool proof than that one could
be fitted. I also think I would be happy to risk the occurrence of an
accidental call out to my parents’ home as a trade off for such a smart way of
tracking their safety.
'What this means in practice is having warm, dry towels whenever they are needed, and all for free. Which sounds rather nice really.'
What of the money-saving aspects of the house? Well, the
property I visited had been fitted with solar panels which, against all the
odds, appear to be quite effective in Cardiff. The amount of watts being
generated by them can be seen easily on the app, and that electricity can be
used (either through a moment-by-moment choice or automatically) to power any
item in the house. The owners of this particular property may well use it to
charge their electric car for free; dishwashers and washing machines also
spring to mind as potential recipients of this costless power.
One place where the owners have specifically chosen for the
power to be used is in the bathroom. The towel rails have been fitted with
their own heating element and thus can come on without the main boiler having
to warm up. What this means in practice is having warm,
dry towels whenever they are needed, and all for free. Which sounds rather nice
really.
As we walked around the house, Darren pointed out just what
the system was working on to make sure we were exactly as warm or cool as we
wanted. The temperature of each individual room was already set and on a timer,
but the motion sensors were standing by to override those timers if we stayed
in a room later than planned. Any temperature changes we wanted were just a
flick away on the app. The temperature sensors were constantly noting down
variables and learning how long it takes to heat each room; they more they
learn, the more efficient the heating system becomes. Champions of
multi-tasking, they were also figuring out if different parts of each room got
warmer or cooler at different rates and were telling the radiators to adjust
accordingly. This all added up to guaranteed temperature balance and cost-efficient
use of heaters, without Darren or I having to do anything at all. The house was
thinking for us, and about things I would never even have got round to
considering.
‘The sensors will also automatically switch on the heating
if the temperature drops dangerously close to freezing,’ Darren explained, ‘so
no more risk of frozen and burst pipes.’
As a final touch, he handed the app over to me.
‘Have a look at this,’ he said, walking over to the door. As
he opened it, an alert popped up on the screen. The system knew the door was
open, and as well as notifying me so I could close it if needed, it was also
adjusting the heating so it did not waste enormous amounts of energy and money
trying to compensate.
I think that is one of biggest things I took away from my
visit to the property; a smart house is not just a ‘set-up’ house. Where a
‘set-up’ house can have heating or appliances running on a timer schedule set
days or months earlier, a smart house constantly learns and adapts, running
what needs to be run at exactly the right time. It adjusts to situations as
they develop without its owners having to think.
'If you are staggering into the kitchen with eighty-five bags of shopping then you can turn the lights on with your elbow, just like you always have.'
In my own home we have Bluetooth speakers in several rooms,
and we have an app which controls them. There are heating and lighting systems
on the market which can be operated from a phone. Were I to fit these products,
I would create a brilliant ‘set-up’ house. But I would have to open three
different apps to control them all. I would have to manually choose settings as
I moved from room to room. I would have to remember to adjust the heating and
change its schedules. In a smart home, there is just one app. If I wanted to I
could set everything up once and then let the house run itself more efficiently
than I ever would.
Of course, I would probably spend many a minute tinkering
with lighting ‘Scenes’ and reviewing how much power the British sunshine had
provided for us, but that is just me. The very best thing I can see about smart
homes is this: they feel like the future but will work for everyone, now. If
the efficiency and life benefits appeal to you but you would be happiest just
flicking on a normal light switch when you get in then there’s more good news.
There are no complicated multi-switches or touch screen panels in Darren’s
system. Just a single, simple switch. Sure, it can cycle through all the fancy
lighting arrangements you saved on the app, but if you
are staggering into the kitchen with eighty-five bags of shopping then you can
turn the lights on with your elbow, just like you always have. If like
me you would like nothing better than to show everyone the huge array of
customisations and futuristic tricks available on the app, then the stage is
yours! And if, after a busy evening showing off all the ‘Scenes’ you have
created, you are struck by the thought that you forgot to put on the
dishwasher, then relax. The chances are the house will have remembered and done
it anyway.
Before we left, Darren took me to the garage to show me the
server which keeps everything ticking along. The server itself is just a small
green box. I do not know what I was really expecting (a lot of flashing lights
perhaps? A keypad from the set of Star Trek?), but I certainly was not
expecting to see a perfectly normal circuit breaker alongside it. Even I know
what to do with one of those.
‘So there’s no instruction manual or anything?’ I asked.
‘I’m the instruction manual,’ said Darren, ‘I go through
everything with the customer, and then I set up the whole thing exactly how they
want it.’
As we left I kept reaching to turn off the lights. I was
sure we had left some on. As Darren set the alarm and we locked the door I saw
that much of the upstairs was still lit.
‘Don’t we need to switch off the –‘
Of course we didn’t. Before we had even got in the van,
everything unnecessary in the house had turned itself off.
So I’ve been able to visit the future. It’s quite a lot
easier than I thought.
