The Importance of Pre-wiring for Custom Audio Video and Home Electronics Systems

Pre-wiring. It’s a fairly new term in the home construction industry, but it’s an essential one to understand if you’re building a new custom or semi-custom home. If you’re interested in installing any custom audio video and home electronics systems, it’s essential to get the wiring and cabling in place from the start. Just as conventional home builders have wired a home for electricity, today’s home builders provide wiring/pre-wire services to accommodate electricity, networking, home security and other home automation systems. When you build in the wiring/pre-wire from the start, you’ll maximize your future options and minimize your future headaches by incorporating what you need to accommodate new technologies as they become available.

What the Heck is Pre-wire?

Pre-wire refers to installing low-voltage electrical wiring inside your home’s floors and walls. These wires can accommodate many different kinds of electronic devices. By doing the wiring/pre-wire for all of your systems – even those you don’t plan to install immediately – during the home’s construction phase, you reduce the costs of installing items like HDTVs, multi-room audio/video systems, home security and home monitoring systems and communications systems when you do get around to installing them. The best wiring/pre-wire structures will allow you to create custom audio video and home automation schemes that are convenient for you, the customer, rather than the contractors you hire to install them later.

Can You DIY It?

While there are lots of home automation tasks that an experienced homeowner can tackle, wriing/pre-wire tasks really aren’t among them. It can be tempting to try to do it yourself because low-voltage wiring typically doesn’t require a certified electrician. Setting up the wiring for a home automation scheme is a lot more complex than installing an automatic dimmer switch on your chandelier. A professional custom audio video and home automation professional will understand important aspects of the job that will make it more stable and reliable, not to mention easier to access and upgrade in the future.

Why Wired Is Better Than Wireless

Wireless may be the direction of the future, but for now – and the foreseeable future – wireless systems aren’t really up to demands of a whole-house automated system. While they may perform well in a single room, common home obstructions – such as walls and stone facades – can make the reception and performance of your custom audio video and home security systems spotty – or worse. If you want reliable service for your home electronics systems, cabled is the way to go.

Intrigued? Contact a local company that specializes in custom audio video and home electronics systems to find out more about how wiring/pre-wire systems can prepare your home for the future of home automation.

Trends in Building or Environment Automation

Building or environment automation may seem like something that’s only for the well-to-do or the high-tech geek. After all, when would you ever do more than put your lights on a timer or set your thermostat to kick in when your house gets too chilly. These days, building or environment technology is capable of far more. Imagine this scenario.

You’re on your way to the airport to catch a flight to the vacation of your dreams when you suddenly start to wonder if you turned off the iron. What are your options? Until recently, you had two choices: head back home and risk missing your flight, or get to your flight on time and worry that your house would burn down in your absence. If you had the foresight to leave a key with a neighbor, you could make a call and ask them to run over and check to make sure the iron is off, which is a little more convenient, but wouldn’t it be nice to be able to call your house and tell it to cut the power to the outlet you’ve left your iron plugged into?

Today’s home automation technology makes that possible – and that’s barely the tip of the iceberg. With the right wring/pre-wire setup and smart home technology, your house is capable of doing many common, time-consuming tasks without any input from you. Here are just a few of the most popular – and very affordable – trends in smart home building or environment automation.

Let There Be Light – or Not

Lighting automation has been around for decades and may be the best known and most widely used segment of home automation technology. You can set your lights to go on or off based on a wide variety of inputs. Want the kitchen light to turn on when the garage door is opened? A wiring specialist can set it up to do that automatically. Hallway lights can be set to respond to motion, light, time or a door opening. You can set your bathroom lights to turn on automatically when someone enters and off when the lighting system senses no one is in the room. You can even create “mood profiles” for every room in your house and control them from a remote control, your home computer, your tablet or your smart phone.

Audio/Video Automation

Audio/video controls run a close second to lighting. Sometimes it’s hard to believe that only ten years ago, recording your favorite television show automatically was a complicated process. Today, you can set up and run your DVR remotely from anywhere in the world – and even access your recorded programs from a hotel room on the other side of the country. Beyond recording, there’s a whole world of ways to access your entertainment from any screen or sound system in any room in the house.

From the serious to the frivolous, building or environment automation is here to stay. Whether your concerns run to family security or you just want to turn off the lights automatically when your movie starts, your house can be programmed to do that. Talk to a custom audio video and home automation specialist today and find out how.

Assessing Your Building Or Environment Automation Capabilities

Environment automation sounds like a new concept, but building or environment automation has been around for a long time. While new technology allows for deeper integration of lighting, security, audio/video and other home or commercial systems, the fact is that you probably employ some degree of systems automation already. Assessing the building or environment automation capabilities you already have can help you plan for future integration and automation. These are some of the areas where you may already have some automation capability.

Security

Automated security elements include such things as motion-activated or sound-activated lighting and security cameras. You can also integrate your other systems with your security system to turn on lights, music and television on a timer to simulate that someone is home. Some aspects of building or environment automation make your home or business safer: garage lights that turn on when you open the garage door, for example, or stairway and path lighting that remains on for several minutes after you enter your driveway.

Lighting

In addition to the security aspects of lighting, you can also set lights on a timer to conserve energy, or install motion sensors to turn lights on when someone enters the room and off a certain number of minutes after the last person exits the room. This kind of automation can be a huge money saver in commercial buildings, where customers and staff frequently leave lights on in bathrooms or other seldom used areas.

Audio/Video

Many cable and satellite companies already offer distributed audio/video capabilities that allow you to watch the same or different channels on different screens in your home. Some of them also allow you to integrate a central audio server that stores your entire music collection and lets you access it from any room in the house. Turning that into a distributed audio system doesn’t take much effort – talk to a wiring/pre-wire specialist about wiring ceiling and wall speakers throughout your house to deliver music anywhere you want.

Environment Control

Programmable thermostats are the most common type of environment automation found in homes and commercial buildings everywhere, but they’re only an example of what’s possible with building or environment automation. If you can measure something with equipment, you can use it as a signal for event-based automation. Set your window blinds to open automatically to let in sunlight or close for privacy based on lighting levels, time of day or temperature. Put your lawn sprinklers on a timer, or program them to turn on when a motion sensor is tripped – a rather novel home security measure.

Building or environment control capabilities are becoming a bigger and bigger selling point in new and existing homes and commercial properties. Contact a home automation specialist to find out what capabilities your property already has and how they can be upgraded for more convenience and security.

The Many Facets of Custom Audio Video and Home Automation

Thanks to new technologies in custom audio video and home automation, homeowners and commercial property owners can now have far more integrated control over the way their home systems function. Home automation can be as simple as putting your outdoor lighting on a timer or light sensor, but the possibilities of custom audio video and home systems integration can accomplish so much more. This is an overview of the various systems that can be controlled in an integrated home automation system and ways they can make your life better.

Lighting

Lighting automation is probably the easiest and most popular segment of the industry. For many people, putting home lighting on a timer is a matter of controlling energy costs, but automating your lights and integrating the controls with other home systems offers so many more possibilities. On the practical end, you can set up a scheme where the garage light turns on automatically when the garage door opens – and control it all with the garage door opener, or from your smartphone. On the aesthetic side, you can create home lighting schemes to suit your moods or to highlight landscape or architectural features. And of course, proper lighting is an important aspect of home security.

Security Systems & Access Control

With the proper setup, your home can call you to alert you to any variety of situations that may require your intervention. Those situational triggers can range from traditional security events to such things as water in your laundry room or basement, or the fact that your child didn’t arrive home on schedule. You can even wire your home to allow to remotely unlock your front door when a friend or repairman arrives and you’re not home.

Audio/Video

Replace the typical array of remote controls for your cable, audio system, television, DVR and other audio/video devices with a single controller. You can set up an integrated system that will turn on your television, set it to the right channel, start the DVR and even dim the lights when you press a single button. In-wall or ceiling speakers can pipe your chosen playlist to any room in your house – or provide different playlists in different rooms.

Utility Automation

In addition to security and entertainment, you can automate a wide variety of home utilities, including sprinkler systems, heating and air conditioning, intercom systems for communication and even the windows and blinds. You can set any or all of those systems to start or stop based on a variety of triggers, including time, light, motion and other events.

For more information about how custom audio video and home integration systems can make your life more comfortable and convenient, contact a company that does wiring/pre-wire for new and existing homes in your area.

Custom Audio Video and Home Automation Not Just for the Rich and Famous Anymore

One of the nice things about high-tech is that it is ever-evolving, and as it evolves the prices start coming down. The newest tech toys may start in the homes of the rich and famous, but they eventually work their way down to wider accessibility. That’s the case with custom audio video and home automation solutions, which once were the province of the very wealthiest. In just a few years, automated and integrated systems for audio/video, lighting, security and networking have made their way into the mainstream. Where you once had to travel to major cities to find companies that specialize in bring automation to the home, today you’ll find dozens of companies that design, manufacture and install systems for custom audio/video and home automation in cities all over the country.

What Is Home Automation All About?

At its simplest level, home automation is the integration of services inside and outside the home to make them easier to control. Those services can include lighting, security, telephone, home networking and Internet, sprinkler controls, heating/cooling, audio/video and even window, blind and curtain control. Many of these services are already automated in many homes via programmable thermostats and sprinklers and lighting on timers, but home integration takes it all to the next level.

The end result is a home you can control from a single remote – or, with the right apps, from your smartphone or iPad – or one that can turn on the lights when you need them, turn up the music when you want it and kick up the heat half an hour before your alarm clock goes off.

And those are just the easy options. If you’re willing to sink a little more investment into your home automation scheme, you can have window blinds and curtains that draw themselves closed when it gets dark enough to see inside – or when the temperature in the room reaches a certain level. You can create lighting and music schemes for entertaining, program it into your remote and call it up with a single button when you have guests.

Accessibility of Home Integration Systems

Multiple manufacturers are working to bring custom audio video and home integration to the average homeowner. While it’s still easier to outfit your home for automation if you’re building new, it’s getting easier for manufacturers to retrofit older homes for updated systems. You can bring in an installer to do wiring/pre-wire your home so that you can pick and choose the features you want to install now and have the wiring in place when you want to add more in the future.

If you’ve dreamed of having a custom audio video and home automation package but thought it was out of your reach, this could be the time to explore your options further.

Tips and Suggestions for Custom Audio Video and Home Automation

Custom audio video and home automation can provide you benefits in comfort, luxury, convenience and, most important of all, energy efficiency. There are hundreds of products, services and design choices you can make that will make your home life easier, more convenient and more energy efficient. The process of making all of those choices work together can be complicated unless you take the time to plan out what you want and work with a company that specializes in coordinating custom audio/video and home automation programs in new builds, and in retrofitting older homes for home automation and entertainment.

Use these tips and suggestions to put together your plans so that you can share them with your contractor, electrician and others involved in your custom audio/video and home automation plan.

Walk through your home and consider the ways that automation can improve your security and your pleasure in your home.

Entryway Security and Lighting

When most people think about security, the first things that come to mind are locks and security systems, but there’s more to home security than just barriers. Lighting also plays a major role in keeping your home safe, secure and welcoming.

Choose downlights on dimmer switches above your front door to illuminate the stoop. Infrared scanners and motion scanners can turn the lights on and off whenever someone approaches the house.

The right lighting also helps illuminate areas for your security cameras, especially if you trigger your cameras to turn on when the lights come up.

Include an emergency light in your outdoor lighting and home automation plan. If the electricity fails, you still want to be able to find the front door.

Family Room

Outfit your family room with everything you need to make it totally functional. Some things to consider include the placement and number of energy points, audio connectors for your audio/video system and flush mounted ceiling speakers to pipe in the playlist or music program of your choice. Don’t forget video screens and wiring/pre-wire for cable, internet and telephone, along with any other networking components you’ll need.

Kitchen

Don’t leave your kitchen out of the custom audio/video and home automation loop. More and more appliances are being designed to take advantage of home automation options and Internet connectivity. Even if you’re not there yet, plan ahead for the future with wiring/pre-wire planning so you can upgrade when you’re ready.

Bathroom

Turn your bathroom into a luxury spa with custom lighting, programmed shower choices and audio/video elements designed right in. From towel warmers to mood lighting and music, you can customize your bathroom with the latest technology for your relaxation.

Creating a custom audio/video and home automation plan can help you visualize the possibilities for your home. Take the time to explore the many ways that technology can make your life more pleasurable, convenient and energy efficient.

Custom Audio, Video and Home Integration Elements

The integrated home is the home of the future. Computer automation is already taking over much of the common functioning that people used to set by hand. You can set your sprinklers to go on and off automatically, program your thermostat to heat and cool your home to specific temperatures at specific times of the day in different seasons, turn your lights on and off based on light level, room occupancy or time and even automatically start your music or television programs in every room in the house. These are just a few of the capabilities you’ll get with custom audio, video and home integration, and these elements are what make automation happen.

Residential Custom Audio, Video and Home Integration

Residential automation can include any or all of the following home entertainment and home automation solutions: audio/video systems, home theater, multi-room audio control, multi-room video control, cable or satellite integration, lighting control, central air and heat, central vacuum systems, communication systems and even automated window treatments and shade control for your windows.

The integrated home features a combination of all the elements from many different subsystems so that you can control them all from one central program. The best home automation systems offer a single user interface to control your whole house audio/video system, lighting control for all rooms, thermostat and energy management, climate systems, home theater and any other automated household systems. Add keypads for home security and control, a universal remote and iPad or iPhone integration, and you’ll be able to control your home from anywhere with a single simple and elegant solution.

Where It Starts

The base of a custom audio, video and home integration system is a structured wiring plan that integrates your phone, cable television, home networking and satellite television into one coordinated system that can be controlled from one central location. From there, you can choose to add multi-room programmable audio that plays audio of choice in each room in the home, multi-room video so that each family member can choose to watch what they want on their screens, custom audio, video and home theater wiring and intercoms for communication and monitoring every area of your home.

Advanced home automation systems include control for your sprinkler and other outdoor systems, lighting control for your entire home, remote control for your security systems and even window and window shade control to automatically open and close window shades for environmental control.

Even if you don’t choose to have all of the home automation systems installed at once, specialists in custom audio, video and home automation can set up wiring/pre-wire your home so that the structure is in place when you’re ready to upgrade.

Custom Audio/Video and Home Automation Make Your Home More Liveable

Imagine never having to remember to turn on your sprinklers or draw your blinds again. Imagine living in a house that plays your favorite music on request in any room. Imagine a house that turns on the lights in the upstairs hall as you start up the stairs, gets your coffee started before you wake up in the morning and lets you watch whichever movies you want from any screen in the house – not just the one connected to your living room television. Sounds like something out of “The Jetsons”, doesn’t it? In fact, there are custom audio/video and home automation specialists that can create that dream smart home for you today.

Home Automation: Today’s Smart Home

Today’s technology makes it possible to create a smart home, a home that senses actions, events and conditions and responds to them using pre-programmed commands. It allows for you to integrate all of your entertainment systems, security system, home networking, climate control and lighting systems so that you can control it all from one central location. Using custom audio/video and home automation, you can design a program for your home that includes adjusting the thermostat based on time, temperature and occupancy, creating specific moods with lighting at various times of day and allowing access to network resources. Here are just a few of the many scenarios you can create using a full home automation technology that includes all of your electrical systems.

Got a no video games or online chatting until after dinner rule for your kids? Program your home networking system to block online access in the kids’ rooms until after dinner.

Cut down on your energy usage with automation. Programmable thermostats are common now, but home integration lets you take that even further. For example, you can design a system that opens and closes blinds and windows when temperatures reach a certain level to take advantage of sunny days or block the rays when you’re trying to keep things cool.

Combine lighting sensors, motion sensors and time schedules to turn lights on when they’re needed and off when they’re not. You can even set up lighting profiles to suit your moods and needs and call them up with the touch of a button or a voice command. Shut down all the lights in the house from one switch at bedtime, bring up the task lighting for cooking in the kitchen or dim all the lights and turn on the music for a romantic evening in the living room – all with a single touch to an LED touchpad.

If you’re building a new home, consult a pre-wire/wiring specialist to set up your home for custom audio/video and home automation support. For older homes, consult a custom audio/video and home automation expert to find out what’s possible and bring your home into the 21^st century.

Custom Audio-Video and Home Entertainment Are The New Design Frontier

These days, it’s not enough to have the right curtains, stylish furniture and a great color scheme. The best dressed homes reach far beyond the visual to present a full sensory experience that includes lighting, networking, security and everything else, both high-tech and low-tech. Custom audio/video and home entertainment systems have become an essential part of home décor. If your home entertainment system is still contained in numerous systems and pieces, it’s time to join the world of custom integrated home entertainment and automation.

Dynamic Entertainment and Home Automation

We’ve come a long way, baby. Not too long ago, a comprehensive music and movie collection required tons of dedicated space to hold your DVDs, CDs and vinyl. The advent of the mp3 player totally upended our concept of portable music, but our home collections remained shackled by space and wiring considerations. The truth is that most people have more advanced access to their entertainment choices on their smartphone than they do on their home systems.

That’s where the cutting edge of home décor and building comes into play. If you’re building a new home, it’s easy to build in automated functionality for your audio, video, lighting and security through a wiring/pre-wire specialist. An experienced audio/visual wiring specialist can work with your architect and builder to lay out a flexible, adaptable wiring plan that will allow you to completely automate all of your home’s entertainment functions.

What Building or Environment Automation Means for You

In the 1960s, Star Trek fans got used to a world where you could walk into a room and, with a few words or a snap of your fingers, dim the lights, start the music and pull up your favorite movies on a flat screen television set into the wall. It’s now star date 2012, and that time is here. With a custom audio/video and home entertainment system, you can easily adjust the lighting, call up your favorite playlists, order the movie or television shows you want to watch – when you want to watch them.

Imagine arriving home from work and having your favorite music start playing as you walk through the door. As the evening falls, your lights come on automatically – and only in the rooms that are occupied. Adjust the level of light in every room from a central LED touch pad, and have your television show play in whichever room you happen to move into as it’s playing.

That’s just a fraction of the possibilities you open when you choose a custom audio/video and home entertainment system installed in your home. Whether you’re building a new home or retrofitting an existing one, make an appointment to discuss your entertainment automation options and take advantage of tomorrow’s entertainment technology today.