Key points of home automation
Before carrying out an installation or hiring a company to do it, we have to see some key aspects. The first thing will be to see what sections of the house we want to cover, if we do not want to cover everything, which is an option. Then it will be important to establish in which sections we want to automate actions. Light, water, heating, leisure, are some of the main sections. Obviously, any increase and point to be covered supposes a greater expense, both in devices to automate actions and in labor by technicians.
The most important thing of all when installing home automation will be to establish a centralized control point. This is what its own name indicates, the center of the entire facility. From here we will control all the devices and we will configure them so that everything works as we want. And, on the other hand, the internal network through which all communications and signals will be sent to the different devices distributed throughout the house.
Companies to install home automation
If we hire a company to design the entire process, they will do everything necessary so that everything is correctly installed. But throughout the process, we will have some advantages, such as advice from professionals. This will help us buy the right devices, the ones that best suit our home and, ultimately, many other factors that we can indicate.
The price, aesthetics, consumption, everything can be assessed when purchasing the different devices. In general, it is best to go to prestigious companies, but everything will depend a bit on the assessment of the installation company. It may be the case that it works with a specific brand, or that they also act as distributors and they choose the most appropriate for each section of our home.
The market is very complex, and there are many different devices that cover a lot of functions. Therefore, having professionals advise us can be convenient in many cases. Above all, to avoid excessive installations, or devices that seem to help us but really don’t.
The cheap way: own installation
If we do not want to hire any external company to install home automation, we will have to cover all areas ourselves. This may seem complicated at first, but we have some options to make things much easier for us.
Initially, we can use Home Assistant. This is free and open source software, which helps us manage all home devices that have an Internet or local network connection to be controlled. Therefore, this will be the epicenter of our home automation network. This application has a focus on local control, although it can also be perfectly integrated with Amazon Alexa, Apple HomeKit and any device that works through a Cloud connection. Home Assistant’s strong point is privacy, since everything will be hosted locally and no one will have access to our data except us.
At Home Assistant we can register hundreds of devices of different brands, the most important thing is to make a good choice of the devices, with the aim that they integrate natively without problems in the software, in this way, you will be able to control all the home centrally. How can you start learning about Home Assistant? On the official website we find all the necessary documentation to get started, there are also a large number of specialized YouTube channels, and even free and paid courses that help us specialize in the subject.
After all, what we want is to automate processes and make our lives a little easier. Therefore, doing it correctly is essential for our well-being.
