We’ve spoken about Z-Wave before, but now we’re going to get into a little more detail on the usefulness and practicality of home automation. Typically you would look at a door/window sensor, or motion sensor, and expect that all it does is tell you and your automation hub when a door or window is open or when movement is detected in the room. While that is true on both counts, these sensors are capable of much more than simply telling you.

When talking about home automation, you’ll often hear the terms “automation zones”, “scenes”, “robots” or “scenes”. These terms all mean the same thing. They refer to programmed actions that happen automatically when one or more conditions are met or, in our example, a sensor is tripped or activated.

Let’s say visitors staying at your home. The door to the room your guests are staying in is far from the hallway light switches, but a motion sensor is pointed at the door. Rather than have your guests come out of the bedroom into an unfamiliar dark hallway, you can set up an automated scene that, based on specific conditions, in this case, detecting motion, will turn the hall lights when they open the door. If you have dimmable light bulbs, you can program the bulbs to turn on at 20% brightness between 8pm and 7am, and stay off between 7am to 8pm.

Smart automated scenes can also be programmed to only activate when multiple conditions are met. During the summer, you may want to use your AC more often, but still want to keep your energy bill from rising too high. You can program a smart thermostat to turn on the AC only when the following conditions are met: If all windows or doors are detected as closed, if the temperature reaches 89 degrees, and motion has been detected in the last 30 minutes. Once the AC turns on, it can be immediately shut off once one of the conditions is not met.

Smart scenes are not restricted to convenient home automation, home security can be automated as well. Security lighting around your home or property can be automatically turned on every evening when it gets dark. Outdoor motion sensors can stealthily detect various types of movement and activate surveillance cameras or send you alerts when movement is detected. Certain automation devices, such as door/window or temperature sensors, can double as security devices by triggering alarms or notifying emergency contacts.

These are only a few examples of automated functions that you can implement in and around your home that will make your life easier, safer, and help you manage your energy consumption.

If you would like help setting up scenes to optimize your home automation, we can help. Just call us toll-free at 858-693-8887 (7:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Pacific, Monday – Friday) for free tech support and product advice. You can also email us at service@homecontrols.com.