The best time to plan a home automation concept is… as soon as you get your house plan from an engineer, you can plan your home automation stuff.
First, you need to have a rough idea of what type of automation you need and where it will be installed.
Some automation requires special requirements, and some don’t require much.
As soon as you start your house construction, you need to execute based on that requirement.
In most cases, you don’t need any special arrangement…
The only few things you should remember and take care of is
- have a proper network setup for the entire house
- some automation devices require a power supply, so arrange a power socket wherever those devices come
- some high-bandwidth device requires a wired connection, so plan accordingly
That’s it.
Currently, in the Indian market, only very few home automation service providers are available. You may find it difficult to execute and find proper smart devices.
If you still haven’t implemented it right now, don’t worry.
You can do them later as well. Just make sure the network is available everywhere at home.
This is a basic and must-have requirement to have a better experience with your home automation stuff.
Suppose you have a proper network setup done. In that case, technicians can remove existing normal switches and easily replace them with smart ones.
Most of these smart switches can be placed in the existing switch box. So you don’t need to do any extra thing here…
We experimented doing our own semi-home automation staff in our first house. After using it for a few months, we felt it was an overkill and removed those semi-automated switches.
So, I didn’t implemented it in the second house.
Now, in our home, we automated only outdoor lights and borewells with our own homemade devices and software.
It’s working fine.
My outdoor light automation setup requires extra space to place those electrical units, so, during construction time itself, I properly planned and left space however I needed.
Now, both of our building outside lights are taken care of by those automation devices built and coded by me and brother Avinash.
We never felt this outdoor automation as a burden like what we felt for inside-home automation.
So plan what you need… and execute.
Overengineering could hurt. Plan only where it hurts. At least, this is what happened in my case.
If you need the right guide in implementing network around your house, check out my Internet Everywhere Guide.