Home automation is an up and coming trend that the public looks for in residential houses, apartments, and commercial businesses. Although many techniques used in building automation (such as light and climate control, control of doors and window shutters, security and surveillance systems, etc.) are also used in home automation, additional functions in home automation can include the control of multi-media home entertainment systems, automatic houseplant watering and pet feeding1, automatic pet feeding., automatic scenes for dinners and parties, and a more user-friendly control interface.

Typically, a house during construction has more room for more automation due to the accessibility of the walls, outlets, and storage rooms. Wireless is commonly used when a house has already been built and you don't want to modify your walls. These control wires run to a controller, which will then control the environment.

Home wiring History

Traditionally, homes have been wired for four things; power, telephones, cable TV outlets, and a doorbell. Typically, components and wiring are kept within a closet and/or patch panels. Patch panelCAT6 twisted pairs Home automation has been around since WWI. It all started with the first television remote. In 1893 a remote was originally used in WWI to control motorboats.2, Remote control technology was first developed for military use. From there, the evolution of controllers and automation has been growing and still continue to grow to this day.

Standards and bridges

Specific domotic standards include INSTEON, X10, PLC BUS, KNX (standard), System Box, LonWorks, C-Bus, SCS BUS with OpenWebNet, Universal powerline bus (UPB), UPnP, ZigBee and Z-Wave that will allow for control of most applications. Some standards use communication and control wiring, some embed signals in the powerline, some use radio frequency (RF) signals, and some use a combination of several methods. Control wiring is hardest to retrofit into an existing house. Some appliances include USB that is used to control it and connect it to a domotics network. Bridges translate information from one standard to another (eg. from X10 to European Installation Bus).

Effects

In extreme installations, rooms can sense not only the presence of a person but know who that person is and perhaps set appropriate lighting, temperature and music/TV taking into account day of week, time of day, and other factors.

Other automated tasks may include setting the air conditioning to an energy saving setting when the house is unoccupied, and restoring the normal setting when an occupant is about to return. More sophisticated systems can maintain an inventory of products, recording their usage through an RFID tag, and prepare a shopping list or even automatically order replacements.