So, your idea of home control on a budget is to own a networking business, meet the CEO of a home automation company, become a dealer with your partners and get the parts and labor at cost?

Give me a break. How about a more accurate title for the story, like “How some dude became a Control4 dealer.”

Not sure why the last poster cannot give a guy his due, it was a good article. Who cares if he started a new business? So I contacted Control4YourHome and spoke to some really helpful people and learned a ton of stuff about Control4 Products and what their dealers are trying to do ... make home automation affordable for everyone – sounds good to me!!

if i wanted to see cheap installations of crappy products by homeowners with no taste, i’d hit the radio shack catalog. this is a nice place with a well designed system. if you want a different budget range, stop whining, go do some research and make it happen in your home.

Control4 has good products for a lot less money than some other brands. They have been around for a while (like 4 years, so the article is wrong about that). The are getting popular now becuase dealers can do the same projects for much less $$$. They do not do high end stuff.

Man, that first poster really doesn’t get it.  The title says “Home Control on a Budget”, not “Cheap Home Control”.  Anyone who owns a 5000 sq. ft. home would probably find a $35,000 budget for distributed audio, automation, home theater, security systems, and lighting control pretty cheap anyway. 

Those of us with much smaller homes and more modest budgets can still learn from this example and apply it to our own projects.

Cool article. I use Control4 for people on a tight budget. It is not cheap equipment that poster is dead wrong and just hates Control4, many dealers do. It has a good 24 month warranty. It is NOT for everyone - a big drawback for premium buyers is the screens you get cannot be changed. However it is easy to use with the screens it has and most people do not care. If your project is new make sure your dealer picks equipment that will work well OTB with Control4.

Great article, it proves that it is possible!!! Way to go.

The owner of the Control4YourHome Company is great guy and very helpful. They use the house featured in the article to show people what is possible with Control4 and planning things on a budget. My wife and I set up an appointemnt and toured the house for 3 hours - total professionals and the house is awesome. They did not try to sell me one thing, they do not need to, after you see it all working you are sold, no one can come even close to the prices and they gave us a detailed proposal from our prints within a few days.

Well if he spent $35000 and he’s a dealer then his system would have cost anyone else $55,000 + easily. So the article is somewhat mis-leading to potential buyers.

I believe that it’s not worth spending $35,000 for a system with a 2 year warranty when you can find something for $50,00 that has a life time warranty.

You have a big house, make sure everything works for as long as you can.