Recently Filed in Home Control Systems

Unless you’ve been living in a cave, where electricity usually isn’t an issue, you’ve probably heard about standby, phantom, or vampire power. (They’re all the same thing.) It’s the phenomenon that occurs when your home electronics or appliances continue to consume power—even when they’re “off.” This is caused by ghostly apparitions, pixies and blood-sucking ghouls who perpetrate this when we leave our electronics alone or go to sleep. Just kidding. Standby, phantom, or vampire power—whatever you want to call it—is caused by digital clocks, LED… View this story
Power Management • Line Conditioners • Surge Protectors • Home Control Systems • Green Technology • Info and Answers

Home energy monitoring may be about to go mainstream. It’s made it into at least one spec home, this one constructed by Mark Johnson Custom Homes in Wilmington, N.C. It’s part of a green home that the builder intends to make LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certified, meaning it has many eco-friendly and sustainable features, from the insulated concrete form (ICF) walls to low-flow water fixtures to a rainwater harvesting and underground irrigation system that will save $70 to $100 a month in… View this story
Home Control Systems • Green Technology • Cool Homes

We’re still looking for your ultimate home control wish list. Entries for the Electronic House and Control4 “What Do You Want to Control?” contest are ongoing, and you can register by entering your little essay of what you want for your own home. Each week we’ve been highlighting some of your entries to give you a good idea of what people are looking for, and to show off some of your creative thinking. Click here to enter the contest. Here are 10 more entries for… View this story
Home Control Systems • Enhancements • Info and Answers

There are lots of ways to be green—or greener—and this 4,500-square-foot designer’s delight on the Chesapeake Bay sports several of them. There’s a geothermal heating and cooling system that pulls clean, carbon-free heat from the ground. There’s a lighting control system that helps to save energy, motorized shading to keep rooms cool during the day, and easy and convenient control of everything. The green initiatives began with 14 bore holes drilled 120 feet into the ground for the geothermal heating and cooling system, which pulls… View this story
Climate Control Systems • Thermostats and Sensors • Home Control Systems • Green Technology • Home of the Year Awards 2009 • Cool Homes

Tahl Milburn has no problem admitting to his geek-hood. By day he manages a strategic IT consulting practice in San Francisco, “but my top hobby has been home automation since I was 12 years old,” he says. A couple of years ago when he moved into a new 2,600-square-foot home with panoramic views of San Francisco Bay, Milburn repeated the same DIY performance that put him on the cover of the March 2003 issue of Home Automation magazine, formerly an EH sister publication. This time,… View this story
Home Control Systems • Green Technology • Cool Homes

Sequels usually aren’t very good. But the updates made to this fully-automated haunted house make it even better than when we wrote about it last year. Digital Panacea, an integration company that does a lot of Home Automation Inc. (HAI) control system programming, revisited its spookiest client for a pre-Halloween tune-up. Halloween Park, a haunted attraction outside York, Pa., isn’t a typical haunted house. It’s interactive, meaning that visitors must solve clues in order to move through the scary rooms. The HAI automation system is… View this story
Home Control • Home Control Systems • Cool Homes • Slideshows

This home’s a good example of a custom electronics pro at work. Large home, working parents, three children, basic subsystems to integrate, and easy operation required for everyone. Illinois-based CE pro Architectural Audio & Video pulled it off without a hitch, and the benefits of home technology have been great for this happy family. “The homeowners of this project are both working professionals with three young children, which made their needs very easy to explain. They wanted a system that was simple, automated, and highly… View this story
Multiroom Audio • Multiroom Video • Home Control Systems • Home of the Year Awards 2009 • Cool Homes

Gotta hand it to our tech-savvy readers, you’re coming up with very creative ways to answer our “What Do You Want to Control?” contest question. The Electronic House and Control4 home automation contest is still ongoing — click here to enter — and remember it will require a little storytelling on your end. So what exactly do you want to control? Here are some more of your hopes and requests: I would like to integrate a system that allows me to monitor two houses. We… View this story
Home Control • Home Control Systems • Info and Answers

One of the main tenets of green building is “Do you really need that?” Less becomes more. Smaller becomes better. And 8,000-square-foot homes are not supposed to be. A home that size should not be considered green, says green designer and consultant Michael Anschel of Otogawa-Anschel Design-Build in North Minneapolis, Minn. “The resource consumption, water consumption, land-use are all obscenely out of scale with what is appropriate, let alone required, for living.” Custom homebuilder Margie Hamrick of Ecoexistence in Vail, Colo., would disagree. She’s the… View this story
Home Control • Home Control Systems • Lighting Control • Lighting Control Systems • Green Technology • Home of the Year Awards 2009 • Cool Homes

Few people who buy a spec home leave it as is. They might change the light fixtures, put in a better front door or repaint the walls. In this 12,500-square-foot Atlanta charmer, the owners added a slew of sophisticated electronic systems, from a powerful home theater to a home control system and a lighting system that offers convenience, potential energy savings and dramatic architectural highlights. The homeowners didn’t rush into this project, though. In fact, this well-lit house exemplifies the power of prodigious planning. These… View this story
Home Control Systems • Lighting Control Systems • Cool Homes • Slideshows

It’s always kind of fun to hear the things you’d really like to automate in your home. Sorry, no personal robots to do everything for you yet. Until then, you’ll have to rely on a home control system, which Electronic House is teaming with Control4 to provide you in our “What Do You Want to Control?” contest. We’ve been highlighting some contest entries the last couple of weeks—you must do some short creative writing as part of the contest entry—so here are more from this… View this story
Home Control • Home Control Systems • Product News

A new-construction, high-tech project can pretty much go in any direction. This one went big. But the results are a seamless blend of A/V, automation and decor-friendliness that suits these North Carolina homeowners well. “The project was a design build concept for integration in a new construction home in Fayetteville, North Carolina. The technical elements of the project include a dedicated theater room, whole house sound, high-definition video distribution, intercom, telecom, network connectivity, access control, alarm system, lighting control and automation for hearing impaired residents,”… View this story
Home Control Systems • Home of the Year Awards 2009 • Cool Homes