Make Your House a Smart Home
New products make home automation easier, wireless and more reliable.
By Jeff Bertolucci, Contributing Writer
From Kiplinger's Personal Finance magazine, May 2006
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Z-Wave. The Z-Wave platform has the early lead with dozens of compatible devices from Intermatic, Leviton, Logitech, Smart Products and other vendors. To try out a basic home- automation device, we tested the $125 Intermatic Lighting Control Starter Kit, which uses Z-Wave to exchange information between its tabletop controller and two lamp modules. Additional modules cost $45.
We found the kit fairly easy to install. Each lamp module is a bit wider and thicker than a deck of cards and plugs into an AC outlet. You can plug a lamp into each module. Next, you "assign" each lamp module to the master controller, a device slightly wider than two handheld remotes placed side by side. This step is a no-brainer: Press one button on the module and another on the controller, and you're done.
But programming the lamp modules to perform specific tasks -- such as turning on the living-room lights at dusk -- is trickier. You'll need to study the manual that comes with the product to figure out which buttons to press on the controller. First-timers may find this confusing, but it gets easier with practice. Overall, it took us about an hour to install and program our two-module Intermatic setup.
At the higher end, the $400 Logitech Harmony 890 Advanced Universal Remote is an infrared/Z-Wave wireless handheld remote. With a little programming, it lets you control a stereo, television, lights and appliances in rooms up to 100 feet away.
Insteon. Designed by home-control vendor SmartLabs, Insteon uses both radio and power-line signals to send commands. This dual-band system doubles the chance that a signal will find its target. Another benefit of Insteon devices is that they are compatible with X10, an older, less-reliable home-automation standard that's still popular with hobbyists.
We tested the $100 Insteon Wireless Lighting Starter Set, which includes a tabletop control keypad and two lamp dimmers, all of which are roughly the size of their Intermatic counterparts. The Insteon kit also comes with two signal extenders -- modules that plug into an AC outlet and strengthen Insteon's signal throughout the home.
The Insteon kit was easy to install, but its control keypad lacked useful features found in the Intermatic product, including an LCD screen and the option to program lamps to turn on and off at set times.
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