Home Automation that saves you money

Smart House Technologies is a dealer and installer of Home Automation systems. Our focus is on systems that integrate with a home's heating/cooling (HVAC) and electrical systems to aid in efficient energy use.

How can a Home Automation system save me money?

Do you know what your house is doing? Our HomeEMS display gives you the information you need about your energy consumption to help you make smart decisions. 

• Is your current electrical usage too high?  See all your lights that are on and touch the lights you don't need lit and they go out.
• You will know that your furnace ran for 5 hours yesterday, too much? Adjust your thermostat and see how much less it runs today. Find out if you can really save money by turning the heat down.
• Setup a energy savings program that turns down your thermostats, turns off your lights and connect it to your home security system. Every time you activate you home security system when you go out, your home will automatically go into "Energy Savings" mode.

With a properly outfitted home automation system, not only will you see how you are using your energy, you can have it help reduce your energy by making the most of what you already have. 

• Take advantage of Passive Solar Heating. Do you have a family room with some skylights that tends to get warm on sunny days? Let the HomeEMS monitor the temperature in that room and turn on your furnace fan to circulate that warm air to other parts of the house. If you are building a new home, we can help select skylights that can let heat in during the winter and have the HomeEMS automatically close the shades when the days heat up in the summer.
• Take advantage of Passive Cooling. A typical summer evening in New England will have your air conditioner running while the temperature inside your house is actually higher than outside. Instead of running around opening windows each night and then forgetting to close them when the humidity picks up let your HomeEMS do it. It can monitor the outside temperature and humidity and determine when it is beneficial to turn off the air conditioning and vent your house to the cool outside air.

In addition to your energy savings, you can...

• Have the kitchen lights come on when you pull into the garage.
• Setup "scenes" so when it is time to have dinner or watch a movie, the various lights around your home dim to the setting you like.
• Connect all of your Christmas lights to a single switch or program.
• Add multi-switch lighting systems that would be too expensive or complicated with traditional 3-way electrical switches. Would you like to have the light in your shed come on from a switch inside your house? Control all your outside lights from your master bedroom? How about one switch that turns on every light in your house, if you hear a "noise" in the night?
• Control your sprinkler system.
• Connect to or control any of the above from work or your cell phone.
• Get an email when a family member turns up the heat?

Do they really work?

Advances in computer technology over the last 20 years have been amazing. These advances have moved Home Automation from the realm of the hobbyist to main stream homes. The systems we use are similar to your home computer, but are hardened in a way to make them much more reliable. They have no moving parts to fail and their software is run in a read-only protected mode. However, they still benefit from all the power and flexibility of today's computers. Old building automation systems were expensive and needed to be hard wired at construction time. Today's systems are much more affordable and flexible.