What is Home Automation?
Home Automation, also referred to as smart home or smart house technology, is the automatic or electronic household utilities and activities. In simple words, it means you can easily control your house activities comprise lights, doors, air conditioning, visual aids, appliance control, and any aspect of your house anywhere and anytime via the internet. Definitely “Home Automation” makes your life more convenient and secure it will be a piece of cake to check unlimitedly to ensure that all nuts and bolts of your house are secure. Also, it helps you save more money by paying less on household bills. Economists contended that the “Home automation” market was worth US$5.77 billion in 2013, predicted to reach a market value of US$12.81 billion by the year 2020.
How Does Home Automation work?
It is not an easy task to say how “Home Automation” works because there are lots of whys and there is not just one accepted procedure throughout the world. this technology is various based on country, company, and which type of automation it uses to control the house. It is crystal clear for all that Home Automation is a kind of profitable and fast-paced technology and that’s why always companies try to use new development in their protocols and devise to please their customer and convince them to Renew the subscription.
X10 was the first industry for “Home Automation”. X10 enabled communication between smart home devices, in other words, it connected devices through power line wiring, X10 technology was not such advanced to work wirelessly, thus it was limited and caused some problems for its users but in that time, this simple X10 was a revolution in the “Home Automation Industry”. But today's new industries, like Zigbee, Z-Wave, and Insteon, are also working on protocols for “Home Automation” and their main concern is a modern wireless technology and their focuses are heavily on that. All the systems they use are confusing and complicated but simply put, they use wireless technology and radio waves to send messages to and from devices.
Central Control
One home automation is central control, you can control everything such as lights, thermostat, sprinklers, washing machines, and more, only from a single source. Central control is mostly used in business and luxurious private residences. Central control often sticks to internal walls and runs through a terminal, the central controls are mostly like home security systems, and they are also accessible by smartphones, tablets, and other remote-control devices.
Merit and Demerit
Its name reveals its first benefit. As mentioned above, you can access all smart devices and they simply can be controlled via just one central system. Imagine you are on your way to a beautiful waterfall which is 6 hours far away from home, you suddenly remember in the middle of the trip that you did not turn off the lights and air conditioning, so it’s not logical to come back this long way to turn them off and if not, you should pay more on bills. So, if your house is equipped with central control system connected to the internet, you can turn them off with just one touch on a smartphone.
But central control systems have demerits as well. they are expensive, extremely inclusive, and require professional installation. They are inclusive because you cannot buy any electronic devices, for example, you cannot buy any dishwasher, you are allowed to buy those that work with that system, thus you are limited to fewer options. As Home Automation grows, people are more willing to use app-based automation.
App-Based
In app-based systems, the smart home uses the internet to communicate with Cloud. Nowadays, Cloud is a part of the internet of things. In this system, “Home Automation” and smart devices connect to each other via Wi-Fi. When you create an account in specific apps, you can control the smart home devices. To know which device goes with which app user, you should contact the company or simply google it, but mostly there is a description in guides to know how to connect the smart device to your Home Automation system and it is based on which system; central or app-based and if it is app-based, which app is suitable.
Also, there is another type of app-based home automation technology that connects to your smart device through Bluetooth. In this way, like Cloud-based, you need to create an account but you should be in the vicinity of these systems to get and send signals and to succeed in controlling them, if you go further than limited vicinity, you will lose your connection and the smart devices are no longer in control.
Merit and Demerit
App-based smart home Automation is more popular than central control because the devices that use app-based technology are affordable, easy to set up, use, and update. Unlike the central control system, to use the app-based system you need to install different applications, all devices don’t work through a single app, each company has its own app which to use that product you must install the suggested application.
Now you know the key information about “Smart Home Automation”: what does it mean? How does it work? And two kinds of home automation systems, Central control, and app-based. Thus, you can choose the best one based on what you need and how much budget you have.
