Amp up your home with these smart home automation tips

The festival season is the ideal time to invite friends and family into your glimmering smart home. Whether you’re relaxing, partying, or you just want to show off your 65-inch TV, how can you make things even better? Well, putting that tech to work can make your life easier and give you more time to focus on enjoying festivals. Anusha Technovision Pvt. Ltd offers a brief overview of how to get technology to lighten up your home, almost literally in some cases!

Save Energy

One of the key benefits of home automation is that it allows saving energy at home by scheduling your exterior lights so they aren’t on when they don’t need to be, using motion sensors that automatically turn off when you leave the room. It’s a great way to conserve power and have the best decoration, without dealing with an outrageous electric bill.

Cook With Ease

Whether baking festive delicacies or cooking an entire family dinner, you can use smart appliances to help with preparation. Your smartphone will notify you when the delicacies are cooked, while the safety sensors remind you if you have left the stove on, and the smart refrigerator alerts when the door is left open. 

 

Pick pretty pieces

Gone are the days when smart home automation devices were oversized eyesores. Now it's entirely possible to find sleek and stylish smart devices that won't draw attention. Smart devices are now small enough to be tucked away on a bookshelf and come in classic colours and design, that complement your home decor theme. 

Automate Your Festive Lighting

If you’ve got some lighting out in the garden, why not consider some weatherproofed on/off modules so you can avoid the need for manual control? Apply the same to your lights and decorations indoors so you’ve got all that lighting covered and you can automate it just by a click on your smartphones or tablets.

Create The Right Mood for Dinner

Now, with all the food in place, you can use automation to set the scene for the perfect meal. Create a dining room scene so that the lights are tailored accordingly, and your festive playlist kicks in. With a smart thermostat in place, the temperature is dialled in without you needing to continually fiddle with a manual alternative. All that remains is to enjoy all that lip-smacking food with your nearest and dearest.

Use wireless home security and smart home automation systems provided by ATPL to enhance your decorations, add a little warmth—literally and figuratively, and help make the festive season more fun and comfortable.

The piece is written by Alok Hada, Director, Anusha Technovision Pvt. Ltd. 

Energy Efficient Lighting

Lighting constitutes about 35% of the energy consumption in commercial buildings, making it the highest energy consuming component, according to data obtained from the US government. In India, lighting is the second highest component of energy consumption in buildings, only next to HVAC systems, and estimated to be at least 20-25%.

From the data, we can identify that lighting is a crucial factor in efficient building designs and automation systems. There is an effort to make individual lighting fixtures as efficient as possible, but the industry must acknowledge the fundamental role of Lighting Controls in furthering the objective.

Lighting Management systems can cater to three major sectors – Residential, Hospitality and Corporate/Commercial. In residences, preset lighting control systems can cater to aspects of ambience and convenience. Attractive wall-mounted, custom-engraved, and backlit lighting keypads add aesthetics, with optional control via wireless keypads or smart phones providing easy access and flexibility of use.




In the Hospitality sector, the major focus is on achieving the correct ambience with lighting controls.Hotels such as the ‘ITC Group’ who are  energy conscious, also stress on reducing energy consumption through controls. Here again, the preset Lighting control systems play a role. In commercial or corporate settings, the main driver for automation is the ability to reduce power consumption through the usage of sensors such as occupancy sensors and day light sensors. This is all then monitored and measured through a Lighting Management System (LMS), called Quantum System from Lutron. In the last 3-4 years, this sector has experienced tremendous growth.

Where energy efficient lighting fixtures are low hanging fruits, allowing reduction in usage, without compromising on the quality of ambience or convenience; Lighting Controls form the network, the tree itself, enhancing flexibility to change the transfer of resource depending on real-time requirements.

By incorporating state of the art Lighting Management systems, buildings can achieve energy savings targets and desired management levels with real time monitoring and control. Integrating hardware and software, and to service and combine dimming modules, occupancy sensors, motorized shades, sun trajectory sensors, daylight sensors and time clock controls; supported and optimized by data that is collected from sensors, time clocks and scientific sources; spaces can be made more resilient.

- Alok Hada, Director, Anusha Technovision Pvt. Ltd

Smart Lighting Control System

Smart Lighting Control System is an intelligent lighting control Solution. It is an important aspect of our daily life. Light control would allow the ability to regulate the level and quality of light in each space for specific tasks or situations. Controlling light properly not only enhances the experience, it helps to save energy by using light when and where it is needed most.

Smart Lighting control systems features:

a)     Time Clock facility–The house owner could schedule the turning ON/Off the Lights/curtains based on normal/Astronomical time clock.

b)     Occupancy/Vacancy-Many building spaces remaining unoccupied between 40% and 70% of the day, lights left on are a real energy drain. occupancy/vacancy sensors automate the switching and dimming of those lights, saving energy and money.

c)      Daylight availability Amount of daylight that enters a space is an important aspect of  light control. Electric lighting energy use can be adjusted by automatically dimming  and/or switching     electric lights in response to the level of available daylight.

    d)   Mood Lighting Facility – This gives the power to enhance the beauty of any area with the variety of customized lighting scenes (e.g. TV, Relax, Meeting etc.).

    e)    Alarm conditions-Alarm conditions typically include inputs from other building systems such as the fire alarm or HVAC system, which may trigger an emergency 'all lights on' or ' all lights flashing' command for example.

Benefits of Smart Lighting ControlSystem:

     -  The major advantage of a lighting control system over  conventional  manual switching is the ability to control individual lights or groups of  lights of the house from any location with a single user interface   (Keypad,  i-pad/i-phone etc.) device.

     -   Now, we can also control the lighting system with Voice Command, e.g.-   Alexa

     -   Each button on Wired or wireless keypad is custom engraved with    button functionality to make it user friendly.

     -   A major benefit of lighting control systems is reduced energy consumption and reduced electricity bill too.
      - A room may have multiple scenes pre-set, each one created for different activities in the room

       - A major benefit of lighting control systems is reduced energy consumption

       - Longer lamp life is also gained when dimming and switching off lights when not in use

       -  Wireless lighting control systems provide additional benefits including reduced installation costs and increased flexibility over where switches and sensors may be placed.

         

        It adds the comfort, enhance the beauty of interior and conserve the energy!

SmartHomes

Today, we are increasingly talking about creating ‘Smart Homes’. Smart homes can mean different things to different people. A builder might say that he is offering a ‘Smart Home’ to a prospective buyer if the IP video door phone that he is installing can also be viewed over a smart phone. For an architect, a ‘Smart Home’ could be one, where lighting controls that can be activated manually, on a time clock, remotely or from a house- for one room or for the entire house. A system integrator, selling AV systems could say that he has designed a smart home, where the home owner can view any media content stored in the cloud or locally in the home from anywhere in the home.

So who is right? Or rather, what is the correct meaning of a smart home? For me, there is no right or wrong. A Smart home can be one or all of these things.  All of the above could comprise what we call Smart Home technology. One thing however should be common. Whatever technology is used to make a smart home, should enhance the user and the home owner experience, making life more convenient and enjoyable! A smart Home could have one or all of the following:

a)      Lighting control systems: Imagine the effect of pressing a button and dramatically changing the lighting ambience and the visual environment in a living space! An easy to use system, a reliable technology and setting the right presets could benefit the end-user.

b)      Motorised shading systems: Increasingly, the idea of manually moving huge curtains and blinds is giving way to the convenience of using a simple press of a button to change the natural light coming into the house, by using motorized shades.

      c)       Automation of A/V devices: The ability to control all AV devices from a single touch panel, User-friendly macros, where in a sequence of operations happens every time a button in enabled, assists the user. For e.g.  pressing the movie “scene” in a living room could dim lights, turn on the TV, turn on the Amplifier, turn on the Blue Ray player and also draw the curtains etc. all with just one press of the movie button, on your smart phone.

d)      Media distribution, storage and display: With the ever-increasing demands on resolution (4k TV, 8k TV etc.), it is important that we lay the wiring/hardware capable of transmitting the highest resolution in picture and audio possible, at least as of today. Media could be and should be available to be played anywhere in the house, from the cloud or from a local Media server.

e)      HVAC controls: Smart home owners today have the ability to control and monitor the HVAC system in the house. Not only is control possible, monitoring with two-way feedback allows energy saving when certain areas do not need conditioning.

f)       Security Systems: While security systems have existed for a long long time, the smart home has a security system that is integrated with the rest of the house controls. For e.g when the security system detects an intrusion, it starts flashing the lighting in the entire house on/off. It sends a notification to the home owner phone and scares away a potential intruder.

All of the above systems should be seamlessly available on customer touchpanel/smart home through a customized user interface that is easy to understand and to use. Every electronic device that has a remote is virtually available to the home owner from with in or from outside the house. IOT or Internet of things is a term used to suggest connectivity of all such devices via the internet. Today voice recognition and voice commands are being offered to clients as part of the home automation technology. The key however for any home owner would be – Ease of use, and Remember -The Smart Home should NOT require a home owner to be technologically smart!