Smart homes: what is worth wiring in, and what can wait

Start with what it is for

Smart home is a shopping category rather than a thing, and it covers everything from a doorbell you can answer from the airport to a house that runs itself. Most people want three or four specific outcomes, not a system.

Name yours before anybody quotes. In practice they are usually some of these.

• Lighting and blinds that run to a schedule, so the house looks lived in while you are away
• Keyless entry
• A doorbell with a camera, so you can see and speak to whoever is there without opening the door or being home. This one is a security product, so see below on who may install it
• Music and video through the house rather than in one room
• One button that turns everything off, instead of walking the house
• Alerts when energy use goes somewhere it should not

The only decision with a deadline

Nearly all of this can be added to a finished house. Wireless devices have got good, and retrofitting a smart switch or a camera is rarely difficult.

What is genuinely hard to add later is cable. While the walls are open, running data to the places a house might one day want it costs very little, and it will never be that cheap again. Ceiling points for speakers or access points, a run to the front door, a run to wherever a rack might live, a couple of spare runs to the living areas.

You do not have to buy a single smart device to do this. You are buying the option, which is the cheapest thing on the whole list.

Cameras and alarms: who installs them

Surveillance and alarm work is licensed separately from electrical work in Queensland, under the Security Providers Act 1993. An electrical licence does not cover it and never has.

BH Electrics does not hold a security licence, so we cannot install the security equipment itself. We will run the cabling and provide the power a system needs, and we work alongside licensed security installers. On a job that includes one we will tell you so rather than quote for it.

Choosing between products

There is a great deal on the market and more arriving constantly, which is exactly why it is overwhelming. Brad’s view, after twenty years of being asked: there are so many products on the market that choosing well for one particular house is genuinely difficult.

Two rules help. Prefer things that still work when the internet is down, because up here it does go down. And prefer a system a future owner or electrician can understand, because a house wired around a product that is discontinued in five years is a problem you have built into the walls.

Big or small, there is something that suits the property and the budget. Have that conversation before the shopping, not after it.