Hello, fellow remote control and home automation enthusiasts.  I’m a new contributor here at MoreControl.com, and a self-confessed home automation and home theater addict.  I’ve spent the last several years automating and tweaking various aspects of my home.  Much of the work has been of a practical nature, introducing user-friendly automation to conserve energy, monitor temperature, avoid water leaks, and simplify tasks for myself and my family.  Though, I’m certainly not averse to implementing something just to see if it can be done.  Lest you think that home automation is just for the über-rich to control their mansions, I thought I’d share a few practical automation features I’ve implemented in my own home. This is part one in a series of posts.

If you spend any time around kids, you’ll likely agree that they seem to not grasp the concept of turning lights off.  My children, for instance, constantly leave the lights on down in the basement when they’re done playing.  Our original solution was to install CFL bulbs to at least conserve some energy while the lights illuminated the empty space.  However, this was more of a band-aid than an actual cure.  We needed an easy way to tell that the lights were on and, subsequently, turn them off.  Ideally, the solution would also provide two more features.  First, we didn’t want to continually go down the basement stairs to turn off the lights.  Worse, we didn’t want to listen to the kids complain when we sent them down. Second, we wanted the lights to turn off automatically if we neglected to do it ourselves.

My current automation system is built primarily with Insteon devices from SmartHome.com all managed by an ISY 99i controller from Universal Devices.  The photo at the top of this post shows a KeypadLinc I installed in my family room (near the stairs to the basement).  You can see that a key is lit on the bottom-left that says “Basemnt Overhd”.  (Note that there’s an unfortunate limitation of 2 lines of text with 7 characters per line on the custom-etched keys, so abbreviate as best you can.)  With a little programming, I set up this key to perform several tasks.

• If either of the basement light switches is turned on, the key lights to let us know.  Likewise, the key goes out if both of the switches in the basement are off.
• Pressing the key will toggle the basement lights on and off with the key always illuminating in sync with the lights.
• A daily reset program runs early each morning to set various facets of the house into a desired state.  Part of this program ensures that the basement lights are off.

It’s a pretty simple bit of automation, but it has been extremely useful.  Not only are we able to save energy because we always know when the basement lights are on, it’s actually had two unexpected side-effects.  First, my kids find the automation so interesting that they frequently actually remember to turn the lights off (preferring to use the keypad vs. the light switches).  Second, my 4-year-old son doesn’t like to go down in the basement when it’s dark down there.  I showed him how he can now turn on the basement lights before even opening the door, and he loves it because he doesn’t need to find mom or dad to ask for help going downstairs any more.

Equipment list:

• Insteon KeypadLinc
• Custom-etched buttons for KeypadLinc
• (2) Insteon ToggleLinc Dimmer switches
• Universal Devices ISY 99i/IR Pro