New home options, need advice

Mr Spock

Active Member
So I may be buying a new construction home next year and I'm starting to think about what I want to do for HA. So many options on just about everything. I tried to search for some posts on the subject for people's experiences and recommendations, but not sure what words to use in the search. Every phrase I tried yielded little, humm...

I'll throw out a few items and see what people have to say.

I've been using Homeseer for the last 3 years and am only moderately happy with it. I control lighting, irrigation, pool/spa, some cameras, a few more things... While I am a DIY'er I've found HS to be quite buggy and feature poor. My hardware skills are good, but software writing skills aren't that great and it seems the happiest HS users are those with great coding abilities. Are there other/better options? Kind of looking for a middle zone. Is Mainlobby a good option? I don't know much about it yet.

I would like to do just about everything in this new place: Lighting, security & megapixel cameras, audio/video server, HVAC control, tablet based touchscreens in various places with a slick interface, and more. I'm not going to pay someone big bucks for a managed system. I guess I'll pull CAT6 wire to a lot of places, especially for security and the cameras.

Maybe you have some experiences you can share, a few good links, or even the right search words to get me started.

The sky is limit right now, just need to get started somewhere...

Thanks in advance.
 
Have you considered Elk or HAI?

How about one of those + CQC?

Overwire, but make sure you cover the basics (22/2 for door and window contacts, 18/2 + coax + cat cable for camera locations, 22/4 for flood sensors, conduit for hard-to-retrofit video locations, at least 4 cat cables to video locations (if you're considering distributed video), coax x 2 for each video location, etc).
 
A great security system doesn't require much programming. But when it comes to HA, you pretty much get what you deserve from a programming perspective. I don't mean to bum you out, but HA is all about the programming. The programming is the logic that is in your head overlaid on the hardware to make it behave as if your brain was running the show. Since every brain and every home are different, there really isn't any off the shelf deal that will dazzle.

Obviously some hardware is more capable than others of being quickly and effectively programmed. I don't have homeseer, but from what I hear around here, it is pretty capable. You could get "different" but I don't know that you will find anything more to your liking if homeseer is falling that short for you.
 
Coconut your right about HA requiring great programming. Unfortunately HA has not yet caught on big time to where a large company with deep resources has developed a full featured HA product. I'm thinking along the lines of the Microsoft office of HA. Homeseer has quite a few built-in half-baked capabilities and is a great base point for those with the software skills to do what they want with it. I have neither the background nor the time to develop my SW skills to the necessary level. There are many plugins you can buy, but my experiences with them have been very mixed. In the end I may go back to HS if it is still the best choice.

In the past I remember reading some posts from people who went into details on their new home experiences and recommendations. I just can't find them or similar posts. What are some good search words for this topic?

Thanks.
 
Coconut your right about HA requiring great programming. Unfortunately HA has not yet caught on big time to where a large company with deep resources has developed a full featured HA product. I'm thinking along the lines of the Microsoft office of HA. Homeseer has quite a few built-in half-baked capabilities and is a great base point for those with the software skills to do what they want with it. I have neither the background nor the time to develop my SW skills to the necessary level. There are many plug-ins you can buy, but my experiences with them have been very mixed. In the end I may go back to HS if it is still the best choice.

In the past I remember reading some posts from people who went into details on their new home experiences and recommendations. I just can't find them or similar posts. What are some good search words for this topic?

Thanks.

You make good points. It is certainly possible that if someone thought this could be a 1 billion dollar a year industry, they might create an application that makes programming seem easy. It certainly could be made easier than it is at present with some massive "MS Office" type setup with fancy gui's and lots of built-in "plug and play" scenarios, but keep in mind, even using MS Office is very complicated when you want to do something more than just write a letter. They teach whole courses on it at the community colleges!
 
You can create extensive solutions in CQC without ever writing a line of code. It's almost all point and click. It's not just set it up and go, since no product can begin to foresee the many ways people would like to do things. But it's not something that requires coding skills either. It is more akin to learning Excel or Photoshop or something like that. Though we do have a new feature in the 4.0 version (coming out next week) that is the first step in our move towards being able to generate pretty nice start kits for you.
 
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