Does your refrigerator have an Internet address? Join host Susan McKinnell as she discusses with guest experts how there is more to home automation than home theaters.
Guests
Bob Christensen
Bob Christensen
Bob is the founder and owner of Magic Homes, LLC, a custom home electronics design and installation company headquartered in Oakdale, Minnesota.
A native of the Twin Cities, Bob Christensen retired as a commander in 2000 after 25 years with the United States Navy Submarine Force. He received a B.S. in physics from the U.S. Naval Academy and master's degrees from Roosevelt University, the Naval War College, and Chaminade University.
Denise Guerin
Denise Guerin
Denise Guerin is a professor of interior design in the Department of Design, Housing, and Apparel in the College of Human Ecology at the University of Minnesota. She's a recipient of the University's prestigious Morse-Alumni Award for Outstanding Contributions to Undergraduate Teaching and she's recently been awarded a large grant to create a national database for research on the interaction of design and human behavior.
For Your Files
Bob Christensen, an electronics designer and installer, said home automation provides security, comfort, convenience, and fun:
"Well, the automation part takes all those things and many more—whole house music systems, security [systems], your information systems, and so forth—and then the automation combines them together to integrate them so with the touch of a button, you can make many different things happen all simultaneously instead of running around manually and doing that yourself."
Bob said there are devices that can automate your existing home:
"X-10 devices [use] a style of power line carrier that can send automation signals over that wiring and normally that will work. Depending on the exact way your home was wired you might need to do things like go from one side of the electrical bus to the other so that the signal can transmitted throughout all the electrical receptacles in the home."
To install home automation in a new house, Bob said you can establish an electronic foundation:
"[You can use] what we call residential structured wiring or the information wiring in the home. And throughout the home we have information receptacles that pipe in all the different things that are going in the home, everything from your telephone and your cable service to your computer network and so forth. A lot of the wiring that we have is category 5 cable or CAT-5. Everyone has heard that term and many people coming to our showroom aren't quite sure what that means, so I just brought a sample here to show you. Category 5 is simply four pairs of twisted wires that are done in a fashion that they can carry high data rates of information and distribute that throughout the home."
Denise Guerin, professor of interior design at the University, said automating the home takes planning and not just of the technical aspects:
"The most important part to that planning I think, is that the family really needs to understand what their tasks and activities are. How do they want to come together as a family? How do they want to communicate together as a family? Where is their interaction going to occur? They need to understand how they use their home [and] relay that information to the the automation [system]."
Cat-5
Category 5 cable, commonly known as Cat-5, is an unshielded twisted pair type cable designed for high signal integrity.
CEDIA
Custom Electronic Design and Installation Association. CEDIA is an international trade association of
companies specializing in the planning and installing of electronic systems for the home.
X-10
X-10 is a communication protocol for remote control of electrical devices.