What Would Be Your Ideal Futuristic Home?

deman1985 asks: "As the owner of a small commercial and home integration company, I'm exposed to a wide variety of customers with differing tastes and needs. I'll get requests for anything from the ordinary audio distribution systems and full home theater systems, to downright bizarre requests like having bubble baths run automatically, when they walk in the door. However, the vast majority of customers I encounter are not technologically inclined and are more interested in simplicity rather than impressiveness. What would your ideal integrated home look like? What's the most unique feature you would like to see? If you had access to an unlimited budget, what would you spend money on to make your home stand out? Whole-house audio? Hidden video screens? Automatic locks? Do most people view home integration strictly as a toy for entertainment, or is the technology ready for prime time?"

Comments

Product name...

[AnonymousPrick]

Luddite HomesTM

Oooo, I think I'm on to something here!

There was this builder on NPR a year ago. He builds house in Athens, GA. He figured out that if he left as many trees as he could on a property, he could sell the house for a premium. I just thought - "Uh, Duh!" Most GA builders just clear cut everything and plant weeds (i.e.a lawn).

Re:My requests

[deman1985]

I'm hurt!

Now, that said, I have no intention of actually work with a company like yours. I mean no offense, but in my experience, installation companies like to choose absolutely ridiculously expensive equipment and spend far too much time trying to maximize their profits

Indeed, it is an image that is unfortunately associated with my company's industry all to often. Installers have come to recognize that the easiest way to make a quick buck is to go after the customers with deep pockets who want to show off. Someone who wants to show off doesn't want to have the same DVD player, projector or audio system as the average joe, even if it is professionally installed. As a result, most installers don't cater to projects under $5k, and shudder at the thought of using equipment from the likes of Sony.

While I can't deny being guilty of trying to push the higher end equipment myself, I've made sure to set my company up to offer people a wide range of options and I don't set any minimum cut off. If someone already has all the equipment they want and just want their wiring redone, I'm more than happy to take on the project. That doesn't mean I don't prefer and bend over backwards more for customers who want the whole package, though. And, in some applications, there just aren't that many low-cost options for off-the-shelf automation equipment that works reliably; that's why I hope to extend my company into manufacturing eventually.

Re:I can't afford it anyway, so why bother?

[deman1985]

Out of curiosity, what would be a feasible price point for something like what you described?

I don't disagree that the pricing on much of the currently available home integration technologies is out of reach of most consumers. My ultimate goal with my company is to eventually move into the design side of integration equipment and make the technology more widely accessible, but that is some time off. My personal belief as to why it is so "overpriced" in comparison with PC's and more common consumer electronics is simply the niche market that is has been in for so long. Even for international companies like Crestron, their mass production numbers can't come anywhere close to what Dell does. By the time enough units have been shipped of a particular technology to bring the price down, that technology is vastly out of date. There is also limited competition on the manufacturing side. This combined with the commonly held view that home integration (or variations of it) is a luxury forces the technology to stay below that threshold where competition, mass production and wide availability pushes the price down. It will happen eventually, though, don't worry.

Re:My requests

[egomaniac]

For me, it's not about the money per se but what I actually get for it. My theater cost me about $70,000, which certainly isn't super-high-end, but I expect it was enough to have gotten most installers' ears to perk up.

But because I did it myself and carefully selected components with overall value in mind, I have a theater which (as far as I'm concerned) blows away a lot of $250,000 theaters. Not all of them, certainly, but a lot of them. I used a cheap-ass DVD player because that's all you need, a pretty good but not stellar projector because I expected to throw it away in a few years when better models come out, and absolutely amazing speakers because they are a mature technology which can already reproduce sounds better than my hearing can distinguish them and I mean to hang on to them for life. And no screen at all, because with a nice flat wall, a completely light-controlled room, and a bright projector, a screen provides literally no advantage (it's plenty bright with a gain of 1.0, so increasing gain would merely serve to produce hotspotting).

Again, truly no offense meant by my earlier comment.

Re:Wrong way for me.

[apt142]

I used to live in a house about 900 square feet. And I completely agree with you. For just a couple, it's fine if you've got it set up where it's working for you. If it's not set up however, it can be quite painful. I ended up moving because the storage areas consisted of two closet just large enough to stand in. And I was renting so there wasn't a lot of home improvements I could do to it.

About two years ago we moved into a larger house (1300) and we thought we'd never use all the space in the house. It's funny, you find a way to use it. I'd equate the experience to a Hard drive. When you get one with more space, you just find more ways of filling it up.

Re:My requests

[BenEnglishAtHome]

What the hell did you spend $70k on, then?

The GP post made mention of speakers being a mature technology worth investing in. It's awfully easy to spend USD$70k on speakers. When it comes to mature technologies that can actually make a difference in the quality of the entertainment experience, audio gear can get really expensive, really quick.

I'm in my 40s and my ears aren't so good anymore, so even if I were incredibly rich I would have no reason to buy the best speakers out there. Still, based on easily discernible quality differences I could justify $20k to $30k for a (standard 2-speaker) stereo system. (To be fair, I could get 90% of that performance out of a $5k system, but I hope you take my point.) Add to that the extra speakers required by a theater and by multi-room sound, plus the infrastructure, and you can easily spend $70k even if you do use a $50 DVD player.

Hnads down zero energy homes

[zogger]

Any new built home should be ultra insulated and be self powered. The concept is called "zero energy homes". By using "superinsulation" techniques, combined with intelligently purchased home appliances, and then adding in such things as active and passive solar heating, hotwater, and garnering your own electrical supply with PV or wind, etc, you can get down to about zilch for "energy bills" and always have your home be powered and heated and cooled.

    In addition, they should be built to be storm proof as much as possible, ice, wind, even fire can be dealt with using more advanced construction techniques like earthships, cordwood masonry, concrete domes, earth bermed,etc, plenty of different styles and techniques. There's no one size fits all, it really depends on geographical location and budget.

here are a some useful links to get you started

http://www.eere.energy.gov/solar_decathlon/ (check the homepages of last years entries to see the completed structures, the homes even run the car!)

http://www.google.com/search?q=zero+energy+homes&s tart=0&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8

http://www.google.com/search?q=earthships&start=0& start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8

Basically, ANYTHING but normal energy hog and fragile square stick built framed housing. That is so 20th century. Oil is not two dollars a barrel anymore, yet most homes are built about the same way they were back when that was true. You got to ask yourself, is that just plain nuts, or what? I vote "plain nuts". There are better ways to do things now...

Re:Interoperability

[Fastolfe]

I completely agree. This is perhaps the #1 reason I have stayed away from things like nice home security systems and decent home automation: I'm locked into that one solution. I can't easily hack it and I can't integrate it into "something else" that comes along later. I'm not going to pay hundreds of dollars on something that could conceivably be obsolete soon afterwards, with no ability to swap out components or add components without the blessing of the manufacturer.

I recently got a low-end wireless weather station, but it's the same thing: I can't do anything useful with it because it's all proprietary. Some day someone will hack up GNURadio to sniff on the wireless exchange, and then I'll be able to do some useful stuff with it, but until then, it's a "siloed" technology. I can't make it work with anything else. I shouldn't have to buy 5 different temperature-sensing solutions if I want 5 different temperature-driven things.

Re:Keep it simple...

[pjp6259]

A machine learning professor at University of Colorado built a Adaptive Neural Network House that learns from his behavior. It learns when to turn lights on and off, heating and cooling, radio, etc. Some of the inputs are time of day, temperature, day of week, as well as motion and audio sensors in the house. So for example the house learns that every time you walk into the bathroom you turn the light on, and when you leave the bathroom you turn it off. Pretty soon it does it for you. Really neat.

The home and garden channel even had an episode of Extreme Homes that mentioned it.