The relentless technological progress in the building industry creates some great products. A classic example is the evolution of the thermostat over the past few years. The first really good one to hit the market was the Nest, and this company was later bought by Google. This disrupted the industry and all the other manufacturers are now competing with web enabled, easy to use smart thermostats.
Thanks to some damage by one of the kids, I had the chance to swap out my old style $25 on/off thermostat that runs my infloor heating system in the basement with a new smart thermostat by Honeywell, called the Lyric 5. This was half the cost of buying another Nest unit. I will compare this unit and see if I prefer it to the Nest for use in my upcoming houses, and see how well it deals with the slow to react slab heat system vs a furnace. The cost of web enabled devices is certainly getting more attractive, and the benefit of being able to check on your house via a phone in winter when on vacation is major plus.
One area of cost that has not come down very much is the 'structured wiring' work for smart home features. We recently had some shocking quotes for work on our upcoming houses. There is no way that smart home wiring should cost 1/4 or more of the value of a complete new house electrical system install with panels, underground services, dimmer switches, finished light package labour, and dozens of pot lights. Needless to say we wont be spending thousands on wires behind the wall when you can get some of the new wifi smart gadgets for less than $200, and more future smart devices will be introduced not even require wiring.
Another example is security system wiring. The wiring cost could be used for purchasing the equipment for a wireless system that does not require a home phone connection and comes complete with motion sensors and a door sensor plus low cost monitoring. We will be trying this new wireless home security system on our next show home to see how well it would work for our future clients.
Here is a shot of our new and old thermostats. Looks great and can save energy/add comfort to the house.
Looks good and is easy to set up once installed. Install, while DIY friendly, required a call to the manufacturer and resulted in a painful process of running a third wire to the old thermostat location to power the new unit. If this had failed we would have been calling one of our heating guys to come and help out. Once powered up the unit quickly configured itself to the home network and iPhone app.