How to choose a smart home control system
·7 min read
There are a handful of serious control platforms on the market, and the honest truth is that most of them are capable of doing what you want. Homeowners tend to research the platforms exhaustively and the installation barely at all, which is backwards: the brand on the box matters far less than who configures it and whether anyone can still help you in five years.
Here's what we'd actually look at.
Does it do activities, or does it do devices?
This is the difference between a system people use and a system people abandon.
A device-oriented system gives you a list: the TV, the receiver, the lights, the shades. You control each one. It demos beautifully and it wears thin in a fortnight, because watching a film means touching six things.
An activity-oriented system gives you Watch TV, Movie, Listen to Music, Entertain, Goodnight, Away — and each one quietly performs a dozen actions in the right order. Inputs switch, lights come down, shades close, the right zones wake up.
Most good platforms can do this. Whether yours actually does comes down to programming, not purchase. Which leads to the real question.
Who writes the programming, and do they stay?
Every capable system arrives as a box of potential. Someone has to sit down and decide what Goodnight means in your house — which lights, which rooms, what happens to the thermostat, whether the basement TV turns off too.
That work is where a system becomes good or mediocre, and it's almost entirely invisible when you're comparing spec sheets. Two identical installations, same hardware, can feel completely different depending on who set them up and how much they cared about the detail.
So the questions worth asking a prospective installer are less about the brand:
- Who does the programming — the person I'm talking to, or someone off-site?
- Will you walk the house before quoting?
- What happens when I want to change something in a year?
- Who holds the configuration file, and can I have a copy?
That last one matters more than people expect. See our guide on what to do when your installer disappears.
Keypads or phones?
Almost everyone says "phone" at the start, and almost everyone ends up wanting keypads.
Phones are excellent for the unusual request — adjusting something from the sofa, checking a camera from the airport. They're poor for the ordinary one. Nobody wants to unlock a phone, find an app, wait for it to connect, and locate a room, in order to turn on a light they're standing next to.
A well-labelled keypad by the door is faster than a phone will ever be, and — this matters more than it sounds — it works for guests, kids, house-sitters and grandparents without anyone installing anything or being handed a login.
Best practice is both: keypads for daily use, app for everything else. If a proposal has no keypads in it, ask why.
How much of it depends on your internet?
Some systems route almost everything through the cloud. Others keep the core logic on a processor in your house and use the internet only for remote access.
This is worth asking about plainly. When the connection drops — and in a Calgary winter, sometimes it does — you want your light switches to still be light switches. A local-first system degrades to "everything works, just not from my phone". A cloud-dependent one can degrade to considerably less than that.
Will it still make sense in five years?
Two things to check:
Expandability. You will add to this. Basement gets finished, a room becomes an office, someone wants speakers on the patio. Ask what adding a room later actually involves — is it a new device and twenty minutes of programming, or a different tier of system?
Support model. Hardware sold only through trained installers usually stays supported and updated for a long time. Hardware sold on a marketplace to whoever clicks buy is cheaper and its lifespan is entirely at the manufacturer's discretion. Neither is wrong, but they're different bets, and it's worth knowing which one you're making.
What we'd tell you if you asked
We install URC as our main automation platform, and Lutron for lighting and shades, and we'd happily explain why we settled there. But we'd start somewhere else: with what you actually want to happen when you walk in the door with your hands full, and what should happen at 11pm when you go to bed.
Get that right and several platforms will serve you well. Get it wrong and the most expensive system on the market will sit unused behind a remote nobody understands.
If you'd like a straight opinion about your own house, get in touch.