iPhone Ready Housing

Designing houses to work with the technology of the day has always been a challenge.  Its hard to stay current on what's available and difficult to sort out the viable technologies from the flavor-of-the-week.  About three years ago I had the experience of showing a (younger) couple a new house design that included some cabinets that I had designated for holding their CD/DVD collection.  They looked me over with a mixture of curiosity and pity, as though I had shown them a kitchen design that included a coal chute and a delivery box for the milkman.  Then they plucked their iPhones out of their pockets and waived them at me to let me know what century they were living in.

Since then, I've been paying a little more attention to the smartphone and how best to integrate that technology into our designs.  When Howell Lofts hit the drawing board, one of my goals was to be able to market the homes as "iPhone ready".  I focused on three kinds of technologies I wanted to try out.  1)  Digital music; 2) Remote control of the house systems, and; 3) Real-time energy monitoring.  For each of these, I installed a test system in my own home to try them out first.  I

Digital Music:  Sonos.

I thought this would be the biggest challenge of the three.  Setting up a house for the playback of a digital music collection turns out to be the easiest, probably because there's a large marketplace of consumers that wants this feature in their home.  There are many ways of getting this done, but I settled on a system made by Sonos.  Sonos makes a line of products that can plug into an ethernet jack in your wall & talk directly to your computer network.  The Sonos client software installs on your computer, catalogs and sorts your music collection, and can be controlled either by a PC or by an app on your smartphone or tablet.  It was incredibly simple to set up & very easy to use.  The best part about it, from an architects perspective, is that it doesn't require much in the way of wiring inside the wall. The only thing you need to provide is an ethernet connection.  A+


Remote Controls:  Insteon


Low voltage control systems have been available for decades, but up until recently, providing a house with a remote control that could dim the lights, adjust the thermostat, or unlock the door has required a six figure price tag and a team of technicians to pull it off.  Recently, this technology has made it down to the level of consumer electronics.  Now, for about $50 per switch, you can use a system called Insteon to create circuits in your house that can be controlled using your smartphone for the remote control.

For my house (and Howell Lofts) I installed a skeleton system that could be expanded in the future.  I installed a few switched outlets in key locations where we plug in our computer monitors, printers, A/V components, and other electronics that have parasitic power loads.  This allows us to shut down the house for the night at the click of a button.  I also put the entry lights onto a remote control switch that would allow me to switch the lights on as I approached the house or shut the porch lights off at bedtime without going back downstairs.

Mixed reviews on the Insteon so far.  It requires a little perseverance to set up, is a little more complicated to operate than is comfortable for the average user.  One drawback seems to be that the controls on the PC work better than the controls on the smartphone app.  Might need one more generation on the software side to get things working just right.  B-



Energy Monitor:  TED 5000 (The Energy Detective)

TED is an energy monitor that wires directly into your main electrical panel.  It give you real-time data on your energy usage & stores the information for those, like myself, that enjoy a little recreational charting and graphing.  Having an energy monitor has been a real eye opener for us, as I suspect it would be for most homeowners.

Once we got the system up and running, we spent a couple hours watching the monitor & wandering around the house trying to figure out what was using all of the energy & how we could turn things off to lower our usage.  Very quickly we got a sense for what our baseline energy usage is.  Now, when we walk by the monitor and see numbers that are higher than the baseline, we know that we've left something on.  So, it's giving us really valuable feedback that you can't really get any other way.  Also, if you're crafty like us, you can make the whole thing into a game & trick your kids into monitoring it for you.

Another valuable thing that the monitor shows you is the amount of energy that certain activities use.  We have an electric hot water heater.  While I could have told you that hot water uses up a lot of energy, there's nothing like a graph like this to illustrate the point.  The spikes in this graph are caused by the hot water tank kicking on for showers and running the dishwasher.  The smaller spikes throughout the days are from the heater kicking on periodically to maintain the temperature in the tank.  Its one thing to be told that taking a short shower saves energy.  But seeing the sheer magnitude is another thing altogether.  Having this kind of information modifies your behavior.

We started out using a cell-phone app for the display, but we quickly found that this is the kind of tool that works best when the display is always on and always available.  So we paid an extra $50 for a wireless display that sits on the countertop & passes judgement on us 24/7.  A+