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Remote Control Your Home

By Talha Ghafoor, CIO Pakistan
March 06, 2009 02:39 PM ET
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Welcome to the new age where your lives are literally being controlled by a collection of smart controllers and providing you with access to the electrical systems in your home or office when you are thousands of miles away, is very much a reality.

This is the age of being wired and having maximum control over every electrical appliance in your property and every kilowatt of power. Home automation has been around for almost three decades and existed in the imagination of science fiction writers for as long as writings can recall.Home automation is something that is categorized under the field of building automation, and often referred to as 'smart homes'. The automation, like most other automation, is done to bring greater comfort, convenience, efficiency and security in the lives of its residents. Everything that has an electrical connection coming through it can be programmed, accessed and controlled. Various equipment and techniques are used for climate control, control of doors and windows, security and surveillance systems and extended into the leisure or luxury systems of the home.

Why Automate?

Home automation, depending on the solution you chose, can be installed on top of your existing wiring infrastructure. It is, however, easier and more flexible to plan and deploy the system during the blueprint stage, in the phase before the actual construction commences, but it can, hypothetically, run either way.

Please note that I keep calling it 'home' automation, but the same concept can be applied to control the office environment since the same technology applies to both ecosystems. When home automation is installed during construction of a new home, usually control modules are added before the interior walls are installed. These control modules run to a controller over the electrical wires, which then control the environment.

There are several reasons why you would consider automation of the internal electrical power grid -- these would be in addition to the fantasies coming to life! It is convenient to be able to control the lights, fans or doorways remotely. Imagine you have a remote location where a skeleton staff of operators are housed. Instead of getting a separate office assistant to manage the operations within that remote location, you could technically have someone from the main office be available to them over a VOIP extension. Once an identity has been verified at the remote location, the office assistant in the head office, could actually buzz the staff member in, whilst sitting a few hundred miles away. It is possible.

The automation provides you with centralized control. Centralized air conditioning or lighting enables for a more efficient use of power. Especially in a time when we're all encouraged to cut down our individual consumption, if you could share power and conserve it at the same time, you may consider looking into the option. Scheduling power consumption so it is used to in the most efficient manner, is also another feature of home automation.

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