Building a New Home with Smart Technology

Smart technology makes a home more enjoyable and comfortable while also improving its potential value down the road. Yet adding smart tech to a home that is not built for it can be tedious. If you are building a house from the ground up, you have an excellent opportunity to build it with the smart technology already in place. Here are some tips to make that happen.

Decide Your Goals

Before beginning, decide what your goals are for the tech you’re adding to your home. What technology will make your life more convenient in your home? How can you use the integrated smart home tech to save energy and lower your bills? Do you want to have your entertainment suite on auto-pilot? These are the types of questions to ask before you start planning.

Start with the Core Elements

As you begin planning for your smart home build, start with the core elements. These are:

• Smart lighting
• Smart heating and cooling
• Smart security

These are the bare essentials for smart home tech, and it’s far easier to add them while building than retrofitting the home later. With the right technology, you can control your lights, turn on your heating and cooling system, or check your home’s security status from your phone, and sometimes even with voice commands for some features.

Add Some Fun Features

Once the core elements are in place, consider what “fun” features you might want to add. For example, if your entertainment system is important to you, consider a smart audio-visual system. Do you want automatic control over your mini blinds? You can add this when you build the home too. Consider the features that your family would enjoy most because each addition adds to the cost of building a smart home.

Consider Complete Smart Home Systems

The ultimate way to make your home smart is to create a complete smart home system as part of your home build. These integrate seamlessly into your home and connect all components to the central control. While this tech is definitely cool, it comes at a high cost. Expect to pay around 5% of the home’s total building cost to add a complete smart home system, at a minimum. That said, if this is a feature you want, adding it at the time of the original build is going to be your cheapest option.

Consider a Wired Network

One of the perks of adding smart home features when you build the home is creating a wired infrastructure in the house. This gives you better reliability and security than you would get with a wi-fi-based system, and it’s far easier to do when building the home. Run data cabling to the areas of your home where smart devices and features will be, such as the living room where the TV will sit, for better functionality.

Building a home means the chance to make it exactly what you’re dreaming it will be. If that dream includes smart tech, talk to your builder about adding it to the plans.

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