Parade of Homes
Posted: Mon Jun 17, 2019 6:17 am
The wife and I spent this past weekend checking out a "Parade of Homes" in WI where local builders showcase their wares. We're planning to build a home there in the next year or two and this seemed like a great way to spot local talent for our build. The homes on the tour were all custom homes and some featured various HA kit. I must admit that nothing really jumped out at me, but the most popular stuff seemed to be:
I was encouraged that all of the builders we interviewed were willing to let me do the low voltage stuff myself which was a pleasant surprise.
- Thermostats -- lots of Nest and Ecobee. A few featured Tekmar which I had never heard of before, but they looked pretty sharp and seemed well built.
- HVAC -- tons of zoned systems. In fact, it seemed like 100 percent of the homes we toured had this feature. Easily 95 percent used Aprilaire systems.
- Audio -- very nearly every home that featured distributed audio used the latest Sonos amps.
- Home Theater -- very nearly every home that featured a full-on theater had a Sony 4k projector. Zero homes had distributed video.
- "Advanced" automation -- I only saw one home that featured anything approaching centralized automation and that was a Control4 system.
- Lighting -- a few of the homes featured Brilliant lighting control, but these only had a few controls per home. It wasn't a situation where every room had one (at US$300 per single switch, I can see why). In fact, these seemed to be more for the built-in Alexa hooks than anything. Beyond that, I didn't see much else.
- Lots of Ring Doorbells.
- Security -- I must admit that I didn't pay much attention to the security systems that were featured, but every home had one.
- Irrigation -- 100 percent of the homes that featured irrigation had RainBird controls.
I was encouraged that all of the builders we interviewed were willing to let me do the low voltage stuff myself which was a pleasant surprise.