How Smart Homes Work

Home automation has a long and fitful history. For many years, tech trends have come and gone, but one of the first companies to find success is still around.

The genesis of many smart home products was 1975, when a company in Scotland developed X10. X10 allows compatible products to talk to each other over the already existing electrical wires of a home. All the appliances and devices are receivers, and the means of controlling the system, such as remote controls or keypads, are transmitters. If you want to turn off a lamp in another room, the transmitter will issue a message in numerical code that includes the following:

All of this is designed to happen in less than a second, but X10 does have some limitations. Communicating over electrical lines is not always reliable because the lines get "noisy" from powering other devices. An X10 device could interpret electronic interference as a command and react, or it might not receive the command at all.

While X10 devices are still around, other technologies have emerged to compete for your home networking dollar. Instead of going through the power lines, many new systems use radio waves to communicate. That's how BlueTooth, WiFi and cell phone signals operate.

On the next page, we'll take a look at the products you'll need to get your smart home running.

Smart homes may make life easier and more convenient. Who wouldn't love being able to control lighting, entertainment and temperature from their couch? Whether you're at work or on vacation, the smart home will alert you to what's going on, and security systems can be built to provide an immense amount of help in an emergency. For example, not only would a resident be woken with notification of a fire alarm, the smart home would also unlock doors, dial the fire department and light the path to safety.

Here are a few more examples of cool smart home tricks:

Smart homes also provide some energy efficiency savings. Electric bills go down when lights are automatically turned off in empty rooms, and rooms can be heated or cooled based on who's there at any given moment. One homeowner boasted that her heating bill was about one-third less than a same-sized normal home. Some devices can track how much energy each appliance is using and command power hogs to use less.

Smart home technology promises tremendous benefits for elderly people living alone. A smart home could notify the resident when it's time to take medicine, alert the hospital if the resident falls and track how much the resident is eating. If an elderly person is a little forgetful, the smart home could perform tasks such as shutting off the water before a tub overflow or turning off the oven if the cook had wandered away.

Smart homes look great on paper, but are they for everyone? On the next page, we'll look at some of the disadvantages of this technology.

These days, the fast proliferations of smartphones and tablets provide an easy way for even tech novices to communicate with household smart devices. And those gadgets are more numerous by the day.

The Nest thermostat comes with integrated WiFi so that you can control, schedule and monitor your home's temperatures, from the porch or from a taxi. Nest learns your behaviors and automatically adjusts its settings for maximum efficiency and comfort. It will tell you how much energy you're using, remind you to change your filters, and even alter its functions to account for the differences between, say, a heat pump or radiant heaters.

Philips' Hue lights offer some concert lighting effects right in your own home. Screw these LED bulbs into your regular fixtures, install the app to your phone or tablet, and then you can turn the lights on or off, brighten or dim them, or perhaps best of all, change the color. Then you can even program the lights to perform just about any combination of color and brightness, and control up to 50 lights on one bridge (which links the lights to your phone). The more lights you have the more fun it will be. But it will cost you -- a starter pack with three bulbs and a bridge goes for around $200.

On the next page you'll see even more nifty smart home products. With a bit of ingenuity on your part, you'll see that you can automate just about any electronics processes.

Belkin markets its WeMo home automation switches specifically to smartphone users. For about $100, you'll receive a smart WeMo switch and a motion detector. Plug the switch into an electrical outlet, and then plug a device, such as a lamp, heater or coffee pot into the switch. Pair the switch with your smartphone using Belkin's app, and then you can control the switch remotely, letting you, for example, turn a light on or off from 1,000 miles away (or just from your cozy bed).

Home automation isn't always about pricey products. Some of the most useful smart home tools are actually free.

The WeMo is one of many products compatible with IFTTT (IF Then, Then That), which is a free Internet service that lets you automate an endless number of processes. For example, with IFTTT (which rhymes with gift), you could create a so-called "recipe" that automatically posts Twitter tweets to Facebook if they contain a specific hashtag or keyword in them. Or you could schedule a text message to yourself as a reminder to call your grandma.

IFTTT is basically just a simple way to create triggers that result in specific actions, and it works with WeMo. For instance, you could set up a WeMo motion detector in your bedroom, and when it sees that you're up for the morning, it will trigger the coffee pot in the kitchen.

The potential for these kinds of "if x, then y" type of actions is limited only by your imagination. Of course, it takes some time to set up all of these fun actions. And that brings up one of the biggest challenges of home automation products.

Many smart home products use their own proprietary apps. In short, you could install dozens of home automation gadgets and their associated apps, and then slowly drown in frustration as you try to control all of them.

The Revolv is a $299 WiFi hub that connects to all of your other wireless home automation products. Revolv attempts to unify all of your home automation gear under one app, and also helps you build pre-programmed capabilities, all in the name of realizing a truly automated home.

Once connected, you control all of your gadgets from the central Revolv app. Revolv currently works best with Z-Wave, Insteon and WiFi products, and it's available only for iPhone users. However, the company plans to expand to hundreds of other products and to add Android compatibility, too. You'll find similar consolidation hubs from companies such as Insteon and SmartThings.

Keep reading and you'll see more challenges associated with home automation.

A smart home probably sounds like a nightmare to those people not comfortable with computers. Those who routinely fumble around with a remote control just trying to change the TV channel might have stopped reading by now.

One of the primary mental blocks of installing a smart home system is balancing the complexity of the system against the usability of the system. If it's downright exasperating, then it's actually making your life harder instead of easier. When planning the system, it's important to consider a few factors:

For these reasons, it may be easier to start with a very basic home network and expand as enhancements are needed or desired. Like many new technologies, smart homes require a significant investment in both cash and time to keep up, so if you're short on either, you may want to stick with your "dumb" old house.

Before you buy, check product reviews and avoid those that draw the ire of users. There are plenty of products making sky-high promises that fall flat in the real world. And if you're a smartphone user, strongly consider products that come with an equally well-reviewed smartphone app. Some apps are so unwieldy or convoluted that they cause more headaches than they relieve.

Smart homes also come with some security concerns. Hackers who find a way to access the network may have the ability to turn off alarm systems and lights, leaving the home vulnerable to a break-in. They could also cause mischief like turning devices on and off rapidly, which could ruin some electronics or -- in an extreme case -- possibly cause a fire.

Consumer electronics manufacturers are ramping up their product lines in the hope that home automation finally hits the mainstream. Thanks to smartphones and tablets, and the many home automation apps that are now available, there's a chance the trend will catch on ... but a full-on Jetson's-style home may still be years or decades off.

That's because, in spite of so many technological advances, there's still no standard system for automating all of these gadgets. Without such a standard, many consumers are left wondering if they're spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on products that will wind up obsolete or unusable in a short time.

Of course, there's also the question of whether an individual needs all this technology. Is our society really so lazy that we can't flip a light switch? The good news is that with all the time we save from home automation, we'll have time to work on other pursuits. Like developing robot maids.

To learn more about smart homes, visit the links on the next page.