Hestia Home Integration

A post to CE-Pro this morning about underrated revenue generators for integrators in today’s challenging market included a paragraph devoted to motorizing and automating blinds and window coverings.  We had a half story attic remodeled in 2000 into a master suite, home office and bathroom.  The home office faces west and south - if I had it to do over again, I’d have had the electrician run wiring into the window framing to enable installation of motorized blinds that could be automated now.

We’re frequent travelers to Central Oregon, specifically the Sunriver planned community in Oregon’s High Desert.  The development is mainly single family homes that are owned by private homeowners who lease their properties to vacationers who come to the Sunriver to golf, bike, hike, ski, river raft, fish, etc.  The high temperatures in summertime average in the 90-degree range.  Yet, we’ve not leased a home yet that central or room air conditioning.  Instead it’s typical to find a placard posted on a wall that explains how residents work with the high desert climate, window coverings and quality windows to control temperature inside the homes.  Visitors are encouraged to close all windows by 9:30 am, when the house is still filled with cool night and morning air, and all blinds and window coverings to keep infrared rays from heating the interior.  After the sun begins to go down and the high temperature has been reached around 4:00 pm, people begin opening window coverings and windows to usher in cool high desert night air.  Summer low temperatures can be in the 40s and 50s; houses cool off very nicely and quickly.  One qualifier is it is a “dry” heat - but homeowners undoubtedly save significant money on energy bills by avoiding air conditioning through intelligent and purposeful use of window coverings.

Back to our upstairs office - we rarely see highs in the 90s in Seattle during summer time but nice summer days with temps ranging from the high 70s to 80s do heat up the upstairs space significantly.  We have quality windows but automating motorized blinds with heat and ambient light sensors could go a long way to regulating temperature upstairs.  We do have motorized blinds that are automated in our home theater downstairs.  One setting is for the blinds to descend when we activate the “movie” scene to reduce glare on the screen and aid in creating an optimal light level.  The blinds also descend when the house is shut down at night and when we leave for added security - would-be thieves can’t see into the basement and see the home theater equipment.  It was a significant modification to take down molding and run Romex into the window framing for installation and then the serial cable to the home controller for automation.

If we had the option for motorized blinds in our home office, we’d integrate sensors for temperature and light so the blinds would lower and raise in response to pre-programmed settings.  We’d also work with one of our window coverings partners - we did a much better job of selecting shades that were appropriate for our window covering goals downstairs, but we could have done better with the coverings in the home office.  Even when down, the existing coverings don’t do a very good job of filtering infrared and UV rays, definitely not as good as our Draper shades downstairs.  One of my favorite things about our home theater shades is they’re one way visible - we can see out from inside when they’re down but they’re completely opaque to someone looking in from the outside.  It doesn’t feel so much like a cave when the shades are down and brings some of the outside in.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 20th, 2009 at 8:56 pm and is filed under CE Pro, Climate Control, Motorized Window Coverings, New Construction, Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.