At BRAVAS, we recently published our 70-plus page Solution Guide – which you can download here. In this blog, we will review three different ways you can use it to help you make better decisions about how smart you want your smart home to be.

The first way will be ‘short and sweet’ – designed for someone who just has a few minutes and wants to make sure they are not missing anything. The second approach will be more ‘focused’ on specific areas you might be interested in. The final way, which we call Cover-to-Cover, will be the most thorough look at what you should be considering. Whichever way works for you, if you want someone to help you work through our Solution Guide with you, let us know, and we would love to help.

 

Short and Sweet

If you only have a few minutes, we recommend that you spend it on Page 5 – the Index page. While not the prettiest page in the book, it’s the one that shows you all that we have to offer.  The rest of the Solution Guide is an expansion of each of these subjects. If you have the digital version of the Solution Guide in front of you, if you click on any of the items in the index, it will jump you to the page where the solution is outlined.

If you have a few extra minutes, check out pages 7 and 8 where you will find useful information on Healthy Homes and why every smart home should have a single, intelligent home automation platform and the right infrastructure.

 

Focused

You may already know what types of home automation you are looking for, and if that’s you, this is how we suggest you can use the Solution Guide. On page 5, pick an area you are interested in and then use the hotlink or page number to go to that page.  Extra tip – on the digital version, when on a solution page, clicking the header should get you back to the index.

When you are on the solution page, you will find some general overview of the area and three options at the bottom of the page. The idea of these options is to help think through if you want a ‘good, better, and best’ set of choices.

 

• Foundation: these are the basic ideas you should be thinking of when looking at these technologies. While they often enable your home to be connected to the internet; they don’t necessarily make it smart. These approaches can leave you having to manage your home with multiple remote control sorts of apps on your phone.

 

• Smart: to make the technology stylish, you need to integrate it with the rest of the technology in the home. This means connection to a Smart Home Automation Platform. This also enables some more modern and sophisticated choices in fixtures and fittings.

 

• Transformational: many of the technology areas we talk about have capabilities to increase your quality of life and change the way you live in your home. This is particularly true of sites like lighting. In the solution guide, we will offer ideas of how you might achieve some of those objectives.

 

Again, there are many concepts here, and we would love to describe or even demonstrate them to you if it would help.

 

Cover-to-cover

If you build a luxury home from the bottom up, we will encourage you to think about home automation the same way. Rather than just pick and choose areas you already know about, go through every page and explore the ideas in that solution. The Solution Guide is in two halves – Beautiful Places and Smart Spaces. The Solutions in Beautiful Places will be most visible to you and may have the most significant impact on how you use your home and how it looks. However, just as necessary are the solutions in the Smart Spaces section. These are the foundations or basics upon which your smart home will be built.

They are not all the same in terms of importance. Not everyone wants a golf simulator, but everyone needs to have a secure network. Maybe you live in an area with lots of power problems. Check those pages out to protect your home and its contents. As you go through the Guide, ask yourself how you could use the ideas, and if you need them.

If you are using a designer or architect, feel free to share the Guide with them. Together you may have some great ideas we would love to work on with you.

 

Complete Picture

For some people, there may be a temptation to skip the second half because the technology sounds complex. It’s our experience that when something goes wrong in a smart home, the problems are often in networking, power, or security.

At BRAVAS, we share this guide because we want your home to be all it can be. We would love to know if we could help or even what you would have liked to see in the Guide.

 

Thank you.