There are thousands of home automation products that get announced every year. Some of them are brilliant, and some of them are frankly useless. We need first-generation ideas and rehashes of old ideas. There are even some stupid ideas for your smart homes. What makes most of these silly products stupid is not that they don't work (although some do not) but because they don't make your home smarter - they make you work harder.

At BRAVAS, we want to start highlighting some of the products that we see that make your home smarter and your life easier. Not all these solutions will make sense to all homeowners, but they may solve a specific problem or spark an idea. Some of our focus products may not fit your home automation platform, but we may solve an issue with a product that does. Let us know if we can help with that.

A well-designed smart home relies on technology proven to provide safe spaces and peace of mind for our families. One of the cornerstones of this is to ensure we are all breathing the cleanest air possible. In a modern, well-designed residence of today, incorporating advanced air filtration is a great way to start and has never been easier. What is more, when you have cleaner air, everyone says you can smell the difference.

One of the subjects we get asked most about at BRAVAS is lights, lighting, and lighting control. Many people looking to update or build a new home want to explore how to get the best light in their new environment. While some builders and architects know this space well when it comes to power, they are more focused on selling you "four cans and a fan" in each room.

On behalf of everyone at BRAVAS, we hope you and your family have a Happy New Year. We hope that 2021 brings you everything you desire, and after 2020, just a bit of 'the ordinary' might be all we need!

While we are thinking of 2021, we wanted to share a few ideas for your home automation plans in 2021. At BRAVAS, we would love to discuss all the ideas with you, and more details can always be found in our Solution Guide, which you can download here.

In our last blog on why you may not want to do home automation as a DIY project, we stated that correctly done, these technologies can add value to your home. This bold statement got some feedback from prospective customers. How they ask, will home automation add value to your home, and how much?

In this blog, we will explore both if it adds value and try and quantify how much.

We all have a friend who doesn't believe in experts. For the perennial 'Jack of all Trades,' home automation is a robust environment. "You don't need to hire anyone," they say," I can do that for you."  So, when is the 'king-of-DIY' the wrong answer to home automation, and when can you use them safely? Alternatively, when should you call for a professional to help you set up the technology in your home?

If you believe the marketing, then the latest networking craze, mesh, might look like the answer to all your networking problems. The hype goes, “Say goodbye to dead spots and buffering with a connection that doesn’t slow you down, even as you add more devices.” But beware, nothing is as simple as it seems, and mesh networking may only be the correct answer for a small number of users.

When Captain Picard and the crew of the USS Enterprise entered the Holodeck, they knew they were in for an experience. By going to that special place, they opened themselves up to a digital and virtual experience different from their normal face-to-face life. While BRAVAS can’t offer you the hologram experience that Jean Luc and team can, there is lots to learn from Star Trek - The Next Generation.

There is no point in having a security system if no one knows when it goes off. That is why, for years, companies have offered remote monitoring of those systems for you. But with every doorbell manufacture offering cheap ‘professional’ monitoring of your security systems, why should you come to a professional like BRAVAS for that service?

Partly the answer is, like everything, you get what you pay for, but there are three questions you should be asking yourself.

Bob Knight once said, “I don’t believe in luck, I believe in preparation.” My guess is that he was talking about basketball, but he could also have been talking about pre-wiring your home. By pre-wiring, we mean all those low-power cables that are going to control light, shades, audio, video, security and other home automation systems.

If you get the prewire wrong, it can be both frustrating and expensive. Frustrating because you will find there are elements of home technology that may not be possible in your home and expensive because, well, fixing a bad prewire means taking down walls.