Nobody's home. The lights came up, the battery took the house off the grid and the doors locked themselves. Smart home automation that runs on hardware in your house, not on somebody else's server.
4:10pmYou leave.
Asked for by nobody. Every night, whether you are here or not.
Most smart homes are a drawer full of apps.
One app for the lights, another for the aircon, another for the cameras, a fourth for the solar, and a speaker in the kitchen that understands about half of them. Nothing talks to anything else, so nothing ever happens on its own. That is not a smart home, that is a house with remote controls.
A system is the other thing. One brain, sitting in your house, that can see every device at once and act on all of them together. When the house knows the sun has gone, the car is charging, the battery is full and nobody is in the back half of the house, it can do something useful with that. Until then it is just a drawer full of apps.
What it runs.
Lights and blinds
On the sun rather than a timer, room by room, dimming down through the evening without anyone touching a switch.
Climate
Ducted or split, zoned to the rooms people are actually standing in, pre-warmed before you get home and off the moment the house is empty.
Solar and battery
Charge the car on surplus, run the house off the battery through the peak tariff, and see where every kilowatt went.
Cameras and access
Recording to a drive in your house, gates and doors that open for the right car and the right phone, the front door on the TV when somebody knocks.
The network
Wifi that covers the whole block, cameras and devices on their own segment away from your laptops, and a gateway that shows you what each one is talking to.
The odd ones
Pool pump, irrigation, gate intercom, garage door, hot water, the shed. If it has a switch or an API, it goes in the same system as everything else.
How it's set up.
We start with a walk through the house and a look at what already talks, because most houses are further along than the owner thinks. Then a small server goes in, usually something the size of a book in the comms cupboard, and everything that can be brought onto it is brought onto it. Hardware only goes in where there is a genuine gap.
From there it is automations, and that part never really finishes. You live in it for a fortnight, tell us the three things that annoyed you, and we fix those. That loop is the whole job. A house that has been tuned for a year does things you would never have thought to ask for on day one.
Same approach we take to everything else: work out what the thing should do, then build it. We do this for businesses too, which is most of what we do, and if you want someone to scope the whole picture before anything is bought, that's the consulting side. We're in Melbourne and work across Australia.
Questions people ask.
Does it keep working when the internet drops?
Yes. Everything that matters runs on a small computer in your own house, so lights, locks, climate, cameras and automations carry on with the NBN down. The cloud is only there for remote access and voice, and losing it costs you nothing but remote access and voice.
Do I have to rip out what I already have?
Almost never. Most of a house is already talking: the solar inverter, the ducted heating, the garage door, the cameras, the Google or Alexa speakers, the smart switches someone put in three years ago. We put one system over the top that speaks to all of them, and add hardware only where there is a real gap.
Is this a subscription?
The system is not. It runs on hardware you own and software with no per-device fee, no per-month fee and no company that can turn it off. If you want us to keep it maintained and keep adding to it, that is a separate arrangement you can stop at any time.
What about the network and the cameras?
Usually the same job. A house full of devices needs a network built for it: proper wifi coverage, the cameras and the doorbell on their own segment away from the laptops, recording to a drive in the house rather than to somebody else's server, and a gateway that shows you what every device is doing.
Can it do things a package system cannot?
That is the reason to build it this way. Charge the car on solar surplus only. Turn the heating off in rooms nobody is in. Text you if the garage has been open twenty minutes. Put the front door camera on the TV when someone knocks. None of that is on a feature list, and all of it is a few lines once the house is wired into one system.
What does home automation cost in Australia?
It depends almost entirely on how much of the house already talks and how much hardware has to go in, so anyone quoting a figure before they have looked is guessing. We scope it first, then give you a fixed price in writing before anything is ordered.
Photo to come: Cal.
Calum Buchanan.
Melbourne. Ran the systems behind a services business, the phones, the invoices, the marketing, the reporting, and spent the last few years handing them to AI that works. This is that, for yours.