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The house today is a system where all of its parts
are engineered to function in harmony with your lifestyle. Behind
the scenes, technology works for your comfort, pleasure and the
efficient functioning of the home. Here are two issues to consider.
Get Wired for What's Next
Leading edge technology lets you remotely turn on the lights at
home, lower the blinds, turn on the music, warm up or cool down
the house, even draw yourself a hot bath, all with the touch of
a few buttons on your cell phone. A home management system with
an in-house keypad can control a sophisticated security system,
and can be programmed to do sequences of events like raising and
lowering the blinds and turning designated lights on and off to
give the illusion that someone's home when they're not. In fact,
anything on the home's electrical system can be controlled. The
system from Smart Corporation is modular so you can build it over
time, one component at a time. It's one example of what's available
to let you customize your house to your lifestyle.
The options are equally impressive in the area
of home computer networking, according to Don Hains, Sure-Lock-Homes,
Lakeville, Minnesota. By using a server system with a networking
card, up to five personal computers can be networked in a home.
You can plug a laptop into a jack in the bedroom, and run it off
the printer somewhere else in the house. You and the kids can all
surf the Internet independently at the same time. And for concerned
parents, the system lets you unobtrusively monitor the kids' Internet
usage.
Getting wired for the future isn't as costly
as one might think, Hains says. For the price of a good laptop,
"you can get a home wired for the future with as many as eight
phone jacks, four rooms of audio speakers, one being surround sound,
eight TV connections, four computers networked, and pre-wiring for
an alarm system." He calls it "future proofing your house."
Ask your builder for details on getting wired
for what's next, because doing it during the building process is
not only easier on the budget; it avoids a more complex "really
messy" process later on.
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