Climate Control
Climate Control:
Convenience and energy savings are the two best reasons for integrating your climate control into your home automation system. You’ve been in Florida for a couple of weeks during the winter. To save energy while you were gone, you set all of your house thermostats down to sixty degrees. You’ve just arrived at the airport and know you’ll be home in a couple of hours. You’re not looking forward to coming home to a cold house. Then you remember that you have an integrated house designed for the twenty-first century! You open up your cell phone and dial your home number, then punch a couple of buttons. You’ve just turned your heat up to 70 degrees so that your house will be toasty warm when you arrive.
Most new homes have several heating zones which means they also have several thermostats. Let’s say you need to leave for a few hours to run some errands. Can you imagine running around the house to turn down six thermostats before you go? No one is going to bother but valuable energy is consumed as a result. If your climate control is integrated, you simply press the “away” button to arm your security system as you leave and the thermostats all automatically turn themselves down. You’ve just saved energy and it was easy! With integrated climate control, you can go to a TV or one of your touchscreens and select “climate”. This pulls up all of your thermostats so you can make changes without running to each individual thermostat.
From a safety perspective, it is also useful to have climate control integration. If a fire breaks out, as soon as it’s detected by the fire panel, the integrated system tells all of the furnace blowers to stop immediately; thus preventing the fire from being fed more air and oxygen. If you have lighting control, the fire alarm will tell selected lights to come on to light the pathway to all of your home’s exits.
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