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So I just got off the plane to do a story on a home automation system and I landed in a part of the country
where you find a lot of these.
That's right, those are longhorn cattle. So where on the Earth am I?
We are in Dallas, Texas. Actually we are a little bit north in a town called
McKinney and we're here because we heard about an
incredible smart home automation system at a golf resort called Craig Ranch. Their tagline is
Live the dream so let's go see if they really are.
Before the owner of this four thousand square foot automated showplace gets home
from work,
I got the low down from Byron Baird. He's a Control4 dealer who helped give
this place a smart home automation brain.
This is a townhouse?
It is, they say everything is bigger in Texas and this is probably a pretty good
example of that, yep. There is control in every inch of this town from touch
screens, to keypads, even even an iPad with the MyHome app.
And with those you can control
multiple zones of audio, multiple televisions with DVRs for every
family member. You can control fireplaces, ceiling fans,
thermostats and get this… In this house, a few things that I might highlight would
be the front door camera and doorbell so that if you were for example, watching a
movie
in the family room home theater and someone rang the bell,
it would actually pause your movie for you
for a few seconds, long enough for you to see a camera view of the front door
camera. Everything works together
and what's great about this Dallas palace are the endless custom touches.
Check out the bedside keypad.
Push the midnight button and the lights in the stairway illuminate to twenty
percent,
just enough to venture down for a late night snack.
You think that's personalized control?
Just coming home after a long day at work right now
and him opening the garage door doesn't just trigger the lights, it actually
kicks on the television to his favorite channel, of course ESPN
And wait till you see what
happens next. First thing I do when I come in,
I have a personalized key fob. It's a microchip that's in here
that has my personal settings
programmed into it.
So I waive it over,
the wand if you will, behind the door
that then brings up my personalized settings, how i want to live my life when i come in the
house. And what does that look like?
What it looks like for me, is the home automation system turns on the lights in this hallway, turns on the
lights in the kitchen
and in the family room.
It brings on the TV, ESPN for my purposes
and then it brings on the music. I don't want the audio of ESPN, I want to
just see it,
and it brings on XM90 for me.
These are all the fun features Jeff has continued to add on to his automated home system
but like many,
he started small.
Every single day
there's something more that I want to add to the smart home automation system.
And how many people have you converted?
Yeah, i think that I you know, on a daily basis, i'm probably selling it to
some level because of my enthusiasm about it.
Want this for your home?
Find an authorized smart home automation dealer at Control4 dot com.