Holiday Automation

It's Christmas Time!

We don't know about you but Christmas is a fantastic time of the year for decorations and lighting. If you share the sentiment, we're sure you're aware of the amount of work to put up inside and outside decorations and lighting. It's great when it's all complete and lit up for everyone to enjoy! Home automation comes in very useful during this time of the year and we're about to explain why.

Outdoor Lighting

Depending on how many lights you put up on your home and in your yard, you can end up with a lot of extension cords, power strips and timers. If you have a lot of lights across multiple places in your yard or on your home, you know you usually can't plug them all into one plug. It can be tricky because you want all of your lights to come on at the same time usually. Sometimes, you may want to turn part of them on or off depending on the time or if you are home or not. This is where the ease of using home automation comes in. Here are a few ideas that home automation can simplify and add control from your phone.

The setup - lets pretend like you have the following decorations

1. Sconces on the front of your house and garage with colored bulbs

2. Upshot lighting on the front of your house

3. Christmas lights along the roofline

4. Santa crawling up your chimney (ok...maybe not)

5. Christmas lights in your shrubs

6. Christmas lights on your tree trunks

7. Christmas lights outlining your driveway

8. Pre-lit wreath on your front door

You feel uncomfortable having all of this lighting on while you are away from the house but you want it to automatically come on when you get home. At 11pm at night, you want to turn all of it off except for 1 and 2. You want the color of 1 to change at 11pm when the rest of the decorations turn off from red to white. You don't want just any white but you want it to match the white in your lights on 2. You've got all of your lights plugged into 4 different plugs across the house but you don't want 4 timers that you have to synchronize.

All of this is easily done with home automation. You can setup smart plugs for all of your lighting without hiring an electrician and minimize extension cords and power strips while doing it. With home automation, you can set up scenes that control all of your different lights and the brightness and color of them. You can use the location of your phone or a family member's phone to automatically control your lights when anyone gets home. You can schedule the time of each scene or individual lights easily from your phone. The possibilities are almost endless!

Indoor lighting

Similarly, you have decorations inside your home but you want to control them separately from the outdoor lights.

The setup

1. Christmas tree in the front window

2. Christmas lights/garland on the mantle in the living room

3. Christmas lights/garland on the stairs handrail

4. Christmas trees in the living room

5. Colored wall washing lighting in the living room

6. Nativity scene in the dining room

When your Christmas tree in the front window is on, you want everyone driving by to see it through the windows. You want your blinds on your windows to open and close depending on if your tree lights are on. When you get home, you want all of your indoor lights to come on but you want them off if you're gone. You want your colored lighting (5) to be a red and green when all of the Christmas lights are on but a different color the rest of the time or turned off. All of the Christmas lights in your living room are too bright when you are watching TV, so you want them to dim or turn off while the TV is on. When you get ready to go to bed, you want all of the Christmas lights to turn off but your lights (5) need to change to a night light color and brightness. You want your colored lights (5) to change colors periodically but using a certain color palette.

You guessed it! This is all very easily done and without spending a fortune using home automation. It can all be changed using your voice, phone, light switches, remotes or waving your phone over a certain spot in the house (sort of like paying with your phone at a store). You don't even need to be home to control all of your lighting and you don't need a PhD to do it either.

Casa Connected can take care of setting up whatever your situation calls for. We can set you up however you prefer and you don't need to break the bank to do it. One of the best parts of automating your holiday decorations is that you can use most of the smart devices controlling your holiday lights throughout the rest of the year for other uses!

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