As viewers of the sitcom Peep Show will recall, multiple
remote controls littering your front room aren't exactly nectar to the honeys.
Especially if you Sellotape several together before naming the dubious contraption
The Megatron. Turn-off city. With leading Cardiff company Smarta Home Automation,
however, such worries are banished to the Luddite past. But cutting down remote
control over-abundance is only the beginning: Smarta offers a whole range of
swish innovations to smoothly slide your house into the 21st century, impressing
family, friends and the ladies en route.
For the undereducated, home automation is far more tangible than its handle
may imply: to phrase things simply, it's the art of running various home entertainment
and electronic devices via remote control. Smarta provides all manner of options
to integrate home cinema, CCTV, lighting, heating and even curtains or window
blinds operated by one simple remote, with a thoughtfully designed menu that
a five-year-old could comfortably master and stacks of ingenious features.
In times of economic uncertainty, entry-level set-ups are surprisingly affordable
too, considering the advanced technology involved.
“
You can start off with a little box behind the television,” explains
Smarta's Mark Wray. “With one remote you can control your TV, satellite
box and DVD player; you’re probably looking in the region of £700-£800
as a real basic thing. The initial outlay might be a little more than paying
for an all-in-one remote control but this will do a lot more. Everything else
can be bolted on as and when you can afford it.”
'Everything else' really does cover a multitude of choices; your Sky+ box,
to massively bend a cliché, is nowhere near the limit. Home cinema has
become Smarta's most popular product range, allowing you to store an entire
DVD library on hard disk for easy browsing and handy instant access. For serious
movie buffs, a plug-in is imminent for Blu-Ray DVDs.
Similar interfaces are available for music collections and are compatible with
the online archive Rhapsody as standard, (a subscription fee applies for downloads
from their cavernous collection). And they boast a clever connection capability
for iPods. Expanding the system to link speakers and televisions in multiple
rooms is also a sage choice - indeed, the Rhapsody application enables different
music to tootle forth in more than one room simultaneously.
Where proceedings get really clever is the ability to control the whole shebang
via a touch-screen gizmo and that must-have of mobiles, the iPhone. Replicating
the touch-screen menu, the iPhone link-up allows wireless operation and a Qwerty
keyboard feature. Arrived at work only to remember you left the heating on
full blast? No problem. With an online log-in you can switch settings anywhere
that has an Internet connection. Once back at your abode, if you want to turn
the lights down low for a romantic night in or simply turn them all on at once,
nifty pre-sets allow one-touch mood settings to save time and effort.
Of course, with this much top-notch gear in your home, security is an obvious
concern. Smarta has that expertly covered as well: the system has facilities
for burglar alarm, CCTV and outside gate operation and can be programmed with
holiday settings to turn lights on and off and open and close curtains or blinds
each day while you're away. The latter is variable daily for up to two weeks
to flummox the prying eyes of any house-watching crims. Similarly, the green
brigade will be impressed with its improved energy efficiency. The 'all off'
function shuts down all connected appliances, including lights, at a solitary
click.
Flexible to the last, Smarta can install in new houses, as part of refurbishments,
or 'retro-fit' existing homes with minimal disruption, custom designed for
your specific requirements. And Mark Wray suggests that as flash as home automation
appears, it's not an elitist preserve of playboys and the moneyed. Soon, he
predicts, like previous technological developments from broadband to HD televisions,
it will become a standard household feature.
“
It's for anyone who wants simplicity and to control their whole lifestyle within
the house using a remote control,” he asserts. “In the next five
to ten years it will just be as normal as having a television.”
Smarta Home Automation
0845 643 0762
www.smartahome.co.uk
enquiries@smartahome.co.uk
Adam Kennedy
has his finger on the buttons
Switch to automatic