It’s time to talk about controlling your smart home. 

The main goal of a smart home is for it to gracefully integrate into your daily life, offering convenience and control options that simply wouldn’t be possible otherwise. Whenever our team at AV Design Consultants designs a project, we keep that in mind. With a focus on ease of use and convenience, two of the best ways to control your smart home are through a smart home touch screens and smart home remotes. 

Don’t get us wrong -- voice control is important and is only going to continue to grow as smart devices improve and can recognize even more commands. But what we’ve found is that more people prefer a combination of voice control, apps, controllers, and remotes. 

This week on our blog, we are going to look at some of the many benefits that touch screens and remotes can bring to your smart home, and how they can help bring about whole new ways of control that you may have yet to consider.

You insure your vehicles. You insure your home. These are major investments that can be costly to repair or replace. It only makes sense for you to protect yourself against potential unforeseen expenses. 

If you’ve invested in a nice audio/video or automation system for your home or business, it makes sense to protect that investment, as well. One of the most important ways to do that is with a high-quality UPS (uninterruptible power supply) and surge protection products.

As technology integrators, our team at AV Design Consultants get requests for service and support on clients’ AV systems all the time. A high number of those equipment issues and failures aren’t because of bad or defective electronics, they’re often due to electrical issues that have adversely impacted the system, either through a catastrophic surge event, power outage, or even small, persistent power issues that can degrade electronics over time. 

Fortunately, there are ways to minimize or even eliminate these issues via a well-designed, power-management system using surge protection and UPS products.

Are you looking for a home theater receiver? The good news is that you don’t have to search alone – our team members here at AV Design Consultants are always ready to help you. 

Before you give us a call, let’s take a look at what you should keep in mind when looking for a new home-theater receiver, as well as all of the benefits one can bring to your home theater. 

The way we wire and light our homes has been relatively consistent for over a century. Inefficient incandescent bulbs and high-voltage wiring has been the standard, with little meaningful advancement, until recently. As LED technology has improved in quality, aesthetic, and form factor, things have started to move away from the high-power, low-efficiency methods of lighting a home to a cleaner, greener, low-voltage standard. 

Many people might not know the difference between these two lighting systems – so this week on the blog, our experts at AV Design Consultants tackle the difference between low and high voltage systems, and look at whether we need to transport so much electrical power to the fixtures throughout our homes.