How to Control Your Home with your Cell Phone

How to Control Your Home with your Cell Phone
Home automation is still evolving, and getting it to work requires knowledge of both household electrical wiring and computer networking. But once everything is hooked up correctly, it can change the way you interact with your home. We show you how you can use your smart phone as a remote control for your lights, heat and security in your home. By Glenn Derene Published on: January 30, 2009

Home auto­mation allows you to preprogram and save multiple settings for various systems around your house (sprinklers, climate control, outdoor lighting and others), then log in and control them through a PC or cellphone. (Illustration by Gabriel Silveira)

Home automation exists in the curious realm where screwdrivers and drywall meet PCs and routers. The cat­egory is still evolving—there are multiple, incompatible standards—and getting this stuff to work requires knowledge of both household electrical wiring and computer networking, but once everything is hooked up correctly, it can change the way you interact with your home.

Last month, I wrote about installing Insteon networked lighting in my home, which allowed me to link up switches and outlets throughout my house regardless of which branch circuit they were on.

The Insteon system works by sending data signals over radio frequency (RF) waves and your home’s power lines. As each device receives a signal, it rebroadcasts it, creating a mesh network that bounces commands instantly from one end of the house to the other. It’s an effective system for connecting lighting switches and loads without extra wiring, but it also forms the basis for a more sophisticated home automation network.

Meshed Networks

Insteon’s SmartLinc bridges the home automation network with your local area network’s Wi-Fi router (left) via an Ethernet cable. The SmartLinc serves up a Web page interface (right) for programming and controlling all of your home-control devices from a PC or cellphone. (Photograph by Brad DeCecco)

Home automation is a broad and even somewhat vague concept. And plenty of companies sell systems that do everything from basic lighting control to full integration of home entertainment systems, motorized window blinds, climate control and home security. Many of these “whole home automation” systems from companies such as HAI and Crestron are geared toward the installer market and can cost many thousands of dollars. Other systems, such as SmartLabs’ Insteon and the competing Z-Wave system, tend to be more flexible and aimed at DIYers.

Obviously, since I had already outfitted my house with Insteon’s lighting controls, it made sense to build upon that system. The first step was to integrate my networked lighting into my home’s data network. Insteon has a variety of different network interfaces, but I went with the $120 SmartLinc controller. The SmartLinc serves up its own Web page on your home network, allowing you to control your system from a browser window on any computer in the house, or via cellphones with Wi-Fi capability.

Installation is simple: Just plug the SmartLinc into a wall outlet, then connect it to your Wi-Fi router via an Ether­net cable. The Web interface allows you to set up virtual On/Off switches for any Insteon controller.

More advanced users can even set up control of their home systems from outside the home network. By enabling “port forwarding” on your household router, you can access and control your systems from anywhere with Internet service.

Remote Climate Control

To integrate climate control with a home automation network, upgrade to a thermostat (left) that can interface with a compatible RF transceiver. (Photograph by Brad DeCecco)

Once the Insteon system was linked into my router, I was able to expand automation to other home systems such as climate control. If my wife and I decided to go out for dinner directly from work, I could log into the SmartLinc from my iPhone and change my thermostat’s program—no need to heat the house when no one’s there.

Hooking up that system was a bit more complicated and expensive than I anticipated. To use Insteon’s RF-based thermostat adapter ($100), I needed to replace my existing Honeywell digital thermostat with a compatible Venstar T1800 thermostat ($95). I also needed a two-pack of plug-in RF Access Points ($70) to link the thermostat with the SmartLinc. As I discovered during my previous lighting installation, the toughest part of swapping in Insteon equipment is deciphering the wiring of your existing system.

It took me 2 hours of experimentation and three calls to an Insteon rep to get my Venstar thermostat installed correctly. But after that, hooking it into the SmartLinc’s Web interface took only a minute or so—such is the gulf between my technological and household electrical faculties.

As I complete each new home automation project, my ambitions for the system grow. And there is a surprising array of Insteon equipment available to link into your network, from sprinkler controls to outdoor lighting to automatic pet-feeding systems. Sure, this sort of remote household micromanagement can get ridiculous, but ask yourself, which is worse karmically: Interrupting dinner with the family to check e-mail on a BlackBerry, or pausing for a moment at the office to water your lawn with your iPhone?