Who Is a Home Automation Specialist?

The future is now and what better way to celebrate the technology that is one day inevitably going to conquer the world than by bringing that technology into your home and life? Now it’s not very likely that a smartphone is going to become our overlord (or is it?) but until then, there are specialists in charge of keeping your smart technology in check. They are home automation specialists and they handle everything you need to turn your home into a high-tech paradise.

But the question here is who is a home automation specialist and what’s their job all about? As with most other specialists we’ve featured, home automation specialists play a pivotal role in helping you personalize your home exactly the way you want it. With smart technology making its way into various parts of our lives, naturally, it would also make sense for it to bring more convenience to our homes as well.

From automatic curtains to smart thermostats that set the temperature based on how hot or cold it is outside, there are a lot of practical applications to smart technology and a home automation technician is the professional responsible for installing and maintaining them. 

What Is a Home Automation Specialist?

The Many Responsibilities of a Home Automation Specialist

Home automation technicians specialize in recommending, purchasing, setting up, and maintaining smart technology in your home. Their main task is to develop a smart home that fits all your needs and offers some high-tech conveniences for your day-to-day tasks.

Smart home technicians are also responsible for picking out and recommending the kind of technology that you will need, finding the best and most trusted brands or models, and personalizing all the settings to fit your preferences. Home automation goes beyond the simple programming of an LED light to change colors once every two hours. There are far more complicated smart installations that require a professional touch and home automation technicians have the knowledge and experience to make all this happen. 

What Type of Jobs Does a Home Automation Specialist Do?

Home Automation Tasks You Should Rely on the Pros For

Home automation specialists work with more complicated smart home installations. Even if you don’t have much experience using smart devices, they come with a set of instructions to help you set up your smart toaster. And even if the instructions don’t help there are plenty of tech-savvy people out there who are not specialists that would have no trouble setting up the device.

Home automation is a network. The less technology you have, the simpler that network is and the easier it is to set up. For example, it’s easy to program an alarm clock to go off at a specific time and play a specific song. It’s not a complicated task since there is only one device and a few settings. A more complicated setup would be LED lights, where you will need to download an additional app on your phone. But even then you can simply use the app to program the light to go off exactly at a particular time of day, shine a specific color, and then go off on its own as well.

Smart Home Installations That Add Tons of Conveniences to Your Life

When we talk about a complicated smart home system, we mean when you want your alarm to start playing your favorite song at 8 am, the coffee maker to start brewing a few minutes before that, the news to be automatically be televised on your TV, and your floor be at a specific temperature depending on how cold it is outside. This is much harder to pull off since there are more cogs in the mechanism and the network is much more complicated than simply programming an alarm clock.

When Might You Need a Home Automation Specialist?

Home Automation Projects That Require a Pro’s Touch

In cases where you want the smart network of your house to be interconnected and pull off several tasks at once, you will need a home automation specialist to come in and handle the tech. Sure, some devices are very easy and self-explanatory to set up, but an automatic garage door, which also triggers the lights in your home, and adjusts their brightness depending on what time of day it is, can be very hard to do on your own.

So, home automation specialists are tasked with making sure that all these systems are not only functioning, but functioning in unison. Not only that, but some smart devices are harder to install than others. Screwing in a smart LED bulb into your light fixture is somewhat easy, but setting up automatic curtains or a smart thermostat is much harder to pull off.

Home Automation Specialists Have Many Important Tasks, Most of It Installing or Maintaining Home Electronics

Another very important responsibility home automation specialists have is to purchase the right kind of technology and the right brands. There are many manufacturers who produce smart devices. Some of them are genuinely good and can provide extra functionality or convenience to your home. Others are either pointless gimmicks or cheap knockoffs. It’s hard to tell the difference when you don’t have much experience in this particular field. But home automation specialists know exactly which devices to purchase that will not only work properly but serve you for years to come. 

How Much Does Hiring a Home Automation Specialist Cost?

What You Can Expect to Pay for Home Automation Installation and Maintenance

Each home installation specialist works differently. Some charge per project, so if you want a single room to be automated they will charge a set amount for that particular task. Others charge by the hour, with the national average coming to around $85 per hour. So, it really depends on who is getting the job done and how they work.

Keep in mind that this price does not include the smart devices themselves which you will have to pay for yourself, not the specialist. It would be a tremendous undertaking to calculate how much it would cost to install smart devices in your home, as this depends on what you want to be installed, the quality of the devices, as well as what rooms are going to be covered. Some homeowners may end up installing technology that is worth thousands of dollars, others may opt for more cost-effective options as they’re working with a smaller budget.

The national average cost to automate the entire house is around $1,000. While you can have plenty of hi-tech conveniences installed for this amount of money, you may not have precisely what you ask for and a few workarounds may be needed to minimize the cost. For example, some pieces of smart tech may not work in unison, so your automatic thermostat may change the temperature in your house, but it might do this completely isolated from all the other devices in your homes, such as alarm clocks, smart speakers, or the floor heating system. 

Where Do Home Automation Specialists Fit In Within a Renovation?

How Home Automation Specialists Can Help You With Your Renovation

If you are looking to update the functionality of your home and give it some technological advancements, then you definitely need to hire a home automation specialist. During renovations, when everything else is being rebuilt and reinstalled, you have the perfect opportunity to implement smart technology into your rooms.

For example, why go through the trouble of pulling out pipes and wires to install a smart tech into the HVAC system, when you can do it as the HVAC is being opened and reinstalled during the renovation? Or how about installing the light fixtures along with the smart light controller modules and having customizable lighting from the get-go?

While these may seem like totally optional additions for some people, many homeowners have found smart technology to be very beneficial and cannot imagine their homes with it. For homeowners who are looking into the future, a home automation specialist is a key player in their home renovation.

How to Choose the Best Home Automation

Tips On Finding the Best Home Automation Specialist for All Your Desired Results

As with finding any other specialist, the key to selecting the right professional for all your home automation needs is plenty of questions. You don’t want to impulse pick the first hiree you come across. You need to know as much about them and their work as possible before giving them the job.

The obvious place to start would be to ask for a portfolio of their previous work. This can either be done via photographic evidence or better yet, you can even visit their previous clients to see their portfolio in person. They may even agree to have you tag along to see how they work for one of their current clients.

But there are some questions that cannot be answered with a simple portfolio or by asking to see their previous work. What functioned well for other clients may simply not be useful to you. Everyone has different expectations from their smart technology so if you want to have your systems personalized to fit your needs and expectations, then a portfolio is not going to be enough.

Before you start interviewing any potential candidates for the job, make a few notes about exactly what you want from them. Markdown all the smart tech you want to be installed, what you want it to do, and consider making a diagram of how you want them to connect to one another. Perhaps you want the curtains to open up in the morning with the alarm clock and the morning news to turn on in your bedroom. Or maybe you want the house to heat itself exactly 5 minutes before you come home and greet you with dim lights, your favorite song already playing in the living room, and some tea being brewed in your smart kettle.

The Questions You Should Be Asking a Potential Smart Home Engineer

1. Once you have your desired smart setup written down, ask the possible hirees the following questions:
   Can you make these kinds of installations?
2. How long will it take you to install all these devices?
3. Will they function exactly how I want them to?
4. What is your price model?
5. Have you worked on similar projects before?
6. Can you tell me about your strategy for hiding the wires?
7. Are you accredited?
8. How much tech support do you offer after the installation?

This last one is very important. As advanced as modern smart technology is, things tend to go wrong very often. Be it a hardware or software issue, you need to know that if something malfunctions there is someone ready to help you get everything back to working condition. While this is another important aspect of a home automation specialists’ job, not all of the professionals may offer additional support services. So, make sure to hire someone who guarantees post-installation technical support in case of malfunctions.