Before you start on your smart home automation journey, it’s essential to establish priorities. Nobody understands your lifestyle quite like you do. Putting your preferences in order of importance will make your smart home experience better right from the start.

Is whole-house music at the top of your list? Maybe a smart lighting system that can automatically turn off lights when the room is unoccupied is most important to you. What about security? Or an intercom? All of these things and more are part of today’s smart home. When you can clearly identify the results you’re trying to achieve, it will make it much easier to select the most important home automation product(s) to buy first.

Today’s smart home systems aren’t an all or nothing venture, they’re entirely modular. A homeowner can start in one room and expand the system as their budget or needs change.

A Seamless Home Automation Experience

There are thousands of smart home products on the market today. Most of them have an undeniable advantage over their predecessors. Thermostats look like something from the future, and doorbells allow you to answer the door from across the country, even lighting that will turn on when you walk into the room. The electronic wizardry of these products can tempt a mere mortal to buy these gadgets and gizmos because of the name on the front, or how they look. It’s the definition of the IoT (Internet of Things).

The main problem with this approach is that each product is a stand-alone device that requires its proprietary app that may be easy or difficult to learn. This scenario might be fine for a homeowner that has one or two devices installed, but when you’re connecting multiple rooms of home automation, you might be making your life more difficult.

What’s the solution? A Home Automation System. A home automation system offers a level of integration that the simple IoT devices lack, giving a homeowner the ability to control their entire home from one ecosystem or app. With a home automation system, your installer adds and programs each of your devices into a single system giving you the ability to control everything from a single interface using your smartphone, tablet, even a laptop. What’s more, when all your devices are on the same system they can all work together seamlessly. For example, when the door locks the security system automatically arms.

Smart Home Expandability

The third thing you want to keep in mind when choosing a smart home solution is to select a system that is expandable now and into the future. If you’re going to add additional speakers, lights, security, can the system you choose handle it? There are already thousands of devices available, with more added every day, there’s no telling what will be the next big thing, but you want to make sure that your system will be ready for it.