Project Spotlight: Future-Proof Home
A busy Financial Executive has designed a beautiful dream home in a rural enclave just a brief commute from downtown Toronto. The home was custom-designed for the couple with their two young children, and features an integrated living area for the homeowner’s parents. This home contains a highly integrated automation and entertainment system, developed over a 2-year period via a unique partnership between the tech-savvy homeowner and TriVista Smart Homes of Toronto. TriVista designed and delivered a sophisticated smart security system including video surveillance, tightly integrated with a home automation platform based on Control4. The Homeowner designed the underlying communications infrastructure and selected Audio/Video equipment to suit the family’s expectations, while working closely with TriVista on overall system design. This partnership has yielded a highly automated home with spectacular entertainment capabilities, with more to come in the future.
Easy for the Residents
“With three generations living in this home, everything has to be one-button simple to operate,” says Bill Toms, Project Manager at TriVista. “There is a great deal of complicated technology at work here, but the complexity is all hidden from the occupants. Everything the family members need to do with the various home systems is brought together in the Control4 menu, on four wall-mounted 7-inch touchscreens and one 10-inch wireless portable touchscreen”. Control4`s onscreen Director menu appears on all of the home’s 16 flat-screen TVs for simple, consistent control in any room.
A Control4 HC1000 functions as the master home controller. A separate HC 500 controller manages storage and physical relays, and two HC 300s are used to manage I/R control of the AV equipment. Video Surveillance of the grounds and entrances are provided by eight AXIS IP cameras, with 24/7 recording, all accessible on any of the 16 TVs or five Control4 touchscreens. 50 lighting zones can be easily controlled by in-wall touchscreens and 6-button keypads in strategic locations throughout the home. A six-zone OnQ intercom and teledoor remote driveway gate control allows the homeowners to readily assess and greet visitors.
High-Quality Entertainment
The family enjoys fingertip access to 1,400 stored movies on any of 16 zones of video. The main family room features a 92-inch drop-down projection screen with full 7.1 surround sound. Four other rooms utilize 5.1 surround sound for a superior TV/movie experience. Twenty four zones of premium-quality POLK speakers means the family can enjoy rich music in nearly every room, including the indoor pool.
Major Infrastructure
The 2-level home is quite spread out over 10,000 feet, and the physical distance of cabling runs presented a particular challenge for high-definition TV distribution. TriVista installed 60 active Balun pairs on Cat5e cable runs, so HDTV and premium audio is available in nearly every room. The 1,400 movies are stored on 16 terabytes of NAS storage, managed by five NETGEAR EVA9150 media streaming servers. Five cable TV boxes and several home theatre receivers are shared among the 16 video zones by using two Key Digital 8X8 video matrix switchers. All this equipment resides in six racks in a specially built room for electronics infrastructure. According to Toms ”Distribution is the key to this project. The distances exceeded normal allowable cable run limits, and the homeowner wanted high definition TV in a lot of different rooms, with many different shared sources. The underlying infrastructure had to be quite strong in order to meet their needs for the foreseeable future.”
A Bright Future
The homeowner is not done yet! A home theatre, shared gaming, and possibly motorized shades are all on the drawing board, to be implemented on the existing Control4 platform in this fully future-proofed home.
