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New Features and Refinements Keep the System State-of-the-Art

In the ever-evolving world of home automation, staying ahead of technological advancements is crucial. For residents of Bountiful, the latest update from Control4—a company headquartered right here in Utah—brings a suite of exciting enhancements that redefine convenience and control. As your trusted Control4 Dealer, Show and Tell AV is excited to introduce the new OS 3.4 update, a leap forward in smart home technology. This update not only elevates the functionality of this high-end system but also underscores our commitment to delivering state-of-the-art smart home solutions. Let's dive into how these advancements can transform your home automation experience.

Hint: It’s Not about Your Router

This blog is the third installment this month of our three-part series on home networks and connectivity. In the first, we discussed how popular consumer solutions like mesh networks and routers might not be the panacea that the marketing might imply. In the second part, we talked about our approach to connection speed and stability, particularly through the judiciousness of cabling and commercial-level components. 

In this last installment, we'll talk about Wi-Fi performance and how to maximize it in your Park City, UT home. Wi-Fi is the first thing practically anyone notices if it's slow, won't connect, or drops. Unlike some, we look at Wi-Fi as "last mile" connectivity. Not the last mile in terms of the internet connection into your home, but the last resort for connections. As we noted in the second part of this series, if it can be connected by cable, we do it. You'll get more stable connections, better speeds, and decrease the load on the devices that really need Wi-Fi, improving overall network performance. 

So, how do we do Wi-FI for home network installations? Keep reading below!

SEE ALSO: Home Networking Part 2: What Makes a Strong Home Network? 

Separate Components

If you are familiar with audio, you might know that audiophiles who demand high performance prefer separate components versus all-in-one systems. For example, it might be a separate phono amp for a turntable and separate preamp and amplifiers for a two-channel hi-fi setup. Typical home network solutions package everything into the router, including a switch for wired connections, Wi-Fi radios for wireless networking, and router and firewall software. Much like in audio, separating these components into better individual ones can yield higher performance. Also, similar to audio, you tend to find these separates as higher-end, pro-level equipment. 

Illuminate your Bountiful, Utah, home with automation and lighting control!

Lighting technology has come a long way since Lutron entered the market by perfecting the first home dimmer switch in 1959, and innovative companies like Lutron and Control4 have been improving luxury homes ever since with lighting control. Residential customers have reported benefits like mood improvements, better sleep, more energy, and more, incrementally boosting lighting control’s popularity over the last few decades.

Home lighting automation offers a variety of practical benefits that you will use every day, and the best part is that you can benefit from every one of them just by living in your Utah home! Learn why home lighting automation will be a benefit to your health, productivity, convenience and more by reading below.

What to Know About the Latest Trend in Home Lighting Control

You may have heard about smart lighting and lighting control systems. You might think it is a non-essential luxury. Perhaps it’s not a must-have feature, but when you look at the benefits of smart lighting, they make absolute sense. Think about it this way – your home has a dishwasher, right? It is not an absolute necessity, but you might be hard-pressed to think about giving it up and washing all your dishes manually.

Lighting control has incredible benefits in convenience, efficiency, and aesthetics. But with advances in the latest types of LED lighting, there’s another unexpected one – wellness. A new trend in home design and technology is Biophilic design. Biophilia, according to Webster’s dictionary, means “a hypothetical human tendency to interact or be closely associated with other forms of life and nature.” Applied to light, it means employing new technology to make artificial light more natural, allowing us to bring a little more of nature indoors.

You might ask at this point: Don't we get plenty of natural sunlight in Bountiful and all over Utah? Perhaps, but in our modern lives, we spend a considerable part of our lives indoors. And with LED tunable lighting technology, we can make the indoors feel a bit more natural.

It’s Not All About Convenience

You might remember a few things that weren't as easy as they are today if you are of a certain age. Automobiles are a great example. Did you learn to drive with a manual transmission? Do you remember the thrill of learning to launch the car on a hill with the clutch and try not to go backward? Or how about a car without power steering? No need for weight training if you learned to parallel park muscling a heavy steering wheel.

When we talk about motorized shades, your first thought might be, "why do they need motors?" In cars, we've gone far beyond those manual days toward machines that almost drive themselves. There are many good reasons why adding power to motorized shades goes beyond the convenience factor, although it's hard to deny the convenience.

In this blog, we'll continue to make the case why motorized shades are an excellent investment for your Bountiful, UT home. Keep reading, and don't be surprised when one day, manual windows shades will be as rare as manual steering is in cars today. 

Cut Through Hype and Narrow Down What’s Important to You

When it comes to evaluating technology products, you will encounter many technical terms, and often, much-hyped features. The trouble is, technology products tend to have lots of features, and the reality may be that only a few of those will make a difference. As you look into smart security systems, you will find this to be the case.

How do you figure out what’s important to you? If you are primarily concerned with surveillance for your home and property, we’d like to point out three aspects that could make a significant difference for your usage in Bountiful, UT, and surrounding areas.

A veritable host of smart security systems and cameras are available from both large companies and many you have never heard of. Keep reading to learn about critical features that could make the difference for you.

New Fabrics from QMotion Celebrate Your Unique Style

Whether you’re starting fresh in a new home or renovating your abode, decorating your interiors is an important undertaking. The way you decorate your spaces not only reflects your personality, but it also has a significant impact on the way you and your guests feel within your home.

At Show & Tell AV, we partner with QMotion not only because their motorized shades are whisper-quiet and simple to control but because their breadth of fabrics and colors is also quite impressive. Homeowners in Bountiful, UT, and surrounding areas who desire smart shades that excel in style will love QMotion just as much as we do.

Earlier this year, QMotion announced four new fabric collections, adding 80 new fabrics to their offering. Featuring trend-setting colors and textures, these new fabrics perfectly complement any home interior. Get inspired by learning more about these new collections below.

A Surveillance System Installation Does More Than Deter Crime

Let’s try an exercise. Ask the next person you see why they think a home surveillance system is important. Now, was their answer “to protect homes from criminal activity” or something of the sort? We’d bet so. This answer is overwhelmingly the number one reason why homeowners believe they should invest in a surveillance system installation, and they’re right to believe so.

According to several studies, surveillance systems help reduce crime by at least 50%. But that’s not all they do. You can wring out so much more from your surveillance system to assist you in several other ways. Read below for four unique ways to maximize the potential of your surveillance system.

Motorized Drapes

While the term most applied to motorized window treatments is “shades," the styles available go far beyond these. Roller shades may very well be the most popular powered style, but there are many more to choose from. Are you more into the elegance of drapes? You can motorize those, too. Lutron, a leader in lighting control and motorized shading, offers powered drapery track systems that work for large windows and even heavy drapes. Heavy drapes can be a chore to open and close manually, so power makes them much more convenient to let the light in when you want it and keep it out when you don’t. Styles include classic pinch pleat and ripplefold, and there’s even an innovative vertical system that can lift drapes up instead of opening horizontally to expose Bountiful, Utah’s beautiful views.

Blackout Shades

Blackout shades and drapes are popular for bedrooms and living areas or game rooms that double as home theaters. Did you know you can have double motorized shades for those rooms? When you need darkness to sleep at night or watch a movie, you can lower both the blackout shade and the decorative one. For daytime, you can filter the sun with your decorative shade only while the blackout layer is rolled up. With a wide choice of light-filtering fabrics that can fit the sun exposure for your room, you can have the perfect solution for fully utilizing natural light and having a dark room when you need it. With smart home automation, you can use schedules, sensors, and all manner of controls to position your shades exactly how you want them throughout the day.

SEE MORE: Master Natural Light in Your Home with Motorized Shades

Insulating Shades

Utah has a wide range of weather, from cold winters to fairly hot summers. If you want to give your HVAC system and your wallet a bit of a break, honeycomb shades are an excellent option for their insulating qualities. Their cell design traps warm air inside in the winter from escaping through windows and keeps your air-conditioned interiors cooler in summer. When you want to fully enjoy the view, just press a button to raise your shades and enjoy a sunset or let in warming sun on a cold winter day. Going green has never been easier.

Tensioned and Cable Guided Shades

There are some windows that you might think are hard to manage. Consider a clerestory window or skylight that lets you enjoy the light, but for two hours of every day in a season creates too much glare from the sun streaming in. Powered tensioned shades can come to the rescue. The tensioned design can handle even fully horizontal applications, and you can open and close the shade when you want or on a schedule. For angled applications, cable-guided shades keep a shade perfectly in line with the window angle. Cable-guided shades also work well where shades might be moved by airflow from ceiling fans or open windows and doors.

Command Naturally

As we mentioned in the previous blog, Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant require a certain order to commands and getting device names right. While they both have made strides in that area, even your four-year-old can process language better (they may not do your bidding, but we won’t go into that here). Josh.ai, on the other hand, has a handle on both the context of your commands and where you want to get something done. When you are in the living room and say, “lower the shades in 3 minutes,” it knows what room you are in and which motorized shades you mean.

Like your personal butler (which you won’t need anymore with Josh.ai), Josh can understand more than one thing at a time. And unlike your four-year-old, it will faithfully do what is asked. A compound directive like “dim the lights to 20%, turn the temperature to 73, and start Firefly Lane on Netflix” will be understood and executed without a puzzled look or a quizzical reply. This is voice control the way it should be.

SEE ALSO: Optimize Your Smart Home System with Remote Access

An App When You Want it

Sometimes it’s easier to manage something at the tap of a screen rather than by voice. Josh.ai has an elegant, intuitive companion app that lets you customize your smart home experience. Organized by rooms, it's easy to manage devices and functions in a room, and you can manage multiple properties too. A powerful personalization feature is profiles, where you can control how guests, kids, and visitors can manage specific parts of your smart home. Of course, Josh also integrates seamlessly with automation systems like Control4, so you can combine all your smart home functionality under one comprehensive control system. 

A Higher Intelligence – with Privacy

Josh.ai was designed as a voice control platform for home automation and not for other reasons. The company behind it does not gather information that can be used for marketing purposes. A unique feature of Josh is superior processing power built into the hardware that processes commands locally versus sending it to the cloud, creating a more secure and private approach to voice control. That power also lets Josh.ai learn your habits and do routine things for you, like lowering your shades on late afternoons in Bountiful, UT, to keep the sun's glare out – and that information stays in your home.