Blue Note A/V · Services · Automation & Control

One button is a way of living.

Everything that used to take a few minutes now takes one second, and most of it takes nothing at all. Automation is the part of the system you stop noticing, because the house does it before you think to.

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A living room with a linear fireplace and a television set flush into a paneled wall

What's involved

The house, on a schedule you set once.

Scenes, not switches

Good Morning, Welcome Home, Movie, Goodnight, Away. Each one is a dozen things that used to be done by hand, done together, from one button or from nothing at all.

One system underneath

Control4 or ELAN as the platform, with lighting, shades, audio, video, climate, cameras and the pool on it — so a scene can reach all of them, not just the ones from one brand.

Programmed to the household

The scene is only as good as the conversation before it. We ask how the morning actually goes, who is up first, which door you come in, and we write the house to that.

Good Morning, written out

At the hour you chose, a low light comes on in the primary bedroom and ramps up over fifteen minutes, so nobody is woken by a switch. A path of light leads downstairs to the coffee bar. The shades begin to open with the scene, letting the daylight in gradually rather than all at once. The news comes on in the office, the water features on the pool start, and the first cup is on the veranda with the fountains running. Nobody touched anything. That is one scene, and it is the one that sells the rest.

Welcome Home, and the others

Welcome Home reads the garage door or the front door and brings up the lights on the way in, disarms what should be disarmed, and puts the music where you are about to be. Movie dims the room, drops the shades and sets the theater in one press. Goodnight walks the house for you — every light, every shade, the locks, the thermostat — and leaves a path to the bedroom. Away makes the house look lived in and tells you if anything opens that should not.

Why it has to be one system

A scene can only reach what is on the system. Lighting from one app, shades from another and audio from a third means Good Morning is three buttons and a subscription each, which is not automation, it is a phone full of remotes. Control4 and ELAN exist to put every subsystem on one platform, and the discipline is in the design: choosing hardware that will take instruction from the processor, and wiring it so that it does.

The interface is the last thing we design

Keypads by the doors with three or four engraved buttons, a handheld remote in the rooms that watch television, the app for everything else and for when you are not home. Most days a household touches one button in the morning and one at night. If they are reaching for the app to run the house, the programming is wrong, and we fix the programming.

It keeps working when the internet does not

Scenes, schedules and keypads run on the processor in the house, not in the cloud. An outage takes away the app from the driveway and voice control; it does not take away Good Morning. What needs the cloud is named as such before anyone signs anything.

Questions we get asked

Automation & Control: the questions clients ask us first.

Do we have to use voice?

No. Voice is one way in, and some households never use it. Keypads, the remote, schedules and sensors do most of the work; voice is there for the hands-full moment if you want it.

Can it be added to an existing house?

Yes, to the degree the existing systems can be controlled. Lighting, shades, audio and climate usually can. Where they cannot, we tell you what would have to change and what it would cost, and you decide how far to go.

Control4 or ELAN?

Both are platforms we are certified on and both do this well. The choice comes down to the house, the interfaces the household prefers and what is already installed. We will recommend one and say why.

Who changes the scenes when life changes?

You can, for the everyday adjustments — times, brightness, which rooms. For anything structural, an Encore plan includes the programming changes, and a call handles most of them the same day.

What does it need to stay reliable?

A network built for it, which is why networking is a service of ours and not an afterthought, and firmware kept current, which is what Monthly firmware care on every Encore plan is for.

What we use