Get Your Smart Home Ready to Host This Holiday Season

A Quick Checklist to Help You Prep for Your Guests 

You've been cooking all day, and the table looks great. Then the guests arrive, and the living room and kitchen heat up fast. You spend half the evening slipping off to fiddle with the thermostat. The playlist you started in the kitchen doesn't carry into the dining room, so everyone sits down to silence, and you're back at your phone trying to fix it. Hosting is stressful enough without your own house working against you.

A short systems check before Thanksgiving weekend, well ahead of the December rush, fixes these problems while you still have time. A well-designed smart home can handle a full house without you manning the controls all evening. Here are four areas to check, with clear examples of what you get from each.

Light the Day the Way You Want 

Your lighting can move through the evening with you. An arrival scene lights the entry and the path from the driveway, which matters in November when it is dark before most guests arrive. A dinner scene warms and dims the dining room. A cleanup scene brings every fixture to full brightness when the last guest leaves.

Test each scene now, at the time of day you will use it. For example, with Ketra fixtures, the dinner scene can settle into a candlelight-like warm white. You get a room that feels right for the meal that you’ll be able to pull up the second guests arrive. Our look at intelligent lighting control covers how these scenes are built.

Keep Your Guests Comfortable in Every Room

Twenty guests add a lot of body heat, and the main floor warms up quickly. When we set up your system, we built climate zones into it, so the main floor and the bedrooms each run at their own temperature. A Hosting preset in Control4's climate control can cool the main floor before people arrive while the bedrooms stay where they are. Presets run on a schedule or with a couple of taps on a touchscreen or the app.

Before the party, check that your settings are still the ones you want. Schedules and presets can change over a year of use. Run through your scenes to confirm each one still works as planned. You get a comfortable main floor for the party, and one tap returns everything to normal afterward.

Let the Music Suit Every Room

When we installed your multi-room audio, we gave you the ability to control volume by zones. So, the dining table can stay quiet enough for conversation while the kitchen gets a little more bass. Before guests arrive, test a playlist in each room, and play around with volume levels to find out what feels right for each zone. 

If your system uses invisible speakers, they sit behind the wall or ceiling finish, so a formal dining room looks the way your designer intended. If your dinner scene includes music, run it once to confirm the playlist starts in the right rooms when you sit down to eat. You get music in every room and no speakers in sight. 

Keep Every Guest's Device Online

When guests arrive, they bring an added load to your network with their phones, tablets, and smart watches. That gets added to the streaming video, cameras, and speakers your home already runs. We create enterprise-grade networks to help you handle the added load without any hiccups. 

If we set up a guest network for you, connect a phone to it, and confirm it works. It keeps visitors' devices off the network that runs your lights and locks. Because our designers document each project, we already know how your network is set up. If you are on one of our remote monitoring plans, we can check it from here before the party. You get video calls that stay connected and streams that do not stall.

Ready When the Doorbell Rings

Contact our team, and we will review the lighting, climate, audio, and network in your Ottawa or Gatineau home, then help you decide which fixes are worth doing now and which can wait for the new year. That way, you can spend the evening with your guests, not messing with the technology.