JOHANNESBURG - My wife asked me why I was speaking so softly at home. I told her I was afraid Mark Zuckerberg was listening! She laughed. I laughed. Alexa laughed. Siri laughed. Except that it isn’t really that funny.
Were you enraged by the recent announcement by one of the most popular messaging app’s new privacy policy? I was?
Do you think there is no need for another smart home gadget because Alexa already switches off the lights, dims the volume, and chooses your TV programmes? Because Siri already gives you the weather forecast and plays your favourite podcasts?
ENTER Control4
Control4, distributed by Homemation in South Africa, gives you comprehensive control of your home and garage in one convenient place. “We need to think and be concerned about the degree of privacy in our homes and not just our communications. There is no place like home. Home is our sanctuary, our safe place, our private place. Home is the place where we can just be. Especially now, in lockdown, during the Covid-19 pandemic,” the company’s spokesmen say.
Control4 consolidates devices from your whole house into a single screen giving you the one-stop control over all air-conditioning, security systems, garage doors, smart locks and, of course, your entertainment system. The software interacts with tens of thousands of devices from hundreds of brands.
Voice assistants, smart locks, cameras and entrance controls allow you to reduce contact with products that may have been touched by others. Staying safe and in control is now easier than ever before.
One Button
No more worrying about if you turned the lights (or oven) off when you left the house. Or if you closed the garage door. Instead, a simple button press can do that for you as you depart, as well as arming your home alarm and even closing the curtains.
On your return, your home or garage welcomes you in by turning the lights on, playing chilled music and setting the house to the perfect temperature. While home, your fixed-home-automation-devices are right where you need them from when you rise in the morning until you retire in at night. Use the fixed-touchscreen in your kitchen to easily follow a recipe or to catch up on the latest motoring news on IOL, or see who is at the door, a handheld remote control for watching TV and lighting keypads for bedtime.
Control4 even allows you to personalise and control capabilities that make your smart home as unique as your personal fingerprint – from checking specific rooms to seeing the whole home at a glance. Behind the scenes it has built-in backups for when systems fail which includes power conditioning and surge protection to ensure peak performance.
How Control4 home automation system is a solid solution for car collector garages:
Garage and gate control
As part of a whole home automation solution, Control4 can control motorised solutions such as garage doors and perimeter gates for access to and from the areas where the cars are kept. Taking this to a bit more of an extreme collector, the integration could also be made to car lift systems or turntables where the car can be displayed.
Lighting control
Control4 offers complete lighting control allowing car collectors to light the entire garage or highlight various cars within their collection. With a bit of creativity it is also possible to create fun experiences with lighting, to highlight the garage, pathway lighting or even play with colours for one’s favourite car/s.
Audio Visual
Control4 makes it easy to play one’s favourite music and car related movies in a multi-media car garage to fill the senses with more than just that new car smell and petrol.
HVAC
For really serious car collectors who want to keep their cars in temperature and humidity controlled spaces, Control4 can manage all aspects of the HVAC and air extraction systems, and can also be managed by means of carbon dioxide sensors to do this automatically of course.
For more information, you can contact Homemation.
IOL MOTORING