Technology: Boosting Your Home's IQ

Manufacturers agree on standards for creating the smart house

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So far, only a few thousand U.S. homes are automated, but the number could rise rapidly. Some 700 smart homes are the work of Unity Systems, the Redwood City, Calif., company that boosted the IQ of McCovey's house. Unity sells Home Managers that can be geared to any climate or life-style, whether it means melting the snow off the porches of Connecticut mansions or heating hot tubs in California villas. Gail and Drew Arvay of Cupertino, Calif., rely on a Unity system to run their household while they pursue dual careers. Both of their school-age children and all their regular service people have been issued special pass codes that unlock the doors, as the computer records to the minute everybody's comings and goings. Even the Arvays' two-year-old niece Jennifer is served by the system. Whenever she toddles too close to the pool, a motion detector sets off an alarm that can be heard throughout the house.

So far, these features have not come cheap, except in Japan. A U.S. homeowner who wanted automated control over an entire house had to have it custom wired by Unity or one of a handful of competing firms such as Hypertek in Whitehouse, N.J. These systems start at about $6,000 and go up quickly; the Arvays paid $22,000 for theirs.

But when appliances incorporating the CEBus standard begin to appear later this year, homeowners will be able to build their own home-automation systems at a fraction of the previous cost. Several manufacturers, including Texas Instruments, CyberLynx and AISI, have announced plans to shrink the CEBus electronics into a chip that can be embedded at the factory into everything from air conditioners to toaster ovens. Says Les Larsen, president of Boulder- based CyberLynx: "This will allow homeowners to control their environment to a degree not possible before."

CEBus systems use a house's existing wiring to control appliances. For example, a homeowner might plug a CEBus-compatible microwave oven into a wall socket in the kitchen. Then he or she could set the oven temperature and its start and stop time by using a CEBus controller. That could be a telephone linked to the house's electrical system, a home computer plugged into a wall socket or a remote hand-held controller that beams infrared rays to an outlet. Last week Bell Atlantic announced plans to test a new system that uses standard phones to control a wide variety of household functions.

There are even more ambitious plans in the works. In a project called Smart House, an offshoot of the National Association of Home Builders is developing a revolutionary wiring system that would supply not only AC power but also telephone, audio, video and high-speed data signals to every electrical outlet in the house. The wiring would enable homeowners to plug anything from a telephone to a waffle iron into one of the new outlets, and the socket would determine whether to deliver a dial tone or 120 volts.

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