CRESTRON HOME IS YOUR DIGITAL CONCIERGE WHILE YOU’RE AWAY

Safeguarding Your Peace of Mind

If your holiday plans include a few weeks away from home, Crestron Home will set your mind at ease while you’re away.  Whether your plans involve a trip to Vermont to visit Granny and indulge in spiced maple syrup and romps in the snow, or to work on your winter tan in the Cayman Islands, your faithful high-tech watchdog will be on duty 24/7.

As long as you have cell phone service and the Crestron Home app, you’ll be able to check on the status of your home at any time of day or night and receive immediate alerts if any unexpected activity occurs.

CREATE THE ILLUSION OF NORMALCY

Are you concerned that would-be thieves will be able to easily determine that your home is currently unoccupied?  Just think back to the “old days” when your only option was to set up electro-mechanical timers on things such as lights in order to give the appearance that someone was at home. With Crestron Home OS 4, you can easily set up various scenes that will automatically activate across your home network at the appropriate time of day during your absence, creating the illusion that normal family activities are occurring. 

In fact, if you already have numerous scenes in use that govern normal daily activities, such as “Weekday Wake-Up Call,” “Dinner is Served,” or “Goodnight,” they may be tweaked for this purpose.  Take some time with the family to brainstorm additional scenarios that will create a convincing illusion.  For example, you may want to record audio of certain activities, such as the kids playing “Twister,” or the washer and dryer running, or the dog barking, to be played across the appropriate zone of your whole-home speaker system at the appropriate time. 

Of course, the Crestron automated lighting system and motorized window treatments in your home will play a huge role in the scenes that you create to use during your absence, as will the capability to activate and deactivate music, TVs, and things such as whole-house pages and chimes summoning the family to the breakfast nook for bacon and eggs, or to the theater for a showing of “Home Alone.” 

Any thief who may be casing your home as a possible target for burglary is always seeking the easiest mark, and any home that displays signs of routine human activities will be avoided.  There’s just one caveat: according to covesmart.com, 60% of home burglaries occur between the hours of 10 AM and 3 PM – so even if your home is normally unoccupied during those hours, you will still need to set up scenes in Crestron Home that spoof some kind

of activity.  After all, the kids would be on holiday break from school and could very well be at home with a sitter or relative even if the parents are working a normal schedule.

EASY BUT SECURE ACCESS FOR THOSE WHO NEED IT

If you need to allow certain people, such as a housekeeper or pet sitter, to have access to your home while you’re gone, Yale smart locks or an ekey biometric access system, in conjunction with a video doorbell, such as DoorBird or 2N, can be integrated into Crestron Home for that purpose.  You can either provide a personal access code for each person to key into the lock (while at the same time receiving a notification on your phone of the nature of the activity) or you can choose to receive a video notification on your phone, allowing you to see and greet  the visitor as you unlock the door for them.

TOTAL SURVEILLANCE FOR TOTAL SECURITY                                                                                                 

Obviously, surveillance camera systems (such as those made by IC Realtime), microphones, motion detectors, and automatically activated Crestron lighting, both inside and outside your home, are an essential element of home security, especially for theft deterrence, while you’re out of town.  Just the sight of active security cameras on the exterior of your home is enough to deter all but the most sophisticated thieves.  But if they dare to step foot on your property, the integration of all of these smart devices into Crestron Home, along with a state-of-the-art alarm system, will set into motion the sudden illumination of floodlights, audio/visual recording of the perpetrator, and simultaneous notification of local law enforcement authorities via IP and yourself via your smartphone.

In addition, security cameras and microphones on the interior of the home will allow you the extra perk of monitoring the activities of your house pets, along with any human to whom you have granted access privileges.

NETWORK SECURITY ASSURANCE

If you’re concerned that hackers may be able to gain access to your Crestron Home network and disable it, you can rest assured that it is highly unlikely to happen due to Crestron’s rigorous network security standards.  Due to their original work with government entities in automating conference room environments, their network security standards have had to be of the highest caliber, and those same standards have been carried over into the home automation side of their business.

Rigorous security testing is performed on each smart device as it is added to your smart home network, and according to Crestron, “A rigorous testing process is in place once the software/firmware is compiled and loaded into systems. Each night, the latest code is built and automated tests are run to ensure system stability. Included in these tests are standard network scanning tools to ensure there are no unauthorized ports, etc. which have been open.”

AVE CARE PROVIDES ADDED PEACE OF MIND

As a subscriber to our touchless support service, AVE Care, you can further add to your peace of mind on a daily basis, whether it be while in town or out. 

Thanks to recent advancements in remote monitoring technology, we now have the capability to provide around 80% of crucial updates and problem resolution actions directly from our office. We can monitor your home network and all connected technologies 24 hours a day, 7 days a week through a secure connection, activating immediate software/firmware updates and detecting and fixing problems as they occur. In fact, your smart devices will even have the capability to notify us when they are having an issue. 

We launched AVE Care in October 2023, just in time to offer you another important option to safeguard your peace of mind going into the holiday season.  If you want to subscribe or receive more information about it, please contact our office during normal business hours.

Got questions?  AV Enthusiast has the answers! 

Please call us at 256-882-5081. 

The AV Enthusiast showroom is located at 514 Madison Street in Huntsville, Alabama.  Our office hours are Monday – Friday from 9 AM to 5 PM and Saturday from 10 AM to 3 PM.