Pairing Eco Smart Home Pros with Your Electrical Team for a Smarter Outcome

Here’s Why Working with an Electrician is Important

We here at Eco Smart Home Pros always recommend working with an electrician because electricians know all about high voltage power and proper installation of power in a home or business.

Since we are not electricians, we work closely with them on a variety of projects such as smart light switches, ceiling fans, lighting fixtures, etc. This allows them to come in and install the necessary products without needing to work through the decision-making, ordering, shipping, and delivery stages. It also allows them to handle their area of expertise in a timely fashion, with no additional expense or hassle. 

Working with a Smart Tech Integrator is Also Important

While your electrical team may know all the ins and outs of high voltage, it’s still important to work with an integrator who can get the smart technology you want installed correctly and seamlessly integrated into your home so it can all interact properly for uninhibited control. 

There are some nuances that come with powering smart technology that is important to fully understand.

For example, running low voltage wiring parallel to high voltage power can cause interference in speaker systems and cause the speakers to emit strange, static noise. This type of wiring setup can also slow down your network, since the high voltage wiring can disrupt the signals coming through the low voltage wiring. 

In order to combat this, Eco Smart Home Pros will run our wires at least 12 inches or more away from those high voltage wires, and in situations where they do have to cross, we will run it perpendicularly and have them meet as few times as possible to avoid the possibility of interference when on. 

Learn How to Leverage the Technology Firsthand

Another reason it’s crucial to utilize a smart home technology integrator like Eco Smart Home Pros is because it’s just as important to learn how to leverage the technology as it is to select the right type of smart tech for your home or business. 

It’s only natural to want to learn exactly how to optimize the use of this new technology, but we rarely see many contractors or builders taking that extra time to show their clients how to best use their new equipment. In fact, it’s not uncommon to see an HVAC company install a new smart thermostat and forget to leave the instruction manual behind! 

Eco Smart Home Pros takes pride in spending that extra time helping our clients to get comfortable in using their new technology, and answering any questions that come up along the way. Plus, we offer membership support plans that enable us to help our clients remotely, so they can call us anytime and we can talk them through the steps. And, of course, we’ll always leave the original instruction manuals behind for any device we install, just in case you want to see things for yourself!

Avoid Last Minute Surprises

More and more often, we are starting to see developers who don’t include the ability for low voltage wiring in new homes and office spaces, leaving their inhabitants totally reliant on WiFi. And while this may work in a few instances, WiFi is not the optimum solution for businesses or homes that require large amounts of data — such as file servers, point of sale devices, 4K movie streaming services, gaming solutions, etc. With so many homes already being built without cable and ethernet options, we’re seeing subpar service for television, gaming, streaming, and more — leading to lots of frustration down the road for these clients; or they are forced to spend more money to remodel their home with the wiring they truly needed.

Instead, hardwired devices offer the most reliable service, but they require low voltage wiring capabilities. Eco Smart Home Pros knows what questions to ask so that we can help your contractor or builder construct your home or office space with the proper wiring already in place to avoid disruptions down the road. And, it’s always cheaper to wire things before the drywall goes up — so work proactively to make these decisions before that stage of the build has begun!

We will talk through things with our clients while the space is in the construction phase to design exactly where we will run coaxial cable, ethernet, fiber, speaker wiring, lighting, shades, and camera cables to their individual locations, and hide these wires behind the wall for future installation potential. This then allows the infrastructure to be in place in case the client decides they want to utilize it in the future — or if future home buyers want to add to it and increase the home’s overall value. 

Slow and Steady Wins the Race

Not all work is good work…and unfortunately, there can be situations in which a networking company tries to take a shortcut to make the installation process faster, producing a subpar experience for their client that needs to be readdressed down the road. 

For example, there can be situations where the company tries meshing wireless access points together rather than hardwiring them. This can lead to disaster: all it takes is for one of these access points to fail for all the others that are wirelessly paired to disconnect, too. 

When you create a network, you want to decrease the number of failure points. In an ideal setting, you want to isolate each device so that if it goes down it does not impact the others around it. 

Let’s Talk About Your Next Project

As your trusted West Michigan and Upper Peninsula smart home integration team for more than thirty years, Eco Smart Home Pros wants to help answer all of your questions about smart home installation and integration. Let us work together with our electrical team partners to create a specially-designed custom approach to your build that will ensure all of your smart systems will work well together and can be easily and remotely managed from your smart devices. 

Work with our certified programmers, installers, and computer networking specialists to create the perfect finished space in your new home or office – so you can work smarter, not necessarily harder, to see the results that matter. Send us a quick message and let’s get started.

Are You An Electrician?

Are you looking to expand your offerings to your clients? We can work alongside you to offer low voltage solutions and smart building controls. We are able to be a subcontractor for your business and we can handle all of the smart home solutions and the follow-up support that comes with those sales, so that you can focus on your business. Learn more about our partner program here.