The best Harmony replacement at CEDIA doesn't have a price tag
The Edge Button Pack. About 100 caps, and the installer picks which ones go in the remote. Every year I go to CEDIA Expo, and every year there are tables...
The ultra short throw that actually impressed me at CEDIA
4 sources on one screen at the same time. The projector doing it is the black slab on the credenza. I was at CEDIA Expo in Denver recently, and the projector...
The CEDIA demo that changed my mind
The shootout. Same content, side by side, and the difference wasn't subtle. My own home theater has doubled as our company's demo theater for years, which...
Wired wrong, and nobody tested it
Two runs to this plate. One of them is dead behind the drywall. A family member of mine bought an expensive new-construction house in West Virginia from a...
We offered free doorbell installs. It didn't work the way we thought.
Two wires, sometimes. The rest of the time it's a transformer, a chime converter, and an afternoon. Early on, we offered free video doorbell installs on our...
The room should disappear
Dark walls, dark ceiling, dark floor. The room gets out of the way. The most common mistake I see in home theater design isn't a gear choice. It's light...
The SofaBaton workaround nobody asked for
The route that didn't exist, and the one that did. We sold a customer a SofaBaton X2 remote and a set of Lutron Caseta light switches, 2 products we'd used...
The math on 10 TV mounts a day
Most of them take 2 people. That is the whole problem with the math. We started TV mounting at $150 a job, specifically to undercut what the big box stores...
What your alarm accounts are actually worth
The part that generates the monthly bill. Not the part that makes it an asset. The industry math on this is well known: a recurring monitoring account is...
What happens to your smart home when the company disappears
I've written twice now about gear that stopped doing what the buyer thought they paid for. The Ring doorbell that turns into a chime on day 31. The Harmony...
What I actually tell people to buy when they ask about home security
The keypad people are still mad at, 20 years later. I get asked this at cookouts. Somebody finds out what I do, and the question is always some version of...
What the dashboard couldn't show me
Rough-in, before drywall. This is where the answers actually were. For just under 5 years, I was a product manager on the home automation team at Alarm.com —...
Getting licensed was a nightmare
Pulling structured cabling sounds like one job. It is not one set of rules. Before I go further: everything below is what I ran into, in the places I was...
The demo that sold itself
The basement now. We got called in on this job by an interior designer. She was working on a family's living room and needed someone to supply and mount a...
Logitech Harmony is discontinued, and there's no real replacement
Still on duty. May 2023. A lot of our business at Bright Wire is ripping out expensive, dealer-locked automation platforms. Savant, Crestron, Control4 —...