Determining the Scenes for your Keypad
Customising your keypads enables you to simply press one button and control multiple devices in your home simultaneously and is one of the most appealing features of any integrated smart home.
By simply touching one button you can create a ‘scene’ for example, an evening scene, where curtains and blinds are drawn and lights come on at a relaxing low level in key rooms.
Many of our clients find that determining the ‘scenes’ and the names for the scenes quite challenging, and this can be very difficult to do before you’ve lived in a home for a few weeks. That’s why SONA usually ensure that our clients have some initial scenes to begin with, and we then offer engraving and final programming for lighting scenes a few weeks after they have settled in. Engraving can be expensive, so we want you to get it right.
To help you decide what scenes to have and just as importantly, what to name them, we’ve created some quick tips for you!
SONA’s Top Tips for Keypad Engraving
- Leave your buttons blank for a little while. This gives you time to determine how you are using the house, at what times, and the names you give to rooms. Sometimes you can call rooms something different that you expected to, or use rooms in a way that is surprising.
- Think about how you use each room. Are they quiet, private rooms where you relax or do you entertain? Do you watch TV in those rooms or sit and read? Do you need the room to be really bright or dimly lit for a more relaxing atmosphere.
- Name your keypad buttons in a way that makes sense to you and the members of your household. However, do bear in mind to call them something fairly obvious if you have a lot of visitors or staff in your home.
- You may think you would have a ‘day’ setting and a ‘night’ setting, when in reality you may have ‘Morning’, ‘Breakfast’, ‘Evening’ and ‘Nighttime’.
- These may need to be adjusted as the seasons change, so make sure you use a reliable home automation company who will be back in a timely manner when you need to adjust your settings.
- Don’t forget to consider automated sequences, to make your life even easier. For example, you could have a lighting scene set to come on at dusk for when you arrive home from work.
- When working on lighting scenes and the use of rooms, consider sensors for some rooms. For example some rooms may make sense to have the lighting automated so that when someone enters the room, the lights automatically come on. This usually works well for bathrooms.
