Q: Have I thought of everything I need in home control?

Living Like Bond...James Bond

Before you lay carpet, install a pressure sensor on the floor at each side of your bed. When you step on either sensor, a signal can be transmitted to your home control system which can then tell certain lights to activate. These lights could lead you to the bathroom or down a flight of stairs to the kitchen.

Kitchen: Command Central

What's the busiest area in your home$ If your family is like most, the kitchen probably reigns supreme as the hot spot. For this reason, be sure to equip it with a device you can use to operate all the systems in your house. Our suggestion: an ample-size touch panel that can display the current status of every device.

Think of Your Future

The low-voltage cabling that makes up a networking system is fairly inexpensive, so thread it to every imaginable spot in your house. That includes the guest rooms, kids' rooms, attic and basement. With the wiring in place, it's fairly easy to add electronics to a new area. You'll be able to turn the guest bedroom into a home office without having to fish wiring behind the finished walls.

Beyond Buttons

You'll need some type of device to interact with your home control systems. A popular choice is a touch panel. Custom configured by a home systems installer, it can display an on-screen menu of buttons for commanding the lights, thermostats, audio/video equipment and more. But buttons are just the beginning of a touch panel's presentation capabilities. Some touch panels can display real-time video from surveillance cameras, current weather and traffic reports, your favorite web pages, your family calendar, even TV programs and movies.

The low-voltage cabling that makes up a networking system is fairly inexpensive, so thread it to every imaginable spot in your house. That includes the guest rooms, kids' rooms, attic and basement. With the wiring in place, it's fairly easy to add electronics to a new area. You'll be able to turn the guest bedroom into a home office without having to fish wiring behind the finished walls.

Zoning Out

Initially, you may be wowed by an audio/video distribution system's ability to treat each room as its own independent entertainment area, or zone. But to preserve the quality of the music and keep your budget in line, it's probably better that adjacent rooms (like a kitchen and breakfast nook or a bedroom and a bathroom) are grouped together as one zone. There's a good reason for this: When rooms are close together, it becomes audibly difficult to separate one area from another. So while it might seem like a good idea to be able to play different songs simultaneously in the kitchen and the adjacent breakfast nook, what you'll likely hear is the equivalent of musical mush.

Grow Up!

One of the key differentiating features of a multiroom audio/video system is the number of sources and zones it can handle. For example, a basic system might be able to feed music and video from as many as four sources to six entertainment zones, while a more sophisticated setup might be able to handle 12 sources and 24 zones. Be sure that the system you choose offers enough growing room for your family so that new equipment and new zones can be added to it later on. Another feature to look for is a system's ability to distribute video. Some systems can do it; others can't.