Smart Homes The best of Today's intelligent, networked home appliances aren't just cool and high-concept. believe it or not, they also make sense.
By Jeanne Lee with Brian L. Clark, Art Janik and Amy Wilson

(MONEY Magazine) – "I'm home," you announce to your house, as you stroll through the door like the Tom Cruise character in the futuristic thriller Minority Report. Your house, smart as a whip, responds warmly by switching on lamps and tuning the television to your favorite movie channel. Your fridge checks all the food on its shelves and in its drawers and searches the Internet for a good dinner recipe.

Cool, huh?

Well, it's not so far off. These domestic functions are already possible with today's technology, if not all on the market. Problem is, unlike in the movies, they're not all working smoothly yet, and there are pesky questions of standards still to be worked out. There's no clear killer app for the smart home, and manufacturers are scrambling to figure out what's worth the trouble and the expense. You can go out today and buy voice-activated gear for the house, ranging from a $30 light switch to a $318 home automation kit named HAL (from a Laurel, Md. company called Home Automated Living) that runs on Windows and will respond to commands like "Computer, warm the hot tub at 7 p.m." or "Call Dad at the office." But most of today's gadgets are still finicky--and few things make you feel sillier than talking to an unresponsive computer. In an effort to make the smart home, well, smarter, companies as diverse as Cisco Systems, Panasonic, Sears Roebuck and Whirlpool have formed a nonprofit coalition called the Internet Home Alliance (IHA) to identify technologies that people might actually want. One focus: devices for improving family communication. IHA member Kristine Stewart, Cisco's director of market development, checks her living room webcam from her laptop when on the road. "Whether the kids even know that you're watching them, just catching a quick glance to see them all there," she says, "those small moments mean a lot." Stewart sees this as a model for the kind of practical, easy-to-use devices that can enhance the lives of regular--not just tech-savvy--people.

SMART--BUT NOT TOO SMART

By contrast, the smart-home concept of the past--which had your Web-enabled phone connected to your Web-enabled television and your Web-enabled toaster--has proved clunky and impractical. "The idea of phoning in to start your crockpot didn't take off," notes Kurt Scherf, vice president of research at Parks Associates, a market research firm in Dallas, "and I'm not convinced people want to do e-mail on their fridge."

Instead, the 21st-century smart home is evolving on two fronts. First, rather than one big network controlling everything in your home, smaller, independent networks are being developed to control each system: communications, entertainment, home office and home infrastructure systems like heating and cooling, lighting and security.

Second, as manufacturers realized that consumers lack enthusiasm for Web-enabled washing machines and toasters, they started designing individual appliances with just enough intelligence to make chores less tedious. For example, the Swedish company Husqvarna markets a robotic lawn mower that is quiet, recharges itself on a battery pack and can operate in the dark (see page 128). Tony Evans, spokesman for Electrolux, nicely sums up the kind of products homeowners are looking for: "not supersmart--but highly intelligent." The products highlighted in the boxes that accompany this article--organized by room, from kitchen to garage--all live up to this ambitious but grounded ideal. In sorting through the scores of "smart" home products on the market, we tried to choose the practical over the high-concept. The gee-whiz factor was a plus--but only if we could imagine the thing playing a role in real life.

THE HOUSE OF THE HERE AND NOW

You may be surprised to learn that a sophisticated smart-home nervous system is already built into thousands of American homes. Home builders have been fitting new homes with what's called structured wiring, which consists of high-grade wiring for digital media, telephone, power and cable access all bundled together and built into the walls. In the basic version, your incoming cable signal, Internet and phone service are routed through a central control box and then throughout your house, terminating at jacks located in virtually every room. The result is a convenient way to network all your home computers and peripherals, manage various phone lines and pipe high-quality audio and video into, say, the family room, bedroom and kitchen. Shelling out a few thousand bucks more connects your heating and cooling, lighting and security systems together, all controlled from a PC or wall-mounted keypads.

About 16% of new homes built in 2001 had structured wiring installed, according to Parks Associates; the number is projected to increase to 22% this year and to 50% by 2005. "Structured wiring will be like plumbing in the future," predicts Mark Flagg, vice president of Estridge Cos., a home-building company in Indiana. "You'll just have to have it."

Of course, with an existing home, upgrading to premium wiring means smashing through a lot of drywall. Instead, most people are going the wireless-network route, long a popular choice with tech mavens. Industry experts expect that the rest of us will soon follow, motivated by the desire to connect our DSL or cable-modem subscription to more than one computer. "Probably 25 million households have more than one PC in the house, and people want to leverage their broadband connection," says Bill Kenney, vice president of emerging home solutions for Sears and chairman of the Internet Home Alliance.

Standards in wireless are still in development. The networking device we recommend (on page 124) uses the current frontrunner--called 802.11b, or Wi-Fi. Newer versions, 802.11a and next year's 802.11g, promise faster transmission but aren't yet widely available. (These shouldn't be confused with another popular wireless system, called Bluetooth, which is designed to send more limited digital information over shorter distances--say, from your cell phone to a cordless headset.)

THE HOUSE OF THE FUTURE

Perhaps what's most interesting about these new technologies is the impact that they're having on the way we organize our homes. Already the notion of the home office has changed: Because wireless communication means you're no longer tethered to, say, a printer, the "office" is increasingly located wherever you decide to put down your laptop.

Another development, predicts Gopal Ahluwalia, director of research at the National Association of Home Builders, may just be the demise of the American living room--by which he means a room without a television or other entertainment systems. New technology has shaped American homes before: "When television came in the mid-1940s, it landed in the living room, which was a nuisance. So the family room was created," Ahluwalia explains. Entertainment soon took over the family room, which has since morphed into the "media room." Meanwhile, the living room got less and less use. Now, he says, "one-third of homes built in 2000 did not have a living room."

But whether or not you're ready to reconfigure your home, you no doubt want it to help make life easier, more efficient and more pleasure-filled--in short, you want it to be smarter.

For more smart products, turn to page 128.