Oh, there’s no place like home for the holidays
‘Cause no matter how far away you roam
If you want to be happy in a million ways
For the holidays you can’t beat home sweet home!
If you’re one of the millions of people hitting the road to go somewhere over the holidays—whether to the nostalgic “back home” sung about by Perry Como or on a vacation somewhere warm and snowless—one thing you don’t want to forget to take care of is security.
Electronic House recently published this piece on how to protect your home when you’re away for the holidays, and there are some good pointers here.
There were, however, a couple of other items that could be added to their list. First of all, remember to put some lights on a timer, or, in this modern day of IP control and whole home automation, set up lighting scenes so lights in different parts of the house will go on and off at appropriate times.
In addition, consider doing something similar with your Draper window shades. Set up scenes for shades in different rooms to raise or lower as appropriate. You can even have a couple of them stop three quarters of the way down then go back up to halfway, so it looks more realistic. Be sure to time these shade movements to work in tandem with lighting scenes.
We have some advanced controls to help you accomplish things like this, but our products also work with third party systems, so it may be easier to go that route so everything is controlled by the same “brain.”
Also, don’t forget you can always go in and make manual adjustments whenever you want with your IP interface!
Nobody will ever know you were gone—just don’t forget to stop the paper.
