As a contractor, connected homes can be a large field of  confusing terms and products, and in the end we tend to find ourselves just staying away from a lot of it. But instead of that, we're going to explore this in this article to help you better understand all of these terms. 

Connected Home:

Connected home refers to a bunch of products that allow a homeowner to see multiple aspects of there house. These devices can range from thermostats, leak detectors, cameras, locks and other items. If you are primarily in the residential market, I would suggest getting in to one of these eco system of products so you can start making easy add-on sales. This will make you look very valuable as a contractor. Also helps that you will know the product in and out and can be the your customers main point of contact. 

Wi-Fi:

Wi-Fi is simply a wireless internet network. In our field, Wi-Fi is mainly used to connect our internet enabled thermostats. We use Wi-Fi so we don't have to use wired products. Thermostats would certainly not be an awesome sell if we had to run a large data cable to it. 

There are two bands of Wi-Fi that are typically produced by a router and that is the 2.4 gigahertz band and the 5 gigahertz band. The reason this can be important is because certain devices can only use certain bands. Most of our thermostats will utilize the 2.4 ghz band. So if you are having connection problems verify the cast by the router in the home and that the product you're using is able to be used on those bands. 

All in all, Wi-Fi is a good option for most homeowners and a lot of thermostats can go with other connected home products such as cameras and other things. When you do know you are going to be installing a WiFi product, be sure to ask the customer for the network information, or make sure they are available to do the connection process. Make sure you understand how to do this well so that your customers don't have to call out or refer to YouTube videos to get there products running properly.

If however, you're looking to use Wi-Fi in a commercial space, consider going to the Pelican Wireless product. Typically, Wi-Fi and commercial spaces poses a lot of risk for hacking and it also tends to find up traffic on their routers. Pelican actually build its own wireless network and not affect the Wi-Fi at all. Pelican also offers secure outgoing port communications. Nothing inbound on your customers network.

Wireless:

Wireless simply means that the product can use a different network to talk to an accessory or sensor on without having to use the Wi-Fi. A lot of thermostats have wireless temperature sensors and motion sensors. These are connected to only the thermostat and can be only seen by the thermostat. Along with sensors, some thermostats have equipment interface modules that allow you to communicate wirelessly from a thermostat location to the furnace. This gives us flexibility of the product we are using and it also gives us flexibility of thermostat placement. Just because it's wireless doesn't mean it's Wi-Fi as well. most products like Redlink, for example has its own network for its sensors, but then needs a gateway to get out to the internet. So if you're selling a wireless product and want it on the internet, just make sure that you have all the correct pieces and parts. 

Wired:

This is the old fashioned way if doing things. Wired does offer a lot advantages such as no batteries and reliable communication. The only disadvantage is the retrofit situation. There are also wired solutions for adding wires to a thermostat cable. Faststat makes a wide variety.

Bluetooth:

Bluetooth isn't necessarily used in thermostats or things like that, but it is used in some furnaces like Goodman where you can connect locally to a piece of equipment or product and update settings or download settings so on and so forth. Other connected home devices may use Bluetooth to connect to a central hub as well that then is connected to the Internet.

For Bluetooth to work, you don't have to have good service on your cell phone. You need only to be within distance of the product itself, much like a Bluetooth speaker that I'm sure you've worked with many times before.

There are lots of new things out there in the technology world so it's our job to stay on top of it and make sure we are the experts in it before our customers. That way we can offer these things and we all come out on top.