Canberra is a good place to build a smart home. Lots of new estates, lots of renovations, plenty of tech-comfortable homeowners. It also means everyone from the local sparky to national AV chains will quote you "smart home". Here is how to tell them apart before you sign anything.
1. Where does the system actually run?
Ask whether your automations run on a server in your house or in a company's cloud. If it is the cloud, your lights, locks and heating depend on someone else's servers, subscription and business surviving. A local server (we use Home Assistant on a small dedicated machine in your comms cabinet) keeps working when the internet drops and nobody can switch it off remotely.
2. Can I leave you and keep the system?
A fair installer will say yes. You should be able to hand the system to another integrator, or run it yourself, without losing function. Proprietary systems where only the original dealer can make changes are how people end up with a $60,000 paperweight.
3. What happens when the internet goes down?
Right answer: everything local keeps working. Lights, scenes, sensors, cameras recording. Wrong answer: "you would still have the switches".
4. Who designs the network?
Fifty to a hundred and fifty devices on your WiFi is normal in a smart home. Ask how many access points they are specifying and how they worked that out. It should come from your floor plan and square metres, not a guess. If networking is not on the quote at all, the system will be flaky and it will not be the hardware's fault.
5. Will you price it room by room?
You want a quote you can read: each room, each device, unit price, quantity, plus programming hours and GST. Then you can pull out the second guest room and see the number move. One lump sum on one page is a warning sign.
6. Retrofit or rewire?
For an existing Canberra home the answer should nearly always be relays behind your existing switches, no plaster damage. If someone wants to rewire your lighting for a smart home in a finished house, get a second opinion.
7. Cameras: local or cloud, and whose footage is it?
Ask if recordings are stored on a recorder in your house or on the camera company's servers, and whether there is a monthly fee. Local recording, no fee, and you own the footage.
8. What is the presence sensing?
Cheap PIR motion sensors switch lights off while you sit still. Millimetre-wave presence sensors do not. If the quote says "motion sensor" for living rooms and offices, ask which kind and why.
9. Who do I call in two years?
Ask what support looks like after handover, and get it in writing. Also ask what parts are standard, off-the-shelf hardware you could replace yourself, and what is proprietary.
Local specifics for the ACT
- Most Canberra homes built before 2010 have plenty of switch-box depth for retrofit relays. Very old homes with tiny mounting blocks sometimes need the relay in the ceiling instead. A good installer checks a few switches on the site visit.
- New estates (Googong, Denman Prospect, Whitlam, Ginninderry, Jerrabomberra) are the easy case: get the integrator involved before the electrician's rough-in and you save money for the life of the house.
- Aged care and NDIS work in the ACT has its own requirements. If that is you, our aged care and NDIS pages cover how we handle it.
Where we sit
Intelligent Living Solutions is based in Canberra. Every system runs on a local Home Assistant server, uses open hardware (Shelly for retrofits, KNX for wired new builds), and is quoted room by room from a published price sheet. If you want to run these nine questions past us, book a free consult on the contact page.
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