How to set up Your Smart Home in a new Building
- You want to build a networked house and equip it for the future?
- As an individual one-family house or high-end villa?
- Security and privacy are just as important to you as the automatic control of the house?
- Are you excited when the rooms are transformed into an individual ambience with music of your choice for each resident at the push of a button?
- Energy management for electric cars via wall box, battery storage and optimized self-consumption?
- Then we have the experience & right solutions
“Anyone who doesn’t build smart today is building an old building” – FRANK VÖLKEL
What can a Smart Home do?
- living comfort at the highest level
- guaranteed increase in value (digitization) – see “How much does a house cost? Construction costs per square meter“
- future proof/expandable for 25 to 50 years
- highest energy efficiency with simultaneous comfort
- perfect security against burglary, protection privacy
- multi-room audio: favorite music in specific rooms/zones, garden, pool and sauna
- fully automatic: heating, ventilation, sun protection, weather protection, door access, doors and gates, etc.
- lighting: creation of lighting moods & day/night scenes according to biorhythms
Why KNX Smart Home?
- manufacturer-independent: Largest selection of design/technology, see “The Top 30 KNX push buttons – cheap to high-end comparison“
- electrical planning: easy from planning to commissioning
- a KNX system for everything: light, heating, shading, ventilation, irrigation, surveillance, multi-room audio, etc.
- electrical installation: ideal from the individual family house to the Smart Home Villa
- future-proof: perfect for retrofitting/updating new products – see “History of the Smart Home 1963 – 2023“
- ideal for sophisticated buildings up to high-end areas
- industry standard for networking residential buildings and individual buildings
Why “We” – Smartest Home?
- references to individual one-family houses, smart home villas and high-end KNX smart homes throughout Germany
- KNX Smart Home is Frank Völkel’s passion, he is one of the pioneers in networked house construction
- high level of consulting and professional competence for all trades and interfaces, >100 construction site experience
- since 2010 author of bestselling specialist books on KNX Smart Home
- author of Top KNX Programming Video Courses for Electricians/Builders, Planning Tools
- KNX Professional system integrator in Munich, Upper Bavaria
- Basalte Pro Partner for southern Germany/Switzerland
- Youtube channel (>24,000 subscriptions)
Why build a House immediately as a KNX Smart Home?
- exceptional equipment and premium quality, individual lifestyle
- high cost savings compared to comparable retrofitting (approx. 150,000 to 300,000 euros)
- approx. 10% additional costs initially compared to “old school” electrical installation
- KNX Smart Home = Digitization of a building
- building that grows with you: later changes to rooms and divisions possible without additional costs
Smartest Home known from
How to build a House as a KNX Smart Home?
Building your home begins with knowing the possibilities that exist today in 2023. Similar to the comfort functions in a modern luxury car, your house or residential building can be equipped with all amenities.
You can find out many details about this in more than 232 videos on our YouTube channel.
Building a House in 2023 as a KNX Smart Home
We have designed and planned individual and unique houses. For people who appreciate something special. Here is a small selection.
We live KNX Smart Home and are pioneers in the construction of sophisticated, fully networked houses with KNX in new builds.
As a smart home planner, we take care of consulting, conception, electrical planning, KNX programming and commissioning.
Our Claim
“With our conception and planning, we enable builders to combine the best from the entire range of the world’s most renowned manufacturers. This allows you to design your house in a unique way and also implement unusual wishes – entirely according to your needs and independent of the individual producers.
With every single family home or villa – whether new construction or renovation – it depends on a coherent overall technical concept.”
FRANK VÖLKEL
KNX Visualization: Complete House Control with Scenes
Light control in the house
The control of the lighting in the KNX Smart Home is used for living comfort and aesthetic aspects. Security in terms of burglary prevention can also be increased by intelligently controlling the lighting and faking presence.
Another security aspect is the notification of security-related events and states or the signaling of faults in individual devices, which can be implemented through lighting control.
Living comfort with KNX buttons and DALI lighting
· Atmospheric room ambience, consistent lighting concept
· No confusing “wall switch batteries”
· Scene-related switching of lighting groups
· Visualization of events and states
· Automatic switching on and off when you are present or absent
· Central and room-by-room switching of house lighting
Intelligent light control and music control
The intelligent control of the light is a central function in the KNX Smart Home. The lights are switched on the basis of motion or presence detectors, the time of day, brightness sensors or defined scenes that determine the lighting switching.
Lighting design for house/apartment
Lighting design is essential for every sophisticated house.
Self-sufficiency with Energy, Water
The fully networked KNX house in 2023 starts at the entrance and goes from the basement to the attic and includes the entire outdoor area. A swimming pool, a sauna or completely individual areas can be part of it.
A high degree of energy self-sufficiency / self-sufficiency can be achieved through the harmonious integration of PV roof and battery storage – control via KNX Smart Meter
Smart Home Villa - the Features
For example: Door camera, intercom, access control via RFID & code keypad, bell, mailbox, parcel box and lighting are integrated in this entrance gate. VdS burglar alarm control panel included. See also smart home villa
What characterizes a KNX Smart Home?
From our experience, demanding builders are not only concerned with automatic functions for air conditioning, shading, lighting, etc., but with tangible quality, good design and high value of the switches, touch screens and high-quality visualizations. It should be clear to everyone that a uniform operating concept will result in the end.
The idea behind a good concept: A sophisticated KNX building takes care of controlling the most important functions and processes itself. Desired scenarios can be called up with one or two clicks of a button and the house reacts to different situations by itself.
KNX always from several Manufacturers!
What distinguishes all of our client projects: Each KNX Smart Home is individually assembled from a large number of products from different manufacturers and finely tuned to personal needs. If everything came from one manufacturer (e.g. Gira), the concept of KNX would be taken ad absurdum. Why is that? Because every manufacturer has its clear strengths and weaknesses in its KNX products.
That’s why our design is always about using the best on the global market, which we have previously tested and found to be good. It doesn’t matter which manufacturer is used for a specific sensor.
Lighting & Shading: Whole Room, whole Floor, whole House
The KNX Smart Home system can be controlled locally by room, by floor or centrally for the entire building. This can be done either via KNX switches, beautiful touchscreens or a single iPad app for operation. For example, 40 windows can be shaded simultaneously and automatically at sunset or with a single keystroke.
Or the lighting of a larger house – consisting of e.g. more than 300 lights – at the push of a button to set scenic brightness and color values. We often say: “Mood at the push of a button”.
What does a KNX Smart Home consist of?
To put it simply: A KNX smart home system consists of various sensors, actuators, buttons, detectors and control elements that are connected to each other via a bus line within a house. These components must be connected to each other by cable, since in our experience a “KNX radio transmission” that is definitely possible often causes problems with thick ceilings and walls made of reinforced concrete.
So it’s better to do it right and connect everything with a cable.
KNX Smart Home: Differences between a One-Family Home, Hotel and Town Hall?
We have often answered this question: is a building with a large area more complex to design and plan than one with fewer square meters? For example, let’s compare a single-family villa with a hotel.
While in a smart home villa many trades have to be interlinked and there is a highly complex technology integration per square meter, it looks much simpler in a hotel.
The typical hotel is structurally rather simple, despite the number of rooms and large total area. Because every room and every corridor is identically equipped on each floor. It is often only the basic functions of a KNX smart home that have been implemented due to a tight budget. The system behind it: Copy exactly. With the Smart Home Villa, things look much more individual and complex.
The single-family villa can certainly be equipped with a private wellness area, which, in addition to special lighting, also includes multi-room audio equipment. Special wall touch screens for music and mood selection included. Door and window contacts and glass breakage sensors in combination with a burglar alarm control panel offer a high level of security against burglary. On request, we can equip buildings of this type with special cameras with object recognition. In addition, there are elaborate kitchen, dining and living areas, the latter often equipped with a professional home cinema.
And what about a town hall? The town hall is more comparable to a hotel: It consists of large areas with a comparatively low level of KNX smart home technology. Because the typical town hall is built with public money.
Our Video Courses as Click Instructions to do it Yourself
Do you want to program your KNX Smart Home completely yourself?
- You are a builder or electrician and still have no idea about KNX and how to set up the ETS5 or ETS6 software
- You don’t want to spend a lot of money on theoretical training that doesn’t help you much in practice
- Do you want to save many thousands of euros (often >15,000 euros) and do the KNX programming and KNX going live yourself in just a few hours?
- Then take a look at our video course “Click instructions for the KNX Smart Home” (8-hour video course complete package).
Do you already have a house with KNX and want to program the Gira X1 to control it?
- Do you want to set up your house/apartment with the Gira X1 in 2 hours and control it via smartphone, tablet or PC app?
- You want to reach your goal immediately and without detours, the setup and programming should be implemented now?
- Would you like to immediately automate heating, ventilation, shading, cameras, lights, etc. with the Gira X1 Server?
- Then watch our video course “Click instructions for the Gira X1 server – programming in 2 hours”
Do you want to automate the blinds/shutters of a sophisticated building?
- You want to automate and precisely adjust the electric blinds in a house, office or commercial building
- You would like the position of the sun to be tracked over the course of the day, with the slats rotating automatically
- You want to automate the blinds on up to 8 different facades so that perfect daylight always penetrates
- In addition to perfect sun protection, you also want automatic glare protection for certain rooms
- Then take a look at our video course SPECIAL “KNX weather station”.
