Home Automation Company in BR Area - Recommendations

Pretty much everything you want to do can be done with a Wi-Fi router, Sonos, Roku/Apple TV’s, and a smart thermostat from Home Depot

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Pretty much everything you want to do can be done with a Wi-Fi router, Sonos, Roku/Apple TV’s, and a smart thermostat from Home Depot

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Can? Sure. Should? Probably not.

Bare minimum in any open walls situation I'd run cat6 to every room plus extras around the perimeter for security cameras, and run speaker wire. I would hate to pass on that opportunity and then have all that shite plugged into power outlets and plugging up the wifi.

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Three or four main components I'm looking for

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1) Decent network capability

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like kork said, just run cat6 EVERYWHERE. there's no downside and the bandwidth capabilities of that will serve you for years to come. of course if cat7 or cat8 is the same price for cabling, might as well get that.

you want a wall fish in every bedroom, living room, dens, bonus room, back porch and it wouldn't hurt to run it out to your soffits in key locations you might want to put a PoE camera later. much easier to have the outlets pre-wired now than retrofit later.

wired is ALWAYS better. ALWAYS. with 4K, 8K and beyond you can never be certain no matter how good your WiFi is that it can keep up with the data transfer.

i would recommend hitting monoprice or amazon up for a good 48 port switch that includes PoE. it will be much much cheaper than whatever the builder wants to push.

plan on a server closet; not just a panel on the wall in the laundry room in your floor plan. you'll end up with doodads that need to live there and nothing is uglier than weird 'techno' devices cluttering up the house because you don't have a way to hide them.

the room will need good ventilation so you'll want a floor or wall register in there as well.

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(2) Speakers/Music in a few key rooms

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i'm a sonos-whore but i'm not naive enough to think this will still be the 'go to' product in 5 or 10 years. run speaker wire like kork said wherever you think you'll want speakers. i have speakers in most of my rooms and its great to have whole-home music. i don't know if i would run speaker wire to the bedrooms. my kids are either watching tv, their iPad/phone or school laptops in their room and have ZERO need for speakers. my wife hates music when we go to sleep so unless its sexy time my bedroom is a soulless music-deprived desert.

living rooms, dens, bonus rooms, back porch, kitchen, dining room, office and bar are the rooms with music here.

dolby atmos requires ceiling speakers(?) i think so if you plan to dedicate a room as a home theater you definitely want to install the speakers at the same time. i would hit up avsforums or ask tigerwise or the ohiostate guy on here about placement. there's no need for this to be uber-expensive just because atmos has a fancy name. they can also tell you what is overkill. i dont even know what the latest coniguration is..11.2? its ridiculous

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(3) control TVs in Living Room and on Rear Porch

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Roku all the way. You can use the remotes, app on your phone or integrate with a voice control system like alexa or google* to tell the tv to pause or play a different movie.

*whether you want jeff bezos or the guys at google listening on your every conversation is a whole different discussion you need to have. they're always listening anyway; by definition for 'ok google' to work on your phone it has to be monitoring your speech all the time so your phones are already spying on you way more than you realize.

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(4) Control thermostats.

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this is super easy. check out honeywell, ecobee and nest at home depot and pick the one you like the best. these connect like a standard mercury-switch tstat so there's literally no reason to have someone program it. just pick out the one you want and have them connect it instead of the shitty builder-grade tstats they install by default.


the one thing you haven't mentioned is lighting. this is a whole other ball of wax and probably too much to get into right now. wifi, zigbee, zwave+..switches or bulbs..? smart outlets or smart plug adapters..? this can get really expensive really fast if you're planning to do the whole house. a standard switch is like 59 cents and smart switches are $25+ each plus the hassle to program each one.

finally you should get smart/coded locks. i don't think we even own a house key at this point. they can work 'dumb' (just punch in the code) or smart by pairing them with a smart app on your phone. metal keys are 'quaint'

you might also consider a flume smart water meter so you can keep an eye on your water usage ($200) or possibly a whole home energy monitoring system but not sure if those are consumer-friendly yet.

No problem with that. I am getting trip charges just to get quotes from contractors. I'll call you at lunch time.

That's fine, but OP specifically asked about networking and AV.

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Slidell area?

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You could try AVL Installations, they are located in Slidell