Author: GMI Automation

There’s no denying that we live in a wireless world. It seems that everywhere you turn there is a new device that is equipped with wifi designed to connect with other devices to make your life easy in some new way. With many different wireless devices bouncing around a home or office, it becomes increasingly more and more difficult to ensure a powerful and reliable wireless signal when it matters most. While on a smaller job, this may not be a problem, once you get into larger jobs wireless networks become an undertaking that can constantly fail, no matter how great your hardware is. This is GMI and the #DoneRightNotEasy crew take the extra steps in understanding and designing our Crestron control systems to work effectively with reliable Wi-Fi signals throughout the space.

The most important thing to understand about the ubiquity of wifi equipped devices and how they work together with your Crestron automation system, is that not all Wi-Fi is created equal. Wi-Fi routers and devices operate on one of two frequencies, 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz. The primary difference between the 2.4 GHz and 5GHz wireless frequencies is range as the 2.4GHz frequency is able to reach farther than the 5GHz frequency. This is a result of the basic characteristic that waves attenuate much faster at higher frequencies. While 2.4 GHz frequency may travel farther, 5 GHz is a wider band that is more stable, carrying more data from more devices with less interference. Unfortunately though, there are many devices and situations that require the use of a 2.4 GHz frequency, making it unavoidable.

This is where having the appropriate training and experience with Wi-Fi and connected devices allows the #DoneRightNotEasy crew to effectively design a system for a large home or estate. While many of the primary devices in the Crestron control system will be hard wired, that doesn’t eliminate the end user’s need to have functioning and fast Wi-Fi on their handheld remotes, smart phones, tablets, and laptops when moving throughout the home. To ensure this, we take care to design our system properly to make sure that all wireless components can communicate properly with one another, and play nicely together. This means understanding the concept of co-channel interference.

Co-channel interference is where devices take turns talking, so the more devices on one channel, the longer it takes for a device to talk since it has to wait for its turn. This interference isn’t a major problem until there are too many WiFi devices on the same channel. Luckily, these interferences can be reduced or eliminated by selecting the proper WiFi channel. Each channel on the 2.4 GHz spectrum is 20 MHz wide. The channel centers are separated by 5 MHz, and the entire spectrum is only 100 MHz wide total. This means that the 11 available channels have to squeeze into the 100 MHz available, and in the end, overlap. However, there are three channels that don’t overlap: 1, 6 and 11. Understanding how the network at large as well as individual components are operating on the network, and which specific channels they are on, allow us to ensure the reliability of an end user’s wireless signal.

Issues can arise however long after we’ve left a job site, thanks to the ubiquity of wireless devices on the market. Accessing the network from the back end and using a spectrum analyzer, we can identify what frequency and what channel a particular device is operating on, and how it may be affecting the system at large. We can then reorganize the network devices onto the appropriate channels, restoring the system to it’s proper level of functionality.

Readers of this blog know how complicated a Crestron automation can be on their own .Adding the additional complication of reliable and stable Wi-Fi throughout a large job can create pitfalls that will trip up a less experienced integrator. GMI and the #DoneRightNotEasy crew have the knowledge, tools, and experience necessary to simplify your life through reliable and intuitive control, every single time you reach for a device.

When working on a full home automation job site, it is extremely important that integration professionals take a whole project view of the site. Crestron control systems, by their nature, reach out and connect to every system in the home, which is why working closely with other vendors on a project is vital to our success, as well as the end user experience. In the coming months we will be highlighting how we work on site with specific types of vendors to ensure our clients have concierge level service during all parts of the installation process.

Today we begin that series by discussing how we work alongside landscaping professionals to elevate their work and make every part of the job a success.

At first glance, landscaping and outdoor work may not seem like it would have anything to do with an automated home, but in reality they are connected in a myriad of ways. First and foremost, a properly built Crestron system relies on hard wired components throughout the entirety of the space, often including outdoor cameras, speakers, televisions, and swimming pools. More directly, Crestron systems can often include connections to yard irrigation and sprinkler systems which can be impacted by landscaping changes or a careless crew.

If a landscaping crew is working on site during our installation it can disrupt operations in significant ways. The first of which is simply access to the site, if major landscaping work is happening during our installation schedule which blocks entry to all or part of the home, our engineers can lose critical hours that could push us off a tight schedule. To combat this we communicate with the crew leader to ensure our schedules align and we properly prepare for loss of access.

Complicated landscape projects can also disrupt the delicate process of laying out conduit or fiber optic cables for outdoor audio or video systems. Oftentimes we will have to dig trenches or holes to house these enclosures or an outdoor speaker system, and without proper coordination with landscaping crews as to the locations and direction of these wire runs we are left open to the risk that during the landscape work they could accidentally damage or destroy a delicate part of the control system infrastructure.

As with every vendor we work with, we take the time to communicate and work with landscaping crews to bring them up to the level of excellence a client expects when working with GMI and the #DoneRightNotEasy crew. While many high end landscaping companies will be familiar with outdoor automation and audio/video components, many are not, which is why we take the time to educate and ask second level questions about their work and process so we can ensure positive performance and improvement all around. This extra effort and commitment to concierge level service is what allows us to keep our clients happy with not only their automation system, but with all the work going on in and around their home.

When clients are tired of using challenging installations, they call the Crestron Doctors to diagnose and cure their problems. In this case, a video conferencing system was driving a finance company crazy for several years. While the boardroom was of an enterprise-level, the video conferencing was overly-complicated and never worked as it should. The team flew across the country, ready to do what they do best – troubleshoot and repair with the trademark high quality of the #DoneRightNotEasy crew.

The Issues Pile Up

Upon arrival, the video conferencing system had a laundry list of issues, including: wrong microphones, an overly-complex routing of the audio, balancing issues, an incorrectly configured codec and amplifier, limited muting options, and wrong wire types that were incorrectly terminated. Other providers couldn’t seem to fix the problems, but the GMI team knew there was a way to greatly improve and streamline the existing setup without replacing it entirely.

Just Another Case for the Crestron Doctors

It only took a week for the GMI team to get the once-frustrating video conferencing system running optimally. Wires were replaced with the optimal types, the codecs and amplifiers were re-configured, and the audio was re-routed properly. The client was thrilled with the updates and was relieved to no longer worry about delays, bugs, or other issues that might arise.

A Video Conferencing System, and More!

If you’re dealing with a troublesome installation at your home or business, consider giving the Crestron Doctors a call. We have a long track record of fixing existing installations and making them work better than their owners ever imagined. Schedule your free consultation today!

As we have discussed in previous entries in the vendor relationship series, when working on a full home automation job site, it is extremely important that integration professionals take a whole project view of the site. It is because of this simple fact that it’s especially important to form a great relationship with perhaps the most important employee in a luxury home environment, the house or estate manager. Estate Managers are the top-level executive position in a large household or complex of properties that employ a wide array of staff or vendors. They are responsible for working directly with the owner to plan and execute the overall plan for management of the property. Due to the wide ranging nature of the estate manager’s duties, it is imperative that as a technology integrator we form a great relationship with these individuals.

As one could imagine, the position of estate manager comes with its share of stressful situations. Luxury homeowners, especially those with multiple homes in multiple states, are busy individuals whose time is extremely valuable. This is one of the many reasons they work with GMI and the #DoneRightNotEasy crew, as our Crestron control systems are designed to streamline their everyday lives. We find the first step in this streamlining is to ease the load of the estate manager to ensure all home projects and systems working with the automation system are working at the highest level possible. Estate managers appreciate the extra effort put forth by a capable integrator working other vendors in a home or group of homes to make sure they are working to our level of expertise.

One of the ways we ease the burden of a busy estate manager, allowing them to better focus on the other needs of the household, is by proactive monitoring and maintenance of the control system itself. Scheduling any kind of service visit is just another item on the long list of demands a typical estate manager will see on a daily basis, and we prevent this by setting up alerts for  any device failure or latency. These systems can even be programmed to notify of negative trends, allowing us to address system failure before it happens. Back end access to both the Crestron system as well as the home networks also allow us to fix any issues that pop up easily without having to send a technician to the site. Properly documented and mapped out system specifications also make it easy for our techs to know exactly what component may be causing an issue, allowing for quick repair or replacement if needed.

Being a ‘Five Star’ dealer, offering concierge level service, and delivering a quality product is not a simple task. It means working with the customer and meeting their needs at every step of the way. To do this you must manage every aspect of a project from the initial consultation to the final finished package and beyond. There are hundreds of Crestron dealers throughout the country who do quality work and build quality systems, but it takes hitting your mark at every turn to truly shine beyond just the technology you install. House and estate managers appreciate this level of detail in the same way the homeowner appreciates the simplicity and reliability of their Crestron system, reduced stress and an easier day to day.

Are you a house or estate manager for a luxury property or group of properties? Learn how GMI can help simplify your life by contacting us today!

This Thursday is the Thanksgiving holiday here in the United States, and for many luxury homeowners, this means one thing, preparing a feast for a large number of family and friends. Afterall, why invest in a beautiful luxury home if you can’t show it off around the holiday season. Fortunately for our clients, our Crestron automation systems not only make their day to day life easier and more streamlined, they take the stress out of holiday events and especially the time spent in the kitchen preparing a large meal.

Anyone who has spent time in a kitchen during a holiday meal prep knows that temperatures can fluctuate as dishes are prepared and people move in and out of the room. As they do in the background of the rest of the year, this is no different environmental control systems automated by Crestron control. Using temperature and occupancy sensors a control system can relegate the temperature for the comfort of those cooking, as well as ensure the kitchen itself doesn’t rise above a set temperature when the turkey is roasting in the oven while the family plays football in the yard. Light levels in the room are also controlled and automated by the Crestron system, allowing family members and hired help the visibility they need to safely prepare a large meal.

A holiday meal prep for a large group of family members and friends can be an especially stressful time for homeowners, or house and estate managers. Temporary additions to staff, managing deliveries and guest access, and keeping family members happy and stress free keep tensions high. Crestron automation linked together with access control and security systems lift many of these burdens, allowing a homeowner or estate manager to grant access to a guest or staff member from any panel in the home, and even remotely monitor the kitchen and other areas of the home directly from their smartphone or device, ensuring meal prep and the days events are running on track.

Of course as we’ve discussed many times, Crestron automation is only limited by your imagination. The ability and expertise of our team of Crestron engineers can create custom tailored automation options for both holiday cooking, and even everyday kitchen use. The world of connected appliances such as refrigerators, stoves, and food storage areas can be programmed and connected into Crestron automation. Imagine getting an alert on your phone or on a Crestron panel at the exact moment a dish needs to be removed from the oven, or an ingredient removed from the fridge for the desired freshness. Combined with intercom ability between any Crestron panel or remote, managing a busy kitchen to prepare a large holiday meal has never been easier.

We at GMI and the #DoneRightNotEasy crew of course want to wish our team, clients and fans the happiest of Thanksgivings and a wonderful holiday season.

Want to become part of the GMI family? Contact us today!

In our combined decades of experience working in home automation and with Crestron control systems, we have seen our share of issues with existing systems. Unfortunately for the luxury consumer, there are a vast number of integration professionals out there who simply don’t have the ability they claim to with regards to properly installing and maintaining Crestron systems. One of the biggest issues we see when diagnosing these systems is the issue of server room and rack management.

Electronic components by nature produce heat and do not operate properly when subjected to the heat they create.  A common failure of others is to not provide proper displacement of the heat created by these components.  We find all too often that pieces of electronic equipment are placed in cabinetry, closets, and other enclosures without proper ventilation or cooling, and in some cases no ventilation or cooling at all!  Equipment that overheats is equipment that fails.  Overheated equipment can run slow, intermittently, or not at all causing a malfunction of the overall control system. Construction of the rack itself and the location and proper number of cooling components is an important factor as well.

Beyond just failing equipment and latency in systems, incorrectly built and placed racks can cause significant safety issues in a home or office. Rooms such as mechanical rooms, boiler rooms or wooden utility closets are often problematic for properly housing electronic equipment. Placing this equipment in proximity to unnaturally high temperatures stemming from boilers or water heaters, leaking or standing water, and significant dust levels could not only lead to system failure, but can be serious fire or life safety hazards. GMI makes sure that our equipment is installed in well ventilated areas. Our knowledge of the equipment we use allows us to anticipate the heat generation of a system and install additional cooling components when necessary.

To prevent issues within racks and service rooms the #DoneRightNotEasy Crew at GMI Automation makes sure that all wire is supported properly from beginning to end. We use supporting bars in our racks and Velcro to guide wire from point to point between component parts. We keep like wires together with each other and organized properly, take heed of bend radius when routing wires, and keep power wires away from power limited control system wiring.

Clients spend their hard earned money on these luxury control systems expecting them to work properly every time they are used. Without the appropriate rack and server room construction and management, this simply is not possible.

For any professional working in a home or office space, client retention is extremely important. Not only does it make good business sense to treat your clients right and keep them long term, but it will also show potential future clients the value of your service.. In the luxury space this becomes even more important, as the value of the time spent worrying about a malfunctioning system can make its utility vanish. Here are the three questions you should be asking yourself if your client retention isn’t what it should be.

Are your clients comfortable?

Crestron automation systems integrate themselves not only into the technology in a home, but into the customer’s lives as well. Due to this intimacy it is incredibly important that your clients have a certain comfort level with you and your service, as well as the system in their home. Have you taken the time to explain to them how the system can be used? People, especially the luxury homeowner set, respond to service providers when they feel like they’ve been treated the right way. No one wants to continue doing business with a company that doesn’t take the extra time to make them feel at ease, especially one as intimate as a Crestron integration company.

Is your service what it should be?

Leaving a customer with a luxury automation system with no service to back them up is like giving them a Ferrari without access to a seasoned mechanic. Taking the time and organizational energy to ensure that even after stepping off a jobsite you continue to serve your customers at the highest level will keep them in your portfolio in perpetuity. This includes installing proactive monitoring of their system to ensure issues can be stopped before they happen; and having the ability to remotely access the system and address issues regardless of how far away you may be from the physical location. When you are dishing out the money for a system as complicated and powerful as a Crestron control system, you expect and deserve the highest level of service.

Do you work with integrity?

Are you honest with your customers about the true costs of their system? Do you work with fellow vendors to ensure they are at the highest level? Do you document your systems to keep yourself in check? Integrity is the most important aspect of every business, and when it comes to client retention working with honesty and integrity in everything you do will pay dividends. In the luxury space, our clients are keen on when someone is attempting to take advantage of them, so it is imperative that you have the integrity to be truthful about how much a specific improvement will cost and what value it brings to the end user. Customers that understand and appreciate your expertise and honesty will continue to come back and turn into wonderful relationships.

In the end we aren’t called the #DoneRightNotEasy crew for nothing, it takes time and energy to bring your organization to this level.

One of the main points of pride here at GMI and with the #DoneRightNotEasy crew is our knowledge, experience, and command of not just Crestron control systems, but almost every other system the automation experience touches. What many may not realize is that the most important of these systems, and the one we have the deepest knowledge well in which to draw, is the monitored security and protection of a home or commercial space. This knowledge and understanding of how security and automation work together is just one of the many ways we bring more value to our customers than your typical integration professional.

While other integrators or Crestron engineers may simply add an aftermarket security and monitoring solution on top of the automation system, or worse, leave the newly automated property unprotected, we take the time to fully integrate the security aspects of your home into the automation system itself. What would have traditionally been banal alarm routines, such as arming or disarming your security system, can now be used to trigger any number of automation scenes. Motion and occupancy sensors can also be used to automatically turn off or on lights or entertainment options depending on who is coming and going.

In the event of an attempted break in or other alarm event, the security integrations with the Crestron system bring the protection of your home to the next level. If an alarm is triggered when you are at home, a path can be lit directly from whatever room you are in to the nearest Crestron panel, allowing you to view surveillance cameras pointed directly at the site of the event. This can allow you to ascertain if there is a burglary in progress, or simply a teen or college student returning past curfew. This ability can even be accessed directly from your smartphone or tablet.

Security in commercial spaces such as luxury or high rise office spaces tends to center more on access control and surveillance than a traditional monitored alarm. Biometric or card based access control systems are integrated directly with Crestron control to provide instant identification of who is coming and going from a space. For further security, each card or bio reading can be specifically tailored to access certain parts of the building, meaning that you can secure sensitive areas from overnight cleaning crews or low end associates. Surveillance cameras and intercoms can also be tied directly into video walls or desk based panels to provide access to guests or clients without interfering with valuable work time.

GMI and the #DoneRightNotEasy crew strive everyday to gain more and more knowledge about the unique ways Crestron automation systems interact with every part of the home or office. Security and protection of these spaces is top priority for many of our clients which makes it paramount for us as well.

Interested in learning more about how GMI can secure and automate your home or office? Contact us today!

We have discussed many times in this blog the ways that GMI and the #DoneRightNotEasy crew separate ourselves from others in the industry. Our combined decades of experience designing, building, and programming Crestron automation systems has given us a unique perspective into both the systems themselves, but also the needs of our luxury clients. Having been around so many failed Crestron systems we’ve been hired to replace, we’ve noticed a significant trend, that is the failure to keep a consistent quality in every part of a system.

A quality system begins with the design and consultation stage. Many integrators will use this step of the process to show off the kinds of high end audio and video systems they’ve installed, attempting to lure customers into purchasing a big ticket item that may not fit their needs. By working directly with our new clients and asking second level questions about the way everyone will be using the system, we can streamline the specifications of a Crestron system specifically to our end users. While the needs of every customer will vary, the process by which we work with them and design their system remains the same, and this consistency in processes sets us the right way.

While the end user experience will determine the nuances of how a Crestron system is built and placed, consistency of design is still important across jobs. One aspect of this is equipment placement and centralization. Centralizing control racks and equipment leads not only to more efficient control systems, it also reduces the need for complicated maintenance and builds customer confidence in the product and your work. We often find other integrators having control equipment distributed haphazardly throughout a space, which can lead to failure, or worse, a danger to the property and the clients themselves.

Once we begin to build out a new control system, or takeover a non-functioning system, our consistency of quality becomes apparent. The most important aspect of a well functioning and high powered Crestron control system is cleanly installed racks and wiring at every level. Each wire is not only selected and designated for it’s own unique function, but is labeled at each end for easy replacement or diagnostic re-seating. Additionally, every single wire is terminated and run cleanly and orderly, even when the customer cannot see it. This is done in this fashion because we understand what it takes for a system to run properly, and this consistency is paramount to our success.

As a system is being built, another level of our consistent quality becomes more and more important, that being the simplified and powerful Crestron coding and programming. As Albert Einstein said “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” Simple though does not mean easy, this is where the name #DoneRightNotEasyCrew comes from, we aren’t just programming automation commands, but full fledged conversations between gear who oftentimes are speaking different programming languages. The more consistent and streamlined our code is, the better all of the systems we build work at the highest possible level.

It’s easy to see why consistency of quality, from design, to installation, to programming, is important for a powerful and reliable Crestron automation system. Before you decide on an integrator for your next luxury automation project, be sure to understand how they approach quality on every level.

Interested in learning more about automating your luxury home? Contact us today!