In an Oak Brook home an electronic voice announces that a vehicle has entered the driveway.
In a Barrington mansion the sun goes down, and automatically the lights come up and the drapes are drawn.
In the Lake County horse country, a whirlpool tub begins filling, though no one is in the house.
The 21st Century is here, but like tiny waistlines and car repairs, it mostly is restricted to the wealthy.
Automated products performing a variety of marvels can be found in a scattering of homes around the Chicago area, but the homes generally are in the $500,000-plus class, or inhabited by computer wizards or electronics hobbyists.
The Jetsons, that futuristic average family in the Sunday morning cartoons with the garbage can that comes to the table and cleans up after them, are liable these days to be more like the Jet Setsons.
If you met George Jetson-or Jane, his wife, as the song goes-today, he wouldn`t be pushing buttons at Spacely Sprockets. He would be Mr. Spacely.
Several developments are taking place, however, that may bring the 21st Century to middle-class owners of new or existing homes by, well, at least the 21st Century.
Smart House, a project started by the National Association of Home Builders, is putting up a prototype home in Baltimore for testing wiring and other automation products. General distribution of a core system for automation is hoped for by the early 1990s.
At the same time, the Electronic Industries Association has developed a home automation standard, a basic electronic code that could be included in all computerized appliances and controllers to allow them to communicate with each other.
If such a standard is widely adopted, according to the trade group, consumers will be able to automate their existing homes in gradual steps as they purchase new products.
Meanwhile, private companies, including one in the Chicago area, already are selling their systems and continually refining them.
The present state of home automation often is compared to the early days of personal computers, when the developments in technology and marketing were proceeding backstage that ultimately would make them a common presence in the home.
”Home automation is going through the same evolution that all new tenchology goes through,” said George ”Bud” Arquilla III, president of the Home Builders Association of Greater Chicago.
”Typically the first buyers are the wealthiest people who can afford the high cost, or engineering-type people who understand the fundamental concepts. These are your market innovators, and they make up perhaps 10 percent of the market.
”Then once the concept is proved, it filters down, and the suppliers find volume goes up so it can be introduced to all levels of affordability.
”It may take to the year 2000, but at that point home automation will become a new standard,” said Arquilla, who is president of Glenwood-based Burnside Construction Co.
Arquilla, whose company has been a strong supporter of the Smart House project, said that he hopes to be able to be the builder of the first home with a Smart House core system in the Chicago area, perhaps as early as next year.
Magic Mansions of Elk Grove Village also is trying to bring in the year 2000 early with its MM2000 home automation system.
The company started in 1984 as a distributor of available home automation devices but two years later began to develop its own products. Now it only sells its own units, with first deliveries scheduled for April.
The basic components of the MM2000 are a central controller, remote cells and a line to connect them. With these in place and fully functioning, the system can control security, lighting, environmental systems, communications, entertainment and appliances over a phone or through a computer.
The remote cells contain an intercom unit, temperature sensor, light sensor, motion detector and infrared transceiver. They are connected to the central controller by what is called a ”bus” line, basically a bundle of lines that can handle different functions.
With this system, said Magic Mansions president Ramiro De La Cruz, ”we can control anything you can put a switch on.”
In fact, the controls can work automatically according to preset instructions, responding either to time sets or to data from the sensors.
According to the company, the system`s possibilities include:
– Sensing visitors at the door or a car in a driveway, and ringing a bell, announcing ”visitors approaching” and turning on a light.
– Turning lights on when people are sensed in a room, and off after they leave.
– Providing automatic watering, lighting, temperature and humidity control for house plants.
– Providing passive solar energy control with motorized blinds or draperies that react to sunlight and temperature sensors.
– Automatic, multizoned lawn watering with soil moisture sensors.
– Detecting if someone-a child, for instance-has gone into an unwatched swimming pool, and sounding an alarm.
– Monitoring temperature of refrigerator, freezer or wine cellar. (Did the Jetsons have a wine cellar?)
– Controlling and monitoring a party, including mood lighting, television, music, fountains, garden lights and swimming pool.
– Turning on a whirpool tub to a preset level and temperature from a car phone, to have it ready when you get home.
– Sensing if a child has gotten up in the middle of the night and automatically turning on the lights down the hall to the bathroom.
– Enabling you to listen to what`s going on in any room of your home, even if you are across the country, simply by using the phone.
In fact, any operation in the MM2000 can be controlled by phone. At the simplest level, you can arm your security system if you forgot to do it before leaving on a trip.
An elaborate system enables you to call and get a status report on your house, with a voice telling you if the lights are on or the heat is too high. Voice output is also a key feature of the system. At a house with an MM2000 prototype model in the Hunt Club Farms equestrian complex near Gurnee, the opening of a window results in a kitchen intercom announcing: ”Security Violated-Zone 3 Window-Authorities Notified.”
”The possibilities of the system are endless,” said De La Cruz. ”They are limited only by the amount of money you are willing to spend.”
The money, and perhaps the practical utility of the functions, are indeed key factors confining the market.
The system in the $569,000 house at Hunt Club Farms, built by D.R. Weiss Builders on a 5.7-acre lot, cost $9,000 including installation and is a comparatively minimal system, with only 2 remote cells inside the house plus one in the front door. It is wired, however, for easy upgrading.
De La Cruz said a basic system could be put in a home under construction for about $4,500 and an existing home for somewhat more because of the greater difficulty of wiring an existing home. Generally, however, buyers order far more costly systems.
”We`re tending to lean toward the higher end here,” said Thomas Lyons, Magic Mansions marketing vice president.
”For most people, when they see the system, the sky`s the limit. They want it to do everything.”
Before it turned to producing its own devices, Magic Mansions installed a $45,000 system designed by Portland, Ore.-based Archinetics in a 17-room house in Oak Brook.
The owner of the house, Dr. Dennis Lebbin, said the system had ”made certain things easier and and more convenient” but added that some of its features were simply ”frivolities.”
Among the more useful purposes he had put it to, he said, was warming the garage to 55 degrees 20 minutes before going to get his car; seeing if his children (as George Jetson would do with daughter Judy and his son, Elroy)
were still up at night by checking if their lights were on; and setting up codes so that he could turn his telephones off at home, yet allow close friends and relatives to get through to him.
In one case, he noted, the system had monitored his electrical usage and found that his bill was double what it ought to be. It turned out that the electric meter was defective, and he didn`t have to pay the extra charges.
”There are exotic things I don`t have,” he said. ”You can call the computer up and tell it to fill the whirlpool at a certain time. I have no use for such nonsense, but people do that. I wasn`t interested in those bizarre things.”
Lebbin also noted that he switched off the voice element that announced when people were at his door.
”I prefer the doorbell,” he said.
Overall, Lebbin said, he enjoys the system. ”I`m a gadget guy. I admit that.”
Taking home automation beyond the ”gadget guys” and the wealthy is a concern of Magic Mansions and others in the field. Lyons said the company`s goals included not only bringing the price down but also making the system simple enough so that homeowners could buy it off the shelf and install it themselves.
One likely contender to push home automation into the mainstream is Smart House, which evolved from a 1984 project of the National Association of Home Builders and now includes dozens of utilities and manufacturers around the country.
The Smart House project has raised about $25 million and is seeking another $25 million through a limited partnership offering. The project was spun off into a for-profit limited partnership in 1987.
The partnership is sponsoring construction of 20 prototype houses financed by utility companies, with the first scheduled for completion in Baltimore by May. One might be built in the Chicago area next year.
Smart House expects to have its core system available to the public by 1991, according to Robert Gonsor, Smart House director of communications.
He said that the price above the present cost of wiring an average home is estimated to be about $7,500, which could be included in the home mortgage. ”When you consider the savings in energy management and lower insurance because of fire alarms, we figure the monthly cost could be little more than a phone bill,” Gonsor said. He also said the price will go down as production increases with stepped-up demand.
”The idea of home automation is starting to grow on people,” Gonsor said, making a comparison with television remote controls, a type of automation familiar to most people.
”If I buy a television set today I buy it with a remote,” he said.
”Fifteen years ago I would have said, `I`ll be darned if I can`t get off the couch and change channels.` Now I get mad if I can`t get one with a compact disc player.”
