No place like home - beep - zzzt - "smart home" technology reviewed

It is 4:45 p.m., and you are getting ready to go home. Your are suddenly called to a last-minute meeting on a new marketing strategy. But you had invited a quartet of business associates to your home for dinner at 7, and this meeting could be a late one. What will you do? Easy. Phone home.

The house will answer. Instruct it to delay the cooking of the stuffed leg of lamb by one hour. With the same call, tell the house to turn on the outside lights at the usual time, but to bring the temperature up to normal one hour later than usual, thus saving a little on your energy bill. Finally, tell the house to phone the homes of your associates and let them know that dinner has been rescheduled for 8 p.m. instead of 7 and that you're looking forward to entertaining them. The messages will be waiting for them when they get home.

This may sound like a pretty implausible house--but it's one that is coming. Already, houses in which a central computer controls all lights, appliances, security systems and electronics are available. And a house that uses less than half the energy of today's typical home is available. In fact, the typical home being built today uses a about half the energy of the typical home built before the first Arab oil embargo, according to a spokesman for the National Association of Home Builders.

A house that diagnoses problems--a leaky roof or a failing furnace, for example--and contacts a repairman (after comparing repair cost estimates, of course) could be available before the end of this century.

Some prototypes of these homes are scattered around the country. In Kissimmee, Fla., Xanadu House is the high tech vision of architect Roy Mason. Xanadu House previews features of a future home: a robot that starts tours for visitors, four large-screen TVs that monitor other rooms and contain a computer graphic art gallery, and simulations of other advanced systems. Mason foresees a time when a home fully monitors itself, reads you the news while you're in the shower and even prepares your breakfast. In Arizona, Ahwatukee House has eliminated hallways (allowing natural lighting in every area), keys (a computer activated code is used instead) and included several time and energy-saving devices. (Designed by the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, it is on the market for $850,000.) The Rocky Mountain Institute House, perched 7,100 feet up in the Rockies, uses 5 to 10 percent of the normal household electricity load, with bills averaging less than $30 per month, thanks to passive solar heating, an air-driven shower and special light bulbs, windows and appliances. Amory Lovins, director of research for the institute, says that the $6,000 cost of all the special equipment was paid off in less than a year by savings in utility bills. And thousands of households around the country are already getting smarter and costing their owners less, albeit on a less radical scale.

In many respects, the basic components of a so-called, "smart home" already exist. The introduction of microprocessor technology to appliances and the electrification of what used to be manual devices were the first steps in this development. According to Joy Schrage, manager of appliance information services for Whirlpool Corporation, microprocessor controls on appliances will become standard within the next 10 years and synthetic speech will increasingly be heard from everyday durables.

Now, several devices that allow linkage of everything electronic in the home--appliances, computers, telecommunications, radio equipment--are either on the market or in development. These systems incorporate existing home wiring, radio signals, heat and motion sensors and coaxial cables, all of which feed information to the home's "brain." The integration of electronics and telecommunications with architecture is being advanced by several companies.

Compu-Home Systems International, a small company based in Denver, has a home monitoring and control system called Tomorrow House that can regulate each room of a house separately for optimum heating, ventilation and air conditioning. Heat, light, smoke and motion sensors tell the system when someone is in a room, and it adjusts the temperature accordingly. It can also turn lights and appliances on and off on a regular schedule. A voice synthesizer can notify a homeowner when certain actions have been taken. Approximately 300 of the systems have been sold in the last year for between $1,500 and $2,000 each plus the price of an Apple II computer, which displays what systems are functioning on a floor plan of the house.

Cyber LYNX Computer Products of Boulder, Colo., is selling an interactive, wireless system using radio frequencies that can be run with an Apple or IBM computer. The company has sold several hundred of the systems for between $800 and $1,500 each. "We think we're delivering a total home [automation] system for the price of a wireless burglar system," says John Antonchick, Cyber LYNX's vice president for marketing.

Another home control system, Artra Corporation's Waldo, has a 206-word vocabulary and can recognize about 24 different vocal commands. The core of the Arlington, Va., firm's system is a printed circuit board that plugs into an Apple II. Lights and other electronics are controlled by high-frequency signals and the home's existing electrical wiring.

HyperTek, Inc., is Whitehouse, N.J., offers HomeBrain, another integrated system using a personal computer. The $2,200 system (plus another $500 to $1,500 for installation) goes beyond some other systems in that it can be programed to calculate an outdoor temperature, determine the amount of time needed to bring the indoor temperature to a comfortable level and switch the heating or air conditioning on at the indicated time.

Small companies are not the only ones entering this market. General Electric Company's Home-Minder, a simple system selling for about $660, will be installed in more than 8,000 new homes built by Ryan Homes this year.

All these home brains are assuming a position at the core of the new American home--a home that has more appliances, more audio and visual equipment and more labor-saving gadgetry than ever before. Sales of audio-visual equipment, home computers and telephones have doubled in the last five years, with videocassette recorders and compact disk players currently hot items, according to Allan Schlosser, vice president of the Electronic Industry Association's Consumer Electronic Group.

Industry experts predict a fundamental change in how people live in and relate to the home as the electronics are tied together. The life of a house will increasingly revolve around one room that houses the entertainment section of a home--television or wide-screen TV, VCR, stereo system, personal computer, compact disk player--along with some of the functions of today's kitchen and dining areas. "We're moving away from the old centers of household activity, the kitchen and the fireplace, to a new center--the electronic hearth," Mason says.

According to Mason, that "hearth" will incorporate two-way monitoring systems, data bases, teleshopping, vacation planning and teletext news delivery.

As this room becomes more important, it will also get bigger and either be linked to or encompass much of what now is done in the kitchen. The esthetics of the kitchen will be improved, with appliances increasingly designed to look like cupboards, cabinets or furniture.

Changes in the American home must accommodate changes in the typical American family. By 1990, the average household size will be 2.45 people. With most women as well as men in the workforce, those in the house have less time to maintain it. Say goodbye to the four-bedroom house. Say hello to smaller, clustered houses with fewer to smaller, clustered houses with fewer but bigger rooms.

Who will be first to bring their homes into the electronic age? The same people who were first to own a VCR, to buy a home computer, to try a compact disk player. "They're not just techies or yuppies," says Donna Amrhein, senior analyst with the Yankee Group in Boston. "Their purchases are not necessarily income-dependent; a lot of these people are in the $20,000 to $40,000 income range." Their numbers could bring to 5 million the number of households with home brain systems by 1990.

These families will have to take to the new technologies before the rest of the population can be persuaded. "The technology is there but the desire to use it and the mass-production cost efficiencies are not," says Lane Jennings, research director for the World Future Society, a nonprofit association that serves as a neutral clearinghouse for ideas about the future. "People are not immediately sold on new ways of doing thins. It's convenient to drive to the store and say hi to people at the bank, so why try to do it at home?"

According to Jennings and others, consumers will have to want to handle banking and shopping functions out of their homes for smart home systems to really catch on with the public.

Along with smart appliances, many companies are working on energy-efficient home appliances and climate systems. Dinh Company, a small manufacturer in Alachua, Fla., has designed a heat pump/hot water/central air conditioning system that runs on electricity produced by solar photovoltaic collectors. American Solar King, a Texas company with sales of more than $30 million last year, is going to introduce a central system through Sears, Roebuck that also relies on solar energy to provide heating and cooling. The company claims annual savings of 60 to 80 percent of a normal heating and cooling bill with the $12,000 to $15,000 systems.

Nyle Corporation of Bangor, Me., which sells lumber-drying equipment, is expected to offer this winter a clothes dryer that uses a refrigeration system to produce warm, dry air. The dryer will cost about $600-roughly twice that of a conventional dryer--but Nyle claims it will run on 65 percent less energy, paying back the difference in cost in about two years. North American Phillips Lighting Corporation and other companies are selling compact fluorescent bulbs for household lamps that use one fourth the energy of a conventional bulb and last 10 times as long. They cost about $25, but Phillips says one bulb would save a New York resident more than $50 in energy costs during the bulb's life.

Standard appliances are also becoming more energy efficient, as the same microprocessor technology and sensors that allow them to work with a computer are used to make them measure water temperature and load size.

As houses get smarter they will take on other tasks. Computers could be programed so the home would not only monitor its heating system, but would identify a problem, communicate with other homes and contact the computer of a repairman. The appliances in it will get smarter as well, and your toaster could even tell you when the toast was done. And microcircuitry could virtually eliminate the need for repairment--when something goes wrong with your dishwasher, a light may flash indicating the problem area, and you'll be able to replace the faulty circuit yourself.

A smart home could also direct the activities of a robot--or several robots--that would prepare meals and clean house while the two-income family is out earning two incomes. Several companies, including Androbot, Inc., of Sunnyvale, Calif.; TTC of Carson, Calif.; Hubotics, Inc., in Carlsbad, Calif.; and Heath Company in Benton Harbor, Mich., are developing robots for home use, and experts say simple robotic arms--that transfer clothes from a washer to a dryer, for example--could spread through the home around the turn of the millenium--which is all of 14 years away.

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