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How Much Does a Smart Home Cost | Smart Home Automation System Cost

The minimum cost of a smart home in 2021 is somewhere around $1500 for basic features like lighting and alarm. Smart home...

Written by Niel Patel · 6 min read >
how much does a smart home system cost

If you’ve just started your trip to smart home enlightenment, one of your first concerns is probably, “This sounds fantastic, but how much does home automation cost value for money can be difficult.

I’ll be honest here and tell you how it is. No one can tell you exactly how much does a smart home costs to you. Simply put, there are too many variables. What I can do is reconstruct the process, cost break down and find some of the elements that will ultimately decide the cost of your home automation project. This will help you figure out what kind of smart home you should build under your budget and how much does a smart home system costs in 2021.

Smart wiring allows you to integrate:

  • App based remote control smart lighting
  • Entertainment systems
  • Security and alarming
  • Roof to Basement to Parking Internet Covered Home
  • Audio-visual communications via camera
  • Sensors
  • Remote control of all above
  • Biomatric lock doors and gate
  • IoT Based Switches and Electrical appliances like Fans, Fridze, Gyser, AC etc

A number of IoT products are becoming available to make your home smart. The list grows every year and the products get smarter as well. 

  • Fridges that can tell you what you need to buy
  • Ovens that take the guesswork out of cooking
  • Microwaves
  • Coffee makers
  • Heating and cooling systems
  • Alarm clocks that can adjust lighting and temperature
  • Security systems

How Much Does a Smart Home Cost in 2023

  • Smart wiring starts at around $2000, but that’s just the starting cost, it totally depend upon the quality and area and number of devices

One of the most user-friendly yet feature-rich lighting setups available today is the Phillips Hue starter pack. The starter kit includes a bridge that serves as the central controller, as well as three bulbs that can be used to replace traditional 60-watt bulbs. Each additional bulb costs $60.

  • IoT supported fan can cost you upto $150 to $350.
  • Smart switches will cost you around $1500 for whole house
  • Sonos amplifier will cost $495 — and it only powers one pair of speakers, or one room.
  • Monthly cost of internet will be around $50 to $90 dollor depending on plan and provider.
  • Wire for the speakers will cost $60-100 for the pair depending on your market.
  • Smart alarm clock costs $125, you can control it from your smartphone. It to warm your home before you get out of bed.
  • A pair of good value line speakers is going to cost $75-100 per pair.
  • A single smart light bulb can cost anywhere between $36 and $80, but it can last up to 40,000 hours. It will also use far less electricity than a standard incandescent light bulb because it is an LED bulb. Kits start at around $200 and go up from there.
  • A 671-litre smart fridge will set you back nearly $7500, but it will come equipped with cameras that will allow you to see what’s in your fridge while you’re out shopping. Samsung has teamed up with Woolworths to bring you a new refrigerator that allows you to do your grocery shopping from the comfort of your own home.

The minimum cost of a smart home in 2021 is somewhere around $1500 for basic features like lighting and alarm. Smart home with audio and video features will cost you near $2000 and the cost will go up to $5000 for IoT based device that will make your home totally smart.

How much does a smart home cost you minimum?

If your budget is low, the ‘DIY’ option is the best for you; there are a variety of smart devices like IoT bulbs or LEDs, remote controlling cameras, surveillance systems that you may set up yourself, usually via an app. Smart lightbulbs and wireless speakers are examples of these goods. Other gadgets, such as smart thermostats, will necessitate some wiring by a qualified electrician. You can arrange all easily online.

Today we’re going to be answering the most asked question, how much does a smart home cost? All right. So it’s actually really hard to answer this question because there’s the scale and there’s a lot of variables in every single smart home, but just a ballpark figure to get you going. If you factor one to 5%, the total cost of your home, that’s going to give you a decent budget to start out with on kind of figuring out the prices of your whole home. Now, listen, understand, if somebody came to us and they did everything that they could possibly do, every single window had blinds, automated blinds, every single light was controlled.

Every single possible room had an audio landscape speaker. They had five secondary surround sound systems. They had a home theater. I mean, just all the bells and whistles they could possibly do. It’s going to cost a lot more than the total home.

But most clients don’t do that. What they do is they buy several pieces of that smart home. They pre-wire for everything. But when they actually move into the home and they get started, they’ve got two or three pieces of the smart home, and they start adding to it as they go along. So that one to 5% rule really holds up.

Now, obviously, we see some jobs that are over 5%, some jobs that are under 1%, but as an initial budget, if you’re building your dream home and you’re designing it and you’re trying to figure out what to budget for your home, that one to 5% rule is going to give you a really good starting point. Now, let’s talk about scalability and why that’s an issue. Think about Sonos Audio. That’s an audio brand. A lot of people are familiar with one-room audio with Sonos that’s pre-wired in-wall or in-ceiling speakers and a Sono amplifier.
It’s going to be 600 and $5700 per room. Awesome. That’s a really easy number to go on, but how many rooms are you going to do? Are you going to do three rooms? Are you going to do four rooms?

A lot of our installations have 1620 plus rooms of audio. So all of a sudden, we’re saying, hey, it’s 600, and it to $700 for your least expensive home audio solution. But on a scale of 15 to 20 rooms, that changes dramatically. Our production homes are first-time homeowners, we’re seeing two, three in four rooms audio on our custom builds, we’re seeing anywhere from eight to 16. So there’s a ton of scale.

It’s really difficult if you just call us and say, hey, how much is my smart home going to cost to know without getting some information from you and understanding what the scale and scope of your system is going to be. Now, sticking with that same scenario of Sonos, we want to talk a little bit about variables. There’s a lot of variable in your system and what does that mean? Well, Sonos, we’ve found is actually the cheapest audio solution through three zones of audio. So if we go to four zones of audio, something like Control Four is actually a less expensive solution and continues to be as many zones as you add into the system, it’s going to continue to be less expensive than Sonos.

So if you’re purely looking at the budget, Control Four is going to be a better solution than Sonos for four or more audio rooms. However, Sonos, every single room is going to have its own dedicated stream of audio, which means you can listen to Pandora title, Apple music, whatever you want in that room and every other room at the same time, so each room can have its own stream playing all at the same time. Now with Control Four, that’s not exactly the same thing. There are some Internet streaming services available, but a much smaller sampling.

You’ve got Pandora, you’ve got the title, you’ve got Deer, but you don’t have Apple Music.

You don’t have a lot of the other popular music streaming services with Control Four unless you add in a third-party server from somebody like Autonomic or even a Sonos Connect, so it’s not a one-to-one solution. Control Four is cheaper, but the feature sets aren’t the same. So you have to make a decision on which is more important to you for that application. This is not a right or wrong answer. It’s really a personal preference, and every application is a little bit different.

So we see that when we’re trying to give you just a blanket statement on budget, it’s really difficult to just say here’s what your smart home is going to cost. But again, going back to where we began, that one to 5% one to 5% rule is going to give you a really good feel for kind of a general budget, a target to stay within that’s going to get you off and running. And then you can start dialing in the different subsystems, your lighting, your audio, your surround sounds, and figure out what your actual budget is going to be.

The factor that is involved in Smart Home System Cost?

The final cost of your smart home system will depend on several factors, which may include:

  1. The size and location of your home
  2. The features and specification you are looking for
  3. Hardware options – whether you choose Loxone switches or other switches, for example
  4. Planning, design and consultancy costs
  5. Labour and installation costs

How much does wire cost for home automation?

If you want to find out a budget for wiring for smart home and want to add features like lighting, heating, and a burglar alarm to ‘smart’ versions of each with Loxone, we recommend doubling your electrical wiring installation budget for a smart home system.

Making of Smart Home Costs in relation to property value

Another method to find out how much does a smart home cost is to compare the cost of a smart home to the value of the property.

A smart home installation will typically cost between 2% and 6% of your home’s value. Of course, there is no real upper limit to how much you can spend on home automation, and your costs may be significantly higher if your home is particularly large or if you want bespoke features.

how much does a smart house cost
  1. A basic smart home will cost you 2% of the property value and will include automated lighting, heating, and security.
  2. You can get automated lighting, heating, security, access control, and a smart intercom for 4% of the property value.
  3. 6%: All of the features mentioned previously, as well as more advanced features like multiroom audio and blind control, will most likely be available at this level.

So hopefully, that helps. If you have any questions, please leave us comments below.

Make An App Like will answer them personally. We want to hear from you. One of the questions you have about your smart home system, your design, your home audio, whatever it is, we will answer them. We really appreciate it. Thanks.

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