While infrastructure talk has only of late become a fashionable buzzword within and around the new Obama administration, it’s been a long-term obsession with the CEA’s TechHome Division.
The group’s intense focus has produced, after 14 months of fine-tuning, an updated TechHome Rating System that takes infrastructure in the custom electronics realm to a new level – or rather, three, to be precise.
CEA’s Kerry Moyer, in explaining the Platinum, Gold and Bronze specification guidelines just issued at EHX by the group, emphasized that they are “not standards but rather, build-to specifications” for residential structured wiring. “These will help integrators have more professional relationships with builders,” he added.
“This has been a noble endeavor,” said Mitch Arthur, CEO of Westwood, N.J.’s Living Intelligent and a collaborator on the project. “The goal was to created a nationally recognized spec – to provide a physical layer upon which to build technologies from the most basic to the most sophisticated systems offered today.”
Using the guidelines, “Bronze” rooms would be built with basic 21st Century technology infrastructure, “Gold” rooms, with increased product functionality in mind including multi-room audio, control capability and energy management, and “Platinum” rooms would be designed to address the highest levels of tech functionality for telecommunications, multi-room and networking.
“The system was developed to alleviate the kinds of mistakes that occur from an ‘I got it covered’ mentality that can produce a wire for a television over a fireplace in a $3.5-million home. These guidelines have thought all that through,” said Arthur.
The benefits of such guidelines in an economy that is anything but builder-friendly, said Moyer, are the creation of business opportunities for the builder – “increasing of the perceived value of what is being built” – and the integrator alike. “It gives the custom installer the chance to work more closely with builders, and the chance for both to sell the consumer products that attach to infrastructure.
“Ideally,” said Moyer, “we’d like to put it through an open-standard process, but it was important to get it out there before first as a build-to standard.”
Arthur said that an online tool that will allow an integrator to go to a home and do a “tech home assessment” for the consumer is in development and should be ready for prime time before summer. “With it, integrators and builders will both be able to log into the site, plug in information, lay out a job and produce an infrastructure document and show it to the consumer as an educational tool.”
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