The home is the ultimate center of life, whether for entertainment, work, or living. For one family in Coldstream, British Columbia, their 4,500-square-foot home needed to be a smart one, replete with intelligent lighting, shading, indoor and outdoor audio, HVAC, security, home theater, and pool system integration. They turned to custom integrator Access Granted, Inc., a company that specializes in whole house automation and control. After years of experience using just about every control solution on the market, Access Granted relies on RTI as its go-to solution for reliable, elegant control and automation for homes and businesses.

“Reliability was critical on this project because the family had used other control systems before and didn’t have a great experience,” said Tim Raymond, owner of Access Granted, Inc. “Having tried them ourselves, we knew RTI would fit the bill and be more than capable of bringing all their systems under control.”

Those systems were numerous. Indoors, there was a Lutron RadioRA2 lighting control system along with Lutron shading and Somfy drapes, a Sonos sound system with Origin Acoustics ceiling speakers, various IP video sources in the media room, as well as Tekmar HVAC home control, DSC security, and access control components. They didn’t stop there. Outdoors, they extended the audio capabilities with Origin Acoustics landscape speakers and sub that stream music from the Sonos system. The homeowners wanted to bring the inground pool into the control experience by enabling the system to open and close the pool cover, turn on and off the jets, and adjust the pump speed or turn it off completely. Finally, the inground irrigation system needed to be controlled from the system as well.

It was a tall and complex order, but with RTI, Access Granted was more than confident that the company could deliver on all the family’s wishes. Using the RTI Integration Designer programming software, every one of the home’s systems was easily incorporated into one control ecosystem and programmed to meet client expectations, giving them a simple-to-use control experience.

The brains of the RTI system is the XP-8v Control Processor, reliably driving all of the smart home’s operations using RTI’s extensive driver database to facilitate integration of third-party devices, such as AV, lighting, shades, security, and HVAC.

To ensure that the homeowners and their two children could have access to their music anywhere in — and outside — the home, Access Granted installed two RTI AD-16x audio matrix switches as well as RTI audio amplifiers to power 16 channels of music, bringing it to every room and outdoor space.

Finally, Access Control brought the pool cover, shades, and drapes under the same control umbrella by leveraging RTI’s RCM-4 Relay Control Module, equipped with four individually addressable relays that can be triggered to open and close these solutions.

For the homeowners, the final touch was individually customized control screens for each of the components they wish to command. On five iPads running the RTI control app, each screen gives them an at-a-glance and in-depth understanding of the state of the system, such as the pool cover, lighting, HVAC, security, and more. In addition, they can control audio and video sources from an RTI T2x Remote Control, which hosts a full complement of hard buttons to provide quick, intuitive control, while the 2.8” touchscreen interface mirrors the RTI control app experience and provides full control of devices throughout the environment.