For builders — four things that cost nothing on a drawing

Straight, because you have heard the other version

You have a guy. Keep him.

Your low-voltage contractor keeps the wire, the infrastructure, the racks and the conduit. He keeps the speakers — all of them, and everything he makes on them. He keeps the physical install and the mounting. We are not bidding against him.

The reason that is honest rather than generous is simple: we are national, not local. We cannot hang a pair of in-ceiling speakers eight hundred miles away. What we keep is the part with no geography in it — the Control4 and Lutron equipment, the programming, and looking after the system for as long as the house stands.

He keeps everything that needs a body in the room. We keep everything that travels over a network.

Give him these four

All four are free on a drawing and expensive at trim.

Home runs. A 4-conductor low-voltage run from every shade head back to a single panel location — two power, two communication.
One panel location, decided once. On the drawing, rather than found during trim by whoever gets there first.
Class 2 separation. Low voltage in its own trough, away from line voltage. Cheap to get right, ugly to discover late.
Blocking for a 300 lb anchor anywhere an arched window is getting a cable-guided shade — top and bottom. Miss it and it is drywall repair, a change order, and a week you did not have.

None of it costs you anything. None of it takes work away from your sub. It just means the automation does not become the reason somebody is standing in a finished room with a drywall saw.

And when the house is finished

Your phone does not ring in year two.

The automation is the part of a house most likely to come back to you long after everybody else has been paid — because it is the part that keeps needing somebody, and the part everybody stops answering about.

We do not stop answering. The system gets watched every night, updated remotely, and fixed before the homeowner notices — which is the same thing as saying it does not become your problem.

We cannot help you with the rest of it. Finish carpenters, framers, the trades that are genuinely hard to find and hard to keep — that is not our business and we are not going to pretend otherwise. This is one small corner of your build, handled permanently.

A finished farmhouse kitchen with beamed ceiling, pendant lighting and a pot rack — no visible automation. — The best version of our work is the one nobody ever has to think about.

The ask

Forward this to your low-voltage guy.

That is genuinely it. If you want the four items marked on a set, send the plans and we will mark them and send them back. There is nothing to sign and nobody will call you.

And if you build the same house fifty times — a package that is identical from lot to lot is exactly the kind of work we can set up once and then run remotely for every house you put it in. That is a conversation worth having.

vince@smarthometheaters.com We do not sell shades, fabric or motors. We specify them, and we supply and run the control.

Our whole reason for beingAnd we do not leave.

Most people in this trade finish the job and move on — and from that day the house is on its own. In twenty-five years we have never left one. We have only ever lost a client to a move or a death, and in several of those houses we still look after the system for whoever lives there now.

And the software that looks after it afterwards is ours too. Ixome programs, updates and watches Control4 systems remotely — no truck, no trip charge. It is where the technical detail lives.

Go to Ixome.ai