Looking for a smart home installer in Muskoka

We install smart home systems at cottages and homes across Muskoka: locks, cameras, lighting and shades, thermostats, leak sensors, TV and audio, and the WiFi that carries all of it. Estimates are free and done on site, because you cannot quote a cottage from a photograph.

Why a cottage is not a house

Most smart home advice is written for a suburb. A suburb has fibre, a garage, drywall, and somebody home most days. A cottage has none of that.

• It sits empty for weeks, so anything that fails silently fails for a long time.
• The power goes out, and it takes the internet with it.
• The walls are board and batten, log or panelled, and there is often no attic

to run cable through.

• The roof is steel and the granite is everywhere, and both play havoc with

wireless signal.

• The driveway is long and unlit, and the nearest neighbour may be seasonal.

Every one of those changes the answer. A lock that is fine on a front door in Toronto can seize on a swollen cottage door in April. A camera that streams happily on fibre is useless on a metered LTE plan.

What a visit looks like

We come out, walk the property, and look at the things that decide the job: where the panel is, how the water comes in, what the walls are made of, where the signal dies, and how you actually use the place. A cottage that gets used three weekends a year needs a different build from one that is rented out twenty times a season.

You get a written plan naming what goes where. Most builds go in inside a day. Before we leave, we walk you through it on your own phone, because a system nobody can drive is not an installation, it is a pile of equipment.

Questions worth asking anyone you call

Ask these of us too.

1. What happens when the internet goes down? Schedules, scenes and frost

protection should run on the hub itself. If everything is in the cloud, a power cut takes the whole system with it.

1. What here has a monthly fee? Some categories genuinely do, cameras

especially. You should be told which before you buy, not after.

1. Can I get at this myself? You should be able to change a code or a

schedule without phoning anyone.

1. What are you not going to do? An installer who says yes to everything

has not thought about your building.

Where we work

Bracebridge, Gravenhurst, Huntsville, Port Carling, Bala, Muskoka Lakes and Lake of Bays, and the water-access properties in between where it makes sense.

If you are still working out what you need rather than who should fit it, the package sketcher walks through it in three questions. If you are building or renovating, the cabling conversation should happen before the walls close, and that is on the builders page.