The Wiring Meeting

We met with Jeff, the rep for Guardian Home Technologies, the low-voltage wiring service provider for Ryan Homes in the greater Pittsburgh region. When I made the appointment, I explained that while I undertsood the value of their services, I helped start a home automation company (albeit a long time ago), so I would listen to what they had to offer, but would not be very likely to add anything more than the base services.

In the Cobblestone plan, the standard wiring options are 2 Cat 5e runs (phone or network) and 2 coaxial cable runs (television). This is very basic. We only wanted television runs to the master and the family room, but Jeff convinced us that the study would be good, too. He also convinced me that they way that Ryan builds homes with their super energy-efficiency, they seal all of the walls and the ceiling in the basement, making it much more difficult to wiring after the fact. I don't know if it's true, but for a reasonable $95/run, we ended up also adding two more network connections, as well. The one thing that is genuinely top-notch (at least from what I could tell from the pictures) is the cabinet. When it comes to structured wiring, the cabinet is the heart of your home system and having a good one with plenty of room to work and the ability to easily add and remove modules to keep the system organized is critical. The Guardian base cabinet seems to meet these needs very nicely. It is also a nice-looking unit, which my wife was particularly happy about. It appeared to have a white enamel coating on the steel frame.

The one thing that my wife was genuinely interested in was a security system. These systems can be purchased from independent providers very affordably, but when it comes to the monitoring, they may leave a lot to be desired. Jeff was quick to steer us towards a special that they had, which saved us a great deal on the upfront costs. The monitoring is a little more than I would like, but in line with going rates for such services. For security reasons, I am not going to get into what, exactly, we chose. Needless to say, Gaurdian has a lot of options with motion detectors, keypads, door chimes, window and door opening detectors, mobile phone backups, a mobile app, etc. The mobile app is a double-edged sword, because you will be in serious trouble if that ever gets hacked, but the convenience is a really nice option to have.

Overall, again, it was a very pleasant experience. Jeff's job is to sell things and he is good at his job, but he was not pushy and accepted "no" as an answer. He was very reasonable and helped us to make what I feel are educated decisions. At the end of the day, we only added a few hundred dollars to our mortgage, but did add a monthly service fee with a five-year agreement (one thing that I was definitely not thrilled with).

Again, we met in the morning room of the model home, and that stupid chair leg is still loose, but I couldn't help looking around and thinking of how nice it will be to have a room like that in our house...