Let us know what your priorities are when you're shopping for window dressings for any room in your house!

Every three months, The Pleasure Home reviews the state of the art in Home Automation, to ensure that its Clients are not only receiving the most cost effective and stable solutions, but that they are also kept abreast of the latest developments ... Our findings on the Amazon Echo are below - we would welcome your feedback on your success or otherwise with this, currently the most established Voice activated Home Controller, or other competitive devices: This month we gathered together an early release of the RAKO lighting control CLOUD GATEWAY, the Mi|Home eTRV Radiator Controllers, a NEST Heating system & the much awaited Sonos integration with Amazon Echo. Up until this point, we had not been impressed with the Alexa Echo - it had problems recognising our instructions, was pretty useless on general questions and stubbornly wouldn't talk to the rest of our house. Well, after a little tweaking with naming conventions and "Alexa Skills", we can now do the following: 1. Multi-room control of Sonos throughout the House playing Amazon Music and TuneIn Radio e.g. "Alexa, play Radio 4 in Kitchen". We couldn't yet play Spotify or Deezer music on a Sonos device by voice control, but we could control it once it was playing a Spotify or Deezer playlist e.g play, pause, next track. However, we COULD play Spotify on the Amazon Echo, although the sound wasn't nearly as good as our Sonos CONNECT:AMP system connected to a little pair of Morel SP-3 Satellite Speakers. 2. We could control the overall Boiler Temperature using the Nest "Skill" and also individually control each eTRV Radiator Valve in the house, so that heat is not wasted in unused rooms. However we could not get back a temperature reading from any of our rooms, other than the NEST in the Hallway - we were greeted with "your device does not support that yet". 3. We could control all the RAKO lighting in the house in a general on/off way and we also created a maximum of 14 custom commands for specific scene controls such as "Alexa, set night lighting" to activate a scene 4 setting for all the downstairs and porch lights. There is also an advanced RAKO skill which is definitely a beta: "Alexa, ask RAKO to lower the TV Blinds" worked perfectly, Unfortunately, we couldn't get the blinds to raise after successfully lowering them! However, requesting a particular scene in a room, or a 50% dim of all the lights in a room worked fine - “Alexa, ask RAKO to dim the Living Room to 50%” So pretty good compared to three months ago - hopefully by the end of the year it will be even simpler to use and we can have a house-wide method of communicating, rather than having to be within 10 metres of the Amazon Echo ...

The lighting is amazing!

We are building a large extension on the rear of a Victorian semi which will be an open plan area comprising kitchen, lounge and dining area. The far wall looking out on the garden will be almost completely glass (2.6m x 5m in 3 sliding panes). Our lighting designer has come up with a design with 12 separate lighting circuits and has recommended that we install a Rako lighting control system to simplify management of the various lighting circuits. Does anyone have experience of using Rayko lighting controllers?