Bring Your Home Automation Outdoors for Some Summer Fun

When those warm Atherton and Hillsborough days start bringing you outside for some fun in the sun, you may find that you want to bring a bit of your home automation along with the lemonade and pool time activities. Thankfully, there are many options available to help! Whether it be an outdoor TV setup, some heaters for those evenings when the fog comes over the hill, or controllers for your pool and sprinklers that work with automation systems such as Savant or Control4 — we have you covered.

Let’s start with the most important, shall we? The TV is the center point of any daytime or evening event, whether you’d like to sit poolside and watch some sports, or enjoy a nice movie on your patio in the evening, there’s plenty of uses for an outdoor TV. Everyone’s first concern when it comes to putting a TV outdoors of course is obvious: the rain! Thankfully, many companies offer TV models that are both weatherproof and reflection resistant for those bright sunny days. They can mount to most outdoor surfaces with mounts that can swivel and angle, providing a variety of uses. Some popular outdoor TV models range from the SunBrite Veranda, Signature, and Pro series. All of these models provide options such as partial shade, full shade, or full sun to give every installation location an appropriate model. If SunBrite isn’t your style, Samsung also offers an outdoor TV called The Terrace, available in full or partial sun models. Unfortunately sound bar options are a bit limited for outdoor TV’s, but hopefully more models will sprout forth in the coming years. There are speaker options available for the outdoors from brands such as Near, but we’ll get to that a bit further down.

Outdoor Speakers are an obvious companion for your outdoor TV, and thankfully there’s a few options available that can connect to your outdoor sound system for TV, music, and anything else you can think of. brands such as Near work with your sound system from apps such as Sonos or Savant, and Sonance has a quite large selection of outdoor rated speakers and AMPs as well. The Near LB series works in all environments and can be mounted almost everywhere. The Sonance Patio Series is a specialty around here as it can be installed anywhere discretely in a yard and provide a surround sound setup with 4.1 surround sound and an AMP that all can be buried in the ground. Sonance also provides RK speakers which look like — you guessed it — rocks.

While the SF Bay Area can have some really warm days, there's also potential that Karl The Fog will come in and bring some very cold nights as well. Thankfully, Outdoor Heaters are a staple for almost any patio setup. Brands such as Infratech can bring some heat when you need it most, and are very easy to install and integrate into your smart home system. Because of this, you won’t have to worry in the fog blast while you’re trying to enjoy your Summer Flick.

Let’s get out of this talk about fog and bring up the best part of warm summer days — the pool. A fun day with some floaties listening to some music on those outdoor speakers and watching a movie is what makes summer great, but wouldn’t it be great if you could install a pool controller as well for even more comfort? Using pool controllers allows you to turn on lights on your pool, or maybe some jets if that’s your thing. For those with heated pools, don’t fret! Pool controllers can even control your outdoor sprinklers as well. Pentair offers some great choices for pool controllers, so don’t forget to give them a visit.

There are quite a few things that we’ve covered here, but most important is getting them all to work together. Thankfully, smart home systems such as Savant and Control4 can help. Nearly everything we’ve covered here can be integrated into a Savant system, offering full outdoor automation control with just the app on your phone. Because of this, it’s incredibly easy to set times, temperatures, and volumes — even music, all from a single place. Once you’ve found everything that you’d like to include on your outdoor patio or yard setup, the experts can take it from there and automate everything together. Don’t wait until it’s too late to get out into the sun this Summer!