July 17, 2024
The best ideas to automate your outdoor spaces for the warm Bay Area summer months
When those warm Atherton and Hillsborough Summer days start bringing you outside for some outdoor activities with friends and family, you may find that you want to bring the latest and greatest in outdoor Home Automation to show off to them. Thankfully, there are many options available for outdoor home automation upgrades in 2024. 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.
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. With new models coming out for outdoor waterproof TV setups and surround sound speakers, there’s plenty of uses for an outdoor TV. Everyone’s first concern when it comes to putting a TV outdoors of course is how well it will weather the temperamental Bay Area weather. Thankfully, many companies offer TV models that are both weatherproof and reflection resistant, allowing for wide viewing angles with no glare for those bright sunny days. These outdoor TV models 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.
When it comes to outdoor TV systems, all of these models provide options such as partial shade, full shade, or full sun to give every installation location an appropriate model. 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, with most of them only allowing passive sound, and not active full surround sound, but adding a simple AMP and SUB to the setup will allow you to connect your Martin-Logan in-ceiling speakers to your outdoor TV setup. There are speaker options available for the outdoors from brands such as Near, along with many Patio and Garden speakers from Sonance.
Outdoor Speakers are a great companion for your outdoor TV as they can create new music zones and link your entire outdoor experience together. There are quite a few options available that can connect to your outdoor sound system for TV, music, and anything else you can think of. Popular 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 has a mauch more advanced Garden Series as well with comes with an AMP along with a SUB that can be buried into the ground along with all of the satellite speakers surrounding your patio area. Sonance also provides RK speakers which look like an ordinary rock in your landscaping.
While the SF Bay Area can have some really warm days, there’s also potential that the Summer fog will come in and bring some very cold nights as well. This of course causes quite a few issues when you want to entertain people with your brand new outdoor patio setup. Thankfully, Outdoor Heaters are a great addition at an affordable price 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 while you’re trying to enjoy your Summer movie night with friends.
The last important thing that comes to any perfect Summer outdoor experience is the pool. A fun day at the pool listening to some music on those Sonance outdoor patio speakers and watching a movie is what makes summer great, however there’s a way to create an even better experience by installing a pool controller to your system. Using pool controllers allows you to turn on lights on your pool, jets for added comfort, and much more. For those with heated pools, pool controllers can even control your outdoor sprinklers as well. Pentair offers some great choices for pool controllers.
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 your Hillsborough or Palo Alto outdoor setup. 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 at Regent5 can take it from there and automate everything together from Menlo Park to Atherton and anywhere else in the San Francisco Bay Area for homes that are in desperate need of an upgraded outdoor Summer setup.
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