Owner's Manual (Complete)

The Home Control Assistant

Chapter 3

Your Home

You’ve already read the introduction to the Home Control Assistant and learned about HCA

Properties. Now you’re ready to create you own home design in HCA. This chapter tells you how

to create a design, and save it in a file. This chapter also discusses simple modifications to your

home properties, and security options for your design.

This chapter includes topics on:

 Planning your home design

 The Quick Start Wizard

 The New Home Wizard

 Modifying your home file

 Light and Dark settings

 Security settings

Planning your home design

There are two ways to begin a new home using HCA:

 A guided process called the Quick Start Wizard can be used. This wizard starts with an

automation tutorial and then guides you through each room of your home and makes

suggestions about where automation might be used. The Quick Start Wizard creates a

complete home design with devices, programs, groups, schedules, and displays.

 A much simpler wizard, the New Home Wizard, can be used that creates an empty design for

you to add devices, schedule, programs, etc., using the various HCA wizards.

Regardless of which of these methods is used to create a new home, there are two important pieces

of information you’ll be asked to supply.

Design name

You must supply a name for your design. This name appears in the HCA title bar when this design

is loaded, but this need not be the file name that the design is stored in. If you like, you can create

several designs, each with a unique name, and in a different file (you may want to do this if you’re

trying different approaches with your programs and schedules).

Location

You must also supply the location of your home. HCA provides a list of zip codes for United

Sates locations. For outside of that area you can configure by entering in your location

information.

HCA uses your location to compute the sunrise and sunset times for your schedules. HCA also

relies on the time zone you have selected in the Windows control panel Date/Time settings tool. If

you select a location in HCA that is in a different time zone from the one you have set in the

control panel, the sunrise and sunset times may appear to be off. So, remember to check your

control panel time zone selection.