Builders: plan cameras, the security panel, door sensors, doorbells and smart locks before drywall. A Central Oregon security pre-wire guide and checklist.

Builders: prevent Wi-Fi dead zones and smart-home callbacks by planning cabling, access points and the equipment closet before drywall. A Central Oregon guide.

Where to point security cameras, how high to mount them, and where not to put them. A room-by-room guide from a Central Oregon camera installer.

Frozen pipes, long nights and empty second homes. Here are the five Alarm.com products we'd set up in a Central Oregon home before the first hard freeze.

Sonos 27, AI control, Beam Ultra, Ace Ultra, Sonos Play, Era 100 SL and the new Amp Multi. Here's what changed in 2026, what we'd use in a Central Oregon home, and where we'd wait.

How Bend interior designers can turn a mood board into lighting and shade scenes: what to decide before rough-in, and how to approve keypads and fabric.

In June, Bend's sun sets at 8:51 p.m., north of west. How we plan Lutron shades and lighting to cut the glare and keep your Cascade view all day.

A Central Oregon integrator on concealing speakers, Wi-Fi, cameras, keypads and racks — and where hiding technology starts to cost you.

A Central Oregon designer's checklist for what to settle before walls close: TVs, keypads, shade pockets, Wi-Fi, cameras, the rack — and by when.

It comes up on almost every security consultation, usually near the end, usually a little sheepishly. "Does this get me anything off my insurance?" Short answer: probably a little. Nobody will tell you exactly how much, and there's a real reason for that. Longer answer, and the one worth your time: in Central Oregon right now, the alarm credit is usually the smallest lever you have. There's a much larger one sitting right next to it — and on a wildfire-related increase, Orego

A customer falls outside a Bend storefront on a Tuesday morning in January. Nobody calls an ambulance. Nobody fills out an incident report. Everyone gets on with their day. The business hears about it eleven days later, when a letter arrives. There was a camera over that entrance the whole time. It was working. It recorded the fall, the ice, the twenty minutes before and the hour after. And it's gone. The camera was recording in 4K to a card that held about nine days, and the

What a smart thermostat actually saves in Central Oregon, why the Oregon rebate rules flipped on January 1, 2026, and the two things that really go wrong on an install here — the wire and the Wi-Fi.

Most smart homes don't fail. They just get ignored. The lights work. The shades work. The thermostat, the cameras, the locks, the speakers — all of it works. But four of the five apps sit in a folder on page three of somebody's phone, and after about a month the house goes back to being operated by hand, one switch at a time. That isn't a technology problem. It's a design problem, and it has a name: nobody built the scenes. A smart home system starts paying for itself the day

Protect your Central Oregon home while traveling with smart cameras, locks, sensors, lighting, monitoring, wildfire prep, and outage-ready security.

If you own a home or business in Central Oregon with an electric gate, you don't need to tear it out to get app control. That surprises most people. They assume a gate installed in 2004 is a 2004 gate forever — that adding your phone to the equation means a new operator, new hardware, and a project that eats a weekend and a good chunk of budget. It usually doesn't. A retrofit controller like the Remootio 3 wires into the gate you already own and adds smart access in an aftern

Automation used to be a novelty. Now it's just how a well-built home or business runs. Lights that respond to the time of day. A security system that arms itself when you leave. One app that controls all of it, instead of six. At SecuraCore, we design and install automation systems for homes and businesses across Bend, Sunriver, Sisters, and the rest of Central Oregon. Not a pile of disconnected smart gadgets — one system, designed right, that works the way you actually live

The landscaping is sharp, the paint is fresh, and the buyer walking through has already decided the yard looks great. Then they stop at the front door and ask something the sign in the yard didn't answer: does the camera stay? Can I run the thermostat from my phone? Will the Wi-Fi actually reach the office in the back bedroom? Those questions didn't used to come up on a first showing. Now they're routine, and they're doing real work — they tell a buyer whether a home is finis

If you already have Lutron lighting and Sonos speakers in your Central Oregon home, there's a feature sitting in your Lutron app that a surprising number of homeowners have never turned on. Sonos Voice Control can operate your Lutron lights, dimmers, and shades. No Alexa. No Google Home. No extra speaker on the counter. You say "Hey Sonos, turn on the kitchen lights," and the Sonos speaker you already own does it. We turn this on for clients regularly, and the reaction is alm

When someone calls us about smart lighting, they've usually already Googled it and landed on Lutron. Fair enough. Lutron makes excellent products and we install a lot of them. But Lutron isn't the only right answer, and picking the platform before you've looked at the house is backwards. We install Z-Wave lighting through Alarm.com every week, and in plenty of Central Oregon homes it's the better call. In other homes it isn't close, and Lutron wins. Here's how we actually dec

For years, the answer to "can we motorize these windows?" in a finished home was some version of yes, but. Yes, but we'll need to open the wall. Yes, but you'll be patching and repainting. Yes, but the window over the stairwell is going to be a problem. Battery-powered shades removed most of that. Lutron's wire-free lines — Serena, Triathlon, and Palladiom Wire-Free — install with brackets and screws, run on D-cell batteries, and talk to the rest of the system over Lutron's o