Field guide
For the person who already owns the expensive system.
Almost everything written about KNX is aimed at electricians or at people being sold something. This is aimed at the owner — what you actually have, what it genuinely does better than anything else, and precisely where its limits are. We have tried to be useful whether or not you ever buy anything from us.
The framework
Five levels of home intelligence.
Every product in this market now claims AI, which makes the word useless for telling products apart. This ladder does. Each level is defined by one capability the level below cannot provide, and the placements include the uncomfortable ones — a flagship Savant installation and a supermarket motion sensor sit on the same rung.
The levels in full →It is also the most useful thing to take into a showroom. Three questions place any product on it, and they take a salesperson about thirty seconds to fail.
Level 0
Manual
- What it adds
- Nothing — and it is not a failure state.
- Where it stops
- A well-designed manual house with good switches in the right places is more pleasant than most automated ones. Every level above has to preserve it.
Who sells this
- A switch
- Your grandmother’s house
Level 1
Scheduled
- What it adds
- Action without a person present.
- Where it stops
- A schedule is a guess about the future, made once. Right about the average day, wrong about every particular one. It cannot know you are away, that it rained, or that the room is already warm.
Who sells this
- Timers
- Most “smart” heating
Level 2
Scened
- What it adds
- Response to the world, not just the clock.
- Where it stops
- Every response is a photograph taken once. No memory, so nothing improves. No model of the building, so behaviour is hand-wired per address. No arbitration, so conflicts resolve by whichever instruction arrived last.
A flagship installation and a supermarket motion sensor sit on this rung together. The expensive one is better executed. It is doing the same category of thing.
Who sells this
- Control4
- Savant
- Crestron Home
- KNX logic modules
Level 3
Assisted
- What it adds
- You no longer need to know the system’s vocabulary.
- Where it stops
- Assistance is still instruction. The house does nothing until asked. A perfect Level 3 system in an empty room does nothing at all, for ever, because its whole function is turning requests into actions.
Putting a language model in front of a rules engine improves the front door and changes nothing behind it. The house did not become more aware. It became more articulate.
Who sells this
- Josh.ai
- Homey
- LLM assistants
Level 4
Autonomous
- What it adds
- It stops needing to be asked.
- Where it stops
- Requires all three of: a model of the building, a durable memory, and an arbiter with enforced precedence. Any two of the three produce something worse than Level 2, not better.
Commercially this rung is close to empty, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. One instrumented house, and it is ours.
Who sells this
- Casient
Three questions
Where does your house sit?
Answer honestly rather than hopefully. It takes about twenty seconds, nothing is sent anywhere, and the same three questions work on any salesperson.
Answer all three to place your house
The guide.
- 0112 min
What is KNX, and why does my expensive system still feel dumb?
KNX in plain English
What the standard actually is, the three things it does better than anything else on the market, and the three things it structurally cannot do — which is where every owner's frustration comes from.
Read → - 0211 min
I've been offered a hub that connects my KNX to an app. Is that the upgrade?
Why a bridge is not a brain
Homey, Josh.ai, a Control4 processor with a KNX driver — they all do the same thing, they all do it well, and none of them does the thing most owners actually want. Here is how to tell the difference before you buy.
Read → - 0314 min
Every product claims AI now. What is the difference between any of them?
What "AI in the home" actually means
Five levels of home intelligence, what separates each from the next, and an honest account of where the products you can currently buy actually sit — most of them two rungs below where they are marketed.
Read → - 049 min
What do all these terms in my documentation actually mean?
The language of your installation
A working glossary for the owner of a high-end system — written so that you can hold your own in a conversation with an integrator, and spot the places where the vocabulary is hiding a limitation.
Read →
The comparison
Casient against Homey, Josh.ai, Control4, Savant and Home Assistant.
A matrix of what each one architecturally can and cannot do, and an explicit recommendation to buy one of them instead where that is the right answer. Four of the five verdicts are not us.
These pieces are written for an owner to read and for a partner to send. If you install KNX for a living and want them under your own cover, that is part of the partnership.
Become a partner