Daniel J SaitIn a new exclusive series for EI, Wim De Vos, Founder of Genesis Home Technology Architects and serial CI investor, comments on some of the sector’s most important issues. This month, how DIY has actually helped pro installers.
For a decade, the story was that the smart home would go the way of everything else: order it online, do it yourself, cut out the professional. A lot of money was spent telling people they could do it themselves.
The reality is turning out differently. One in three smart home DIYers ends up calling a professional installer. Not because they could not buy the parts, but because buying the parts was never the hard part.
The DIY era did not kill the pro; it is quietly proving why the pro exists.
The number that ends the argument: DIY system uptime: 62%. Professional system uptime: 98%. A DIY home works roughly two days out of three. A professionally built one works essentially all the time.
In a premium home, where the client expects the lights, shades, security and entertainment to simply respond every time, 62% is not ‘smart’. It is a daily irritation with an app. You cannot Amazon-Prime your way to a home that just works. You can hire someone who has built two hundred of them.
DIY starts with the product. A clever gadget, a feature, a review watched online. Buy it, then buy the next one, then try to knot them together afterwards. The home is the last thing considered, not the first.
A professional starts with the end in mind: the experience the family should have and the promise that it will work seamlessly. They build from the foundation up: cabling, smart electrical infrastructure, network, layout and placement. The products come last, once the home is ready to carry them.
That order is the whole game. A decade ago the network was the conversation. Today smart electrical infrastructure matters just as much as a solid, secure network. Getting both right is a design decision made early, not a box chosen late. That makes the professional who designs and installs it more important than ever, not less.
Making 20 devices from eight different brands behave like one home is not a hobby. It is a craft. It is networking, interoperability and reliability – all the things that never show up in the product photo, but decide whether the house still works on a wet Tuesday in year three.
What starts as ‘plug and play’ quickly becomes ‘why won’t anything talk to each other?’ The answer is not a better gadget. It is knowledge, training and experience and none of that comes in the box. Google is not training; two hundred completed homes is.
Anyone can sell a client a device. Delivering the promise that the home will work quietly and beautifully for years is a different profession entirely. Quality and reliability do not happen by accident. They are the result of skill and professionalism applied on purpose.
Which is why ‘working properly’ should not be a happy surprise at handover. It should be a delivery spec: written down, expected and stood behind.
Finishing touch at the Genesis HTA Barcelona VIP Lounge 2021 (Javier Moreno and Ronny Meggio).
Here is the part the DIY story rarely mentions. A connected home is a living system and living systems drift. Devices update their software on their own schedules. One quiet overnight update and a bridge holding a DIY system together can disappear, taking everything sewn around it with it. A professional system is designed to survive that and looked after so it keeps surviving it.
The value of the professional is not a day of installation. It is years of a home that keeps its promise. At Genesis HTA we call the professional a Home Technology Architect for a reason. The word ‘installer’ undersells it. The person who makes a connected home behave is closer to an architect than an electrician: they design how the whole thing works and own the outcome. Whether they are the Home Technology Architect leading the design or the installer delivering it, they are the reason the project works.
It is worth being honest about how we got here. Some brands and some distributors built purely as webshops, spent years pushing DIY. Partly because it suited a short-term number and partly because they never truly understood or believed in the value a professional adds.
Now that the long game has proven them wrong, many are quietly turning back to the professional. Good. But the professional never left.
So, the message to the market is simple. The gadgets got cheaper. The promise got harder. And the professional who can deliver that promise is not a cost to design out of the project. They are the reason the project works.
Sources: DIY versus professional reliability figures from Parks Associates.