It’s no secret that I’m a home control junkie. I’ve designed and installed a number of systems over the years and frequently written about the various interfaces I’ve attached. While some people use home control as sophisticated alarm systems or to enhance elaborate home entertainment installations, my application is primarily coordinated video and sensor monitoring.

Since I like spending more time at the “cottage” these days, my HCS is designed specifically to make sure that my house is still there when I return. Believe me, when you have as many miles of wire and powered devices (dozens) running all the time as I do, the mean time between failure (MTBF) of some device is always ending. Some are more critical than others.

On my first trip away last fall, there was a cold snap and the oil burners were getting their first real winter test. I could see that the guest room thermostat was calling for heat, the oil burner had turned on the circulator pump, there was heated water in the boiler, and that the temperature in the guest room was 55°. The bad news was that after 10 h the circulator was still running and the room was still 55°. Obviously, the heating zone was air-bound or the circulator pump was bad. Returning to a house with cracked or frozen pipes would not have been good. A quick call to John Gorsky at the office and the oil burner service company was at the house replacing a bad circulator pump within a few hours. Of course, I watched the whole replacement procedure via my web cams.

I’m not obsessive about watching all this stuff. My system is designed so that once a day I just have to look at an Excel sheet—which polls my sensors and gives a go/no-go status—and look at the driveway entry/exit log (Priority Interrupt #196) to know everything is OK. An HCS simply adds peace of mind for me. Ironically, however, a recent event demonstrated that my particular HCS configuration might have actually saved someone’s life.

A few months ago, I was doing my daily check-in. At 10 A.M., I pulled up the entry/exit log and saw that a car had entered my driveway at 8 P.M. the previous evening. More curiously, the log showed an entry but no exit! Magnetic driveway sensors don’t usually miss a whole car!

Next, I pulled up the web cam facing the driveway. It has internal flash memory and records about 30 s of video each time the driveway sensor is tripped. I could clearly see that a silver car came in at 8 P.M. OK, so where did it go after that? Unless you had a four-wheel drive vehicle and an adventurous personality, you were driving back out the same way you came in.

I started flipping on some of the other web cams around the property and, lo and behold, there was a silver Honda sitting at the end of the driveway headed toward the gravel road into the woods. I turned the 21× optical zoom toward the car and wrote down the license plate number. Then, as I panned around a bit more, I saw what looked like movement in the car. Say what?

I switched to another 21× PTZ camera so I could get a closer look at the car and pulled in tight on the driver’s side window. Even through all the reflections on the glass I could see that there was a white-haired person sitting in the car. Since no other sensor on the property had been tripped, this person had clearly been sitting in the car since 8 P.M. the night before! It had been 10°F that night.

I called the office and asked John and Sean Donnelly to take a ride over to the house to check it out and call the police if necessary. About 10 min. later, I got a call from the Connecticut State Police asking why someone else was calling the police for my property. I explained that although I was sitting hundreds of miles away, I could see that there was someone in my driveway who shouldn’t be there and might be in trouble. I explained that I was doing it via the Internet and web cams.

Of course, you know you live in a small town when it apparently rings a bell loud enough that the state trooper replies, “Are you that guy with all that electronics all over his house and yard?” Over the years, there have been a few times when the fire department and resident state troopers have shown up at my house (like when they were chasing a perpetrator who came ripping up my driveway and over the cliff behind the garage). “Yeah, that’s me,” I told the trooper.

This event was covered on television and in the newspapers, but to make a long story short, the woman apparently had Alzheimer’s disease. Her husband had left the car running while he went into a Wal-Mart and when he came out, the car was gone. The state police instituted a statewide search (using helicopters) while she was driving the considerable distance that led her to my driveway that night. Considering the low temperatures and her apparent objection to exiting the car or otherwise seeking help, the rescue personnel believed she would not have lasted another night.

So, this is one HCS-monitored event that had a very happy ending. From my side of things, it was a media event for the next couple hours as I watched while piles of state and local police cars, rescue personnel, and an ambulance all jammed into my driveway. Needless to say, the entry/exit log on my HCS and the web cams captured everything.