Why an ELV quote takes three weeks, and what really happens in those weeks

Ask for a home automation quote in the UAE and you will usually be told it takes two to three weeks. Ask why, and you will hear the words "design desk". This is what tends to happen in those weeks. It is probably not what you imagine, and none of it is engineering.

Week one: the queue

Your plans go to the supplier's design desk, which is often one or two people serving every salesperson in the company, and your villa joins the pile behind the projects that are closer to signing. For days, nobody looks at your plans. When someone finally does, the first thing they do is ask the salesperson the questions the salesperson should have asked you: how many bedrooms are in scope, whether the client wants dimming, whether there is a maid's room. The salesperson calls you, and another day goes by.

Week two: the template

Next, the designer opens last month's villa and adjusts it. There is a keypad in every room because the template has one, and two screens in the majlis because the last client wanted two. The maid's room gets the same keypad as the master bedroom, and the camera count is whatever the last villa had. The parts are then looked up in the price list of the brand the supplier distributes, and the total is marked up.

This is where the number comes from. It is not the number your villa needs; it is the number the template produced, at a price that protects the supplier's margin on the brand they carry.

Week three: a margin review, not a design review

The quote then goes to a manager who checks the margin rather than the design, and from there back to the salesperson, who sends it to you under a cover email that says "as discussed". You open a PDF with a brand's logo on it, a list of part numbers you cannot read and one large number at the bottom. There is no room-by-room reasoning in it, because no room-by-room reasoning ever took place.

The expensive part comes after you sign

You sign, and the site starts. The electrician opens the drawing and finds "keypad, majlis" and nothing else: no height, no back box, no conduit and no cable. So he puts it where the socket is, the client walks in to find the keypad behind the door, and the variation begins. Many ELV variations are not changes of mind at all. They are gaps in the first-fix documents that the site filled in on its own, priced afterwards at variation rates.

Commissioning brings the rest. The screen in the majlis was never the thermostat, so a thermostat has to be added. The kitchen keypad has sixteen buttons because the template gave every circuit its own, and the client cannot remember which one is the cove. Nobody asks for a WiFi survey, because nobody ever promised coverage. The bill you signed and the villa you received were never the same document.

The engineering is a set of known rules

None of this is physics. The engineering of a villa's ELV is a set of rules. Each fixture type in each zone gets its own circuit, each room gets one primary control point at the door, and the buttons are scenes rather than one per circuit. Presence sensors light the corridors and utility rooms but are never the way a bedroom is lit, and the service rooms stay out of the automation while remaining on the WiFi. There is one wired access point for roughly every 100 square metres, a perimeter ring of cameras before any camera goes indoors, bus power budgeted in milliamps against the supply, and spare ways in the board.

Rules like these can be applied to a plan by software in hours rather than weeks. Applied properly, they produce a design that says where every device goes and why, a contractor schedule with heights and cable, and a bill in which every line has a reason. The three weeks were never the engineering. They were the queue, the template and the margin review.

What we did about it

We wrote the rules down, all of them, and built an engine that applies them to a floor plan. You send the plans and answer plain questions with your client, and the design and the bill come back in hours. An engineer at Homestat reads every design before it goes out. Every bill is priced at MSRP, system by system, so the number on it does not depend on who is asking, and brand names appear in the proposal rather than on the quantity lines. We also do not install, which means we have no reason to design you more parts than you need.

For a fit-out company pricing a tender, that is the difference between submitting a number you understand and submitting one you hope is right. For a homeowner, it is the difference between a quote and a design.

Send us your plans and time it.