The questions worth asking before you hire anyone to wire your home
Updated: Aug 28
Choosing a smart home company is one of the few decisions about your house that you cannot inspect before you commit to it. We design, install and service these systems across Houston, Austin, San Antonio and the Hill Country, and what follows is the list of questions we would want anyone to ask, including us. We also travel for projects, so out-of-state work is not unusual for us.
You can walk a finished kitchen and tell whether the joinery is good. You can taste the food before you book the caterer. A home technology system gives you nothing to look at — it is invisible by design, and the parts that matter most are the parts nobody can inspect. How the network was laid out. Whether the lighting will still behave in five years. What happens at seven o'clock on the evening you have people over.
So the decision usually gets made on the signals that are visible instead: the logos on a website, the size of a showroom, the number at the bottom of a page. None of those predict how a system will behave once you are actually living in it.
These six questions do. They aren't about us — any good company should be able to answer them well, and you should expect specific answers rather than reassuring ones. We've included ours so you can see what specific looks like.
1 — When something stops working, who picks up the phone?
The answer you're listening for isn't a promise about response times. It's whether a person answers at all. A house full of technology will eventually need somebody, and the difference between a good decade and a frustrating one is almost entirely about how easy that somebody is to reach.
StroTek — Our office line is answered by a person during business hours. It takes texts, and we answer those too. You won't be routed through a menu, and you won't be left wondering whether the message landed.
2 — Does everything actually talk to each other, or is something translating?
"Works with" covers two very different situations. Either the pieces speak the same language natively, or there's a translator box sitting between them. Translated connections are often one-way: the shade closes when you press the button, but it can't report back where it is, so the system never quite knows the state of your house. That distinction is invisible on the day of installation. It shows up two years later as the thing that sometimes doesn't work.
Ask which connections in your design are native and which need a bridge. A company that can answer that quickly has thought about it.
StroTek — We hold direct authorisations with Lutron, Control4, Savant, Josh.AI, Kaleidescape, Sony, Bang & Olufsen, Leon Speakers and others, so we can design around native connections wherever they exist. Where a product you love needs a bridge, we'll say so plainly, and tell you exactly what you give up by choosing it.
3 — Are they licensed to touch the security system?
In Texas, installing or servicing an alarm system requires a licence from the Department of Public Safety's Private Security Bureau. A great many capable audio-video companies don't hold one, which means your cameras, alarm and access control become a second company's scope. The seam between two companies is where things get lost, and it is always discovered at the worst possible moment.
StroTek — We're licensed for it. Cameras, alarm and access are ours, designed with the rest of the system rather than bolted onto it afterwards, and serviced by the same people who installed everything else.
4 — Will it work for someone who doesn't know how it works?
The real test is never you. It's your mother, a houseguest, the person who looks after the house when you travel, forty people on a Saturday evening. If a system needs a tutorial, it isn't finished. It's been handed to you half-built with the remaining assembly left as your problem.
Complexity is easy to mistake for sophistication. It is usually the opposite: the sign of a design that ran out of time before it got simple.
StroTek — We design for the person who has never seen it before. Keypads that say what they do in plain words. The same behaviour in every room. If we ever have to teach you a workaround, we've got something wrong and we'd rather fix it than explain it.
5 — What happens if the person who programmed it moves on?
This is the question almost nobody asks, and the one that costs the most. Ask what gets documented and what gets left in somebody's head: labelled equipment, as-built drawings, a written record of how the system is configured. Undocumented systems are the reason homeowners end up replacing equipment that had nothing wrong with it. It was simply cheaper than working out what the last company did.
StroTek — We label and document as we go, and the documentation belongs to you. You should be able to hand it to any competent person and have them understand your house. You shouldn't be dependent on anyone's memory, including ours.
6 — When it isn't clear whose fault it is, who owns it?
The internet drops. Is it the provider, the router, the switch, the television, the company that installed the television, or the electrician who was in the attic last week? You should never be the one running that investigation, and you certainly shouldn't be the one refereeing it.
StroTek — If something in a system we installed isn't working, it's ours to chase down, including the parts we didn't sell you. Working out where the fault actually sits is the job, not a separate service.
The best technology in a building is the technology nobody thinks about.
You notice a lighting system the evening it won't come on. You notice a network the day it drops during a call. The rest of the time, a system that has been designed properly simply gets out of the way, and the work that makes that happen is all the work you never see.
That's as true of a restaurant dining room or an office floor as it is of a house. Anywhere people are living or working, the technology has to disappear behind the experience, or it becomes the experience.
It's why we'd rather be judged on the questions above than on a photograph. And it's why, when we're asked what we do, the honest answer isn't a list of equipment: we make every space intelligent, and then we make it quiet.
If you're planning a build or a renovation, or living with a system that has never worked the way it should, we'd be glad to talk it through. Send us a note through the site, or call or text the office at 832-295-9098.
Houston · Austin · San Antonio · the Hill Country
StroTek LLC · TX PSB Lic. B29770101
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