3 Tips for Choosing Commercial Products

As the housing market has slowed to a crawl, many integrators are looking to commercial installs for a greater percentage of their overall sales.

Even as retail or residential businesses are flat or declining, the demand for commercial installs remains strong.

The result is that dealers who do a balance of commercial and residential work are focusing more on the commercial side, and dealers who were primarily residential are reinventing themselves in order to cater to the commercial market, sometimes for the first time.

For a seasoned integrator who does both residential and commercial jobs, there's little difference in what they specify into both kinds of projects.

But for residential integrators who haven't had much exposure to commercial installs, there are some guidelines to follow when choosing commercial CE products.

Keep the Vendors to a Minimum

This is a cardinal rule of thumb for any kind of installation, but for integrators whose background is retail CE goods, the temptation of mixing and matching the best features of multiple brands can be overwhelming.

That was certainly my mentality when I just started out.

However, the more vendors you have connected to each other, the greater the level of complexity your controls will require, and it'll likely make troubleshooting problems that much more challenging.

Fortunately for you, control systems vendors, regardless of whom they are, offer components that will do pretty much everything you need, from video and audio distribution to telecom and more.

Being partnered with a control vendor is the simplest and best way to use the least number of vendors in your designs.

Control-system Friendly

With the first step out of the way, you need to focus on products that are easily controllable. This isn't always easy.

Sometimes it requires experimentation or research online to determine if a Blu-ray player or video display can be easily controlled.

A programmer friend recently regaled me with the lengths he's sometimes had to go to in order to scrounge up discrete codes for IR-controlled products in cases where the vendor has them, but doesn't readily share them.

The importance of having your hardware be easily controlled can't be understated. Unless, of course, you really enjoy making repeated service calls.

Here's a perfect example: video distribution. Ensuring that twenty flat panels all do what they're supposed to is a piece of cake with serial control or IP functionality. With IR, not so much.

Durability and Simplicity Above All

In commercial installs, you want hardware that focuses on reliability more than shiny bells and whistles.

Most commercial projects will end up being used all day, every day, and you need to focus on brands that concern themselves with that.

In addition, commercial installs can have dozens of end users, none of whom will end up being around for your training session once the job is complete. With that in mind, you need to ensure that it's as hard as possible for one of them to screw things up.

Someone once said that nothing is foolproof, because fools are ingenious.

But small steps, such as being able to lock out all the buttons on the front consoles of your hardware, can go a long way to preventing well-meaning end-users from throwing the whole system out of whack by pushing buttons.

Commercial and residential installs are not world's apart. Forethought and prudence in your product selections will simplify your design and install processes, and help you produce effective, profitable installations.

Lee Distad is a freelance CEDIA Certified Professional Designer who offers design and process consultation to firms in the Custom Installation industry, as well as copy writing and other professional writing services. Lee’s business and industry blog can be read at http://www.leedistad.com