As experienced smart home installers, we often get asked one key question: How much will it cost?
While design and installation costs will naturally vary from project to project, we understand that "it depends" isn't the most helpful answer. As a result, we’ve produced this guide to provide ballpark figures for different elements of a smart home project.
To provide a real-world example, we’ve based our price estimates on a ‘template’ 5-bedroom property. All our price estimates will include parts, labour, and any peripherals.
This guide aims to help you estimate budgets, avoid any nasty surprises, and give you a benchmark to indicate if a quote is either coming in a bit steep or suspiciously cheap.
Smart lighting will vary in cost, depending on the size and layout of your home. Equipping a standard 5-bed home with smart lighting will cost approximately £15,000, and some of the higher end or more custom systems can cost upwards of £25,000-£35,000.
Each lighting circuit (any group of lights that would typically be operated by a single light switch) will cost £150-£250, depending on scale and complexity.
If you opt for LED strips, rather than smart light bulbs, this will set you back around £100 per linear metre for a single colour, and £200 for changeable colour, including hardware and installation.
For lighting controls, Control4 touchpads offer a more elegant alternative to grid switches and cost around £500 per switch to retrofit, and £250 for a new build. They also give you far greater control over lighting warmth and brightness.
With a hands-free operated lighting system, you can expect to pay about £250 for each motion sensor, whether indoors or outdoors.
If you’re looking for a more customised solution, it may be worth working with a professional lighting designer. This obviously gives you far greater control over the project and would come at a cost of around £1,000-£5,000 for a five-bed family home.
Automated curtains and smart blinds are designed to be effortlessly managed using a control panel, voice commands, or mobile app. They can even be programmed to operate fully automatically based on weather and light conditions.
You can expect automated blinds to cost around £800-£1,300 each for a standard window size of ~80-100cm wide, whereas automated curtain tracks for larger windows or doors usually cost around £2,000-£2,500.
Things to Consider:
Your fabric and finish choice will make a big difference to the final cost, potentially adding up to £600 to the cost of each blind.
To get a true blackout effect, you may want to add side channels to your blinds so no light can escape around the periphery. These start at around £750.
Similarly, if you want your curtain track to be hidden, it will cost around £1,800 to build it into the lintel of your window frame.
For smart sound system design, each room of your house counts as a “zone”, and the cost per zone for a multi-room audio system will be roughly £800-£1,200. This figure includes speakers, fire hoods, amplifiers and cabling.
For a cleaner more minimalist aesthetic, you can opt for ‘invisible’ speakers, such as those supplied by our partner Sonance. These are built into your walls and then finished over with the surrounding surface to leave no sign of their presence, without any compromise on sound quality.
As impressive as these speakers are, they are more expensive than conventional options. At around an extra £500 per zone, you can expect your total cost to be £1,300-£1,800 per room with invisible speakers.
To add a subwoofer to boost your bass, you should budget for an additional cost of £600-£1,500 per room.
Most of your video equipment will be stored in a rack and hidden away, with the signal sent to whichever room requires it. For each room or “zone” where you require video, costs will be roughly between £800 and £1,200, excluding the screen. This will rise to £1,000-£1,200 if you opt for in-ceiling speakers, which are more aesthetically pleasing but more costly to install.
For the screens themselves, you should expect to budget anything from £1,000 to £20,000 for a TV in a ‘main viewing room’, like kitchens or living rooms, and £800-£2,000 for ‘secondary rooms’, such as offices and bedrooms.
A basic media room setup, with a simple soundbar and subwoofer, should come in at around £15,000-£20,000.
For a richer viewing experience you can take the next step up to a full home cinema room, complete with a screen, projector, seating, and surround sound. You can expect a lower-end home cinema to set you back around £30,000.
For a mid-range home cinema, with professional acoustic treatment and complete light blocking to create a blacked-out room, prices sit between £50,000 and £80,000.
For a complete cinema experience, you can expect to pay somewhere between £50,000 and £100,00 for a top-end setup, with all of the above and complete acoustic treatment.
Adding mood lighting in the form of a starlight ceiling will cost around £10,000 for a decent-sized cinema room.
Finally, if you want the flexibility of having a space which can double as a home cinema, you may be interested in a stealth cinema. This is where the screen and projector are hidden away and can be revealed when required. A setup of this kind will cost between £20,000 and £35,000.
For “Daybed”-style cinema seating, you should be looking at around £5,000-£10,000 per item, although we typically find our clients prefer to source their own seating.
Naturally, you’ll want your smart home to be safe and secure. Equipping it with a four-camera remotely accessible CCTV security system, with no AI, will start at around £3,000.
Prices for a smart alarm system for the same property begin around £4,000. Costs will vary depending on the sensors you choose, but can include third-party monitoring.
Adding smoke detectors to this setup will cost around £2,500.
With a wide range of smart home devices all requiring internet connection, this places far higher demands on your internet usage, and requires a more complex WiFi system. Mesh WiFi setups ensure there are no dead zones or points of weak connection and would cost around £5,000 for a 5-bedroom home.
If you have outbuildings that require internet connection, you will have to account for the cost of running cables out to them, which can prove costly.
For smart heating control of a 5-bedroom house with a hybrid heating system (underfloor heating downstairs and radiators upstairs with smart thermostats), prices start at around £8,000-£10,000.
Centralised smart home hubs consolidate the management of separate smart home technologies by integrating their controls into a single device. The most suitable option is a Control4 touchscreen system, which will cost between £800-£1,200.
To control your audio and visual devices, prices for a conventional remote start at about £250. Alternatively, a remote with a touchscreen, as well as hard buttons, along with a charging dock will cost £650.
A basic video intercom (touchscreen with a call button) will start from around £900, rising to about £1,300-£1,400 for a video intercom with a keypad and gate control systems.
Automation for a gate will set you back around £6,000, to which you will obviously have to add the cost of the gate itself. Gate prices will vary considerably depending on style and material, so to learn more about your options, check out our blog, “How to Choose the Perfect Home Security Gate”.
If you are looking for a video doorbell and don’t want an off-the-shelf option such as Ring, Control4 has its own offer, starting at around £700, which can be fully integrated with other devices, such as smart speakers or audio systems.
For an even more sophisticated system, you may want to consider a fingerprint scanner or mobile phone reader for access to your home. These start from around £2,000 each.
The processor is central to the smooth running of smart home systems. The number of processor units you need will depend on the size of your home, but for a 5-bedroom property, a £3,000 spend should see you sufficiently covered. Choosing a faster option to allow for potential future needs will set you back around £3,500-£4,000.
You will also need additional processors to connect various other systems in your smart home. The good news is that these processors can be more basic and cost-effective, at around £750-£1,000. In a 5-bedroom property you will usually need 2 or 3 of these.
All your processor units will be kept out of sight, housed in a piece of hardware called a ‘rack’. For our example property, a rack, with the connections for all of the processors, will cost between £1,000 and £3,000.
This rack will also contain a UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) to ensure your systems keep running even if you lose the power to the house. The price will vary depending on how long you want this battery backup to last, but as a ballpark figure, you can expect to pay £1000-£3,000.
In total, a rack for a 5-bedroom house will come in at around £15,000-£20,000.
Though it might not be the most exciting part of a smart home project, preparatory work will influence the success of every installation, and can make up a large portion of your final cost.
This will include cable installation, first fit, specialist back boxes, running cables from origin to termination point, testing the cabling and fitting your finished infrastructure. Pre-wiring also ensures that everything is in place if you want to add further smart systems to your home in the future. For our example 5-bed property, preparatory work would likely come in at £10,000-£15,000.
Even the most reliable technology will go wrong from time to time, and so to make sure your smart home is back up and running as soon as possible, we offer servicing and maintenance packages starting at around £300/month. This will, of course, vary according to the amount of smart technology installed in your home.
Investing in a smart home is more than just a financial commitment - it's a step towards enhancing your daily life with unparalleled convenience, comfort, and energy efficiency. From automating your lighting and heating systems to creating a bespoke home cinema experience, the costs can vary widely based on your specific needs and preferences.
In terms of the overall cost, if you simply want automated systems (lighting, heating, security, blinds/curtains) controlled by one device, that will cost in the region of £25,000 - £50,000. Throw audio and visual equipment into the mix, and that price quickly rises to around £75,000 - £150,000.
Remember, partnering with a reputable and experienced smart home installer like Chris Lewis Group ensures your vision is brought to life seamlessly. We guide you through the entire process, from initial design to final installation, providing expertise, support, and ongoing maintenance to keep your smart home running smoothly for years to come.
Looking for a more tailored quote? Contact us today with your brief and one of our specialist smart home designers will be in touch shortly.