Automating your home
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3. Finally enable standby power control in the appliance settings and push OK to save your settings
and activate the control.
3.6. Advanced automation
3.6.1. Appliance Groups
Appliance groups are a great way to control a set of appliances at once or use one appliance as
a "master controller" for all other appliances. For instance if you have a home office with a PC,
printer, scanner and a screen, set the PC as the master of this group. When you shut down the
PC, all other appliances will shut down automatically, too. No more standby power.
Read more about setting up Appliance Groups at Section 6.2.2, “Appliance groups”.
3.6.2. Themes
Themes are predefined states that let you set your home to a certain "mood" with one click. They
are also handy in programming routine tasks for saving energy, such as controlling many appliances
as a group, timing energy saving or advanced tariff control rules. Unlike Appliance Groups, themes
give you very fine grained control of what happens. In a Theme some appliances may actually
switch ON while others switch OFF. You can program these moods to happen as a sequence i.e.
first shut down the lights, then turn on music, etc.
Read more about setting up themes at Section 6.3.1, “Themes”.
3.6.3. Multi-step sequences
Sometimes controlling an appliance is not just a simple task of turning the power ON or OFF. For
instance when shutting down a PC computer, it is highly recommended that you let the computer
first shut down gracefully before switching off the power. Certainly if you use a laptop, just un-
plugging the power would not be enough as the computer would stay on with its battery power.
To control such situations, you need a multi-step control. A multi-step control lets you combine
many controllers into a sequence and have them wait for each other to complete before moving
on. For instance in shutting down a PC, the sequence would comprise a shutdown command from
the Asema PC client, a delay that waits until the PC shuts down, and finally a controller to turn
off any standby power.
