How Long Does a Home Automation Installation Take? A Stage-by-Stage Site Timeline

This is one of the first questions we are asked on site, and one of the least usefully answered in most quotations — a line saying "installation: 10 days" tells you nothing about which ten days or what has to be finished before each one. This article sets out the real sequence, with working-day figures we see repeatedly on projects across the city. It is part of our wider coverage of home automation in Hyderabad, and it assumes you are either building, renovating, or about to hand a flat to an interior contractor.

The shape of the calendar: two visits and a long gap

Strip the project down and there are only five stages. Two of them involve our team on site with tools, one involves nobody from our side at all, and the remaining two are drawing-board and commissioning work.

• Stage 1 — Design and sign-off. 10–15 working days. Site measurement, lighting and control layout, keypad schedule, load schedule, final quotation.
• Stage 2 — First fix. 2–3 days for a 3BHK, 5–7 days for a villa. Conduits, deep back-boxes, cable pulls, panel position. Must be complete before plastering.
• Stage 3 — The civil gap. 6–14 weeks. Plaster, false ceiling, flooring, joinery, putty, paint. No automation work happens.
• Stage 4 — Second fix. 3–4 days for a 3BHK, 7–10 days for a villa. Fixtures, drivers, curtain tracks and motors, keypads, modules, cameras.
• Stage 5 — Commissioning and handover. 1 day on site plus a revisit at 2–3 weeks. Addressing, scene programming, app setup, testing, sign-off.

Add the hands-on days and a 1,400–1,600 sq ft 3BHK comes to roughly five to eight working days of automation labour. A 3,500–4,500 sq ft villa with outdoor lighting, more curtain tracks and a camera set comes to roughly twelve to eighteen. The elapsed three to five months is almost entirely stage 3, which is your builder's schedule and not something any automation company controls.

A retrofit in an occupied flat behaves completely differently, because there is no civil gap to wait through. Most of our reversible retrofits are designed, installed and commissioned inside 3 to 6 working days from start to finish. If that is your situation, read can you add home automation during renovation in Hyderabad alongside this piece.

Stage 1 — design and sign-off (10–15 working days)

This stage produces paper, and it is the only stage where changes are free. It begins with a site visit while masonry is up and before conduiting starts. We measure room dimensions, slab and finished-ceiling heights, window widths and the depth available above them, switchboard positions and the route back to wherever the automation panel will live.

From that visit, four documents follow, and all four have to be signed before the electrician starts pulling wire:

• A lighting and control layout drawn on the same reflected ceiling plan your ceiling contractor uses, so the cove routes, downlight grid and fixture types are all on one sheet. If you have never had to read one, how to read a reflected ceiling plan walks through the symbols.
• A keypad schedule — where every keypad goes, how many buttons it carries, what each button is engraved with and what gang size the box has to be. Engraving is manufactured, not stuck on, so this list closes early; see how to plan keypad layouts and engraving.
• A load and channel schedule listing every dimmable circuit, its wattage and which channel it sits on, so nothing is discovered to be overloaded at commissioning. The arithmetic is covered in how to plan dimmer channels and lighting loads.
• A points drawing for the electrician — every conduit run, deep box, neutral, curtain point and spare draw wire.

Ten to fifteen working days sounds generous for four drawings. It is not, because the real time goes into three rounds of coordination with your architect, interior designer and electrician, each of whom is also still changing things. The projects that finish this stage in a week are the ones where the interior design is already frozen. Reading the commercial side of the same documents, how to read a home automation quotation explains which line items to check before you sign.

Stage 2 — first fix, before the plaster (2–7 days)

This is the stage with an immovable deadline. Everything here is buried in walls and ceilings, so it has to be finished before the plasterer starts, and there is no polite way to do it afterwards.

Our team works alongside your electrician for two to three days on an apartment, five to seven on a villa, covering:

• Conduiting and back-boxes. Deep boxes at every keypad location — a keypad needs meaningfully more depth behind it than a modular switch, and a standard shallow box is the most common reason a plate will not sit flush later.
• Neutral at every switch box. Non-negotiable, and worth doing even in rooms you do not plan to automate yet. The reasoning is set out in electrical safety and power protection for a smart home.
• Curtain points. A power point inside the pelmet or ceiling pocket at each window, positioned at the correct end of the track. The pocket dimensions themselves must already be on the ceiling drawing — how to plan curtain pelmets and ceiling pockets covers depths and stack space, and how to measure windows and choose tracks covers the measurement that decides the motor.
• Driver and service access. Locations fixed for every driver, with a reachable service point rather than a sealed void. Cove runs in particular need this settled now; see how to plan cove lighting in a false ceiling.
• Panel position and feed. The automation panel's wall space, ventilation and cable entries.
• Security cabling. Camera and sensor runs, door contact points and the main door prep.

Add half a day at the end for photographs. Every wall gets photographed with conduits exposed before plaster covers them, and those images go into the handover file. They are what makes a repair in year six a two-hour job instead of a demolition.

Stage 3 — the civil gap (6–14 weeks, and we are not there)

Nothing from the automation side happens here, and that surprises people. Plastering, false ceiling framing and boarding, flooring, modular joinery, putty and two or three coats of paint run their course. Six weeks is a fast apartment fit-out. Fourteen is normal for a villa with stone flooring and extensive carpentry.

Two things are worth doing during the gap even though no automation team is on site. First, one coordination visit when the false ceiling framing is up but before boarding closes, to confirm the cove depths and cutout positions actually match the drawing — ceiling contractors adjust dimensions on site more often than anyone admits, and a cove that has quietly become 60mm deep is much cheaper to catch now. Second, confirm your electrical supply and meter are live, because commissioning cannot happen on a generator or a temporary construction connection.

If your project is at an earlier point than this and you are trying to work out when to start the whole conversation, when to plan home automation during construction covers the decision stage by stage.

Stage 4 — second fix, after the final paint (3–10 days)

Second fix is the visible half, and its prerequisite is strict: the final coat of paint must be done, and flooring must be laid and protected. Fitting keypads and fixtures before the painter finishes means plates come off again, get masked, get splashed, or get scratched — and an automation company that agrees to do it anyway is agreeing to a callback.

Three to four days on a 3BHK, seven to ten on a villa, covering fixture installation and aiming, driver mounting, curtain track and motor installation with limit setting, keypad plates and modules, panel wiring and dressing, camera mounting and focus, and the main door hardware. On a villa the outdoor lighting usually adds a day of its own because it needs a night visit to aim properly.

Curtains deserve a note: the track goes up at second fix, but the fabric is stitched to a measurement taken from the installed track, not from the window. That means the tailor needs two to three weeks after track installation, which is why motorised curtains are often the last thing in the house to look finished even when the motors have been running for a fortnight.

Stage 5 — commissioning, scene tuning and handover

One full day on site, and it is the day the house stops being a set of devices and becomes a system. Every circuit is addressed and labelled, every keypad button is mapped, dimming curves are set per circuit, curtain open and close limits are fine-tuned, security devices are armed and tested, and the app is configured on the owners' phones.

Scene programming is deliberately done in the evening, in the finished and furnished room, because a 40% cove level that looks correct on a drawing at noon rarely looks correct at 9pm with the sofa in place. Then the household is walked through it — including the people who did not choose the system, which in most homes is the group that will actually use it most.

Build in a revisit at two to three weeks. Nearly every home wants adjustments once it has been lived in: a Good Night scene that turns out to be too dark on the landing, a curtain that should stop 100mm short, a button whose label made sense at the drawing stage and does not in the house. That revisit is part of the job, not a complaint. The full sign-off list is in our home automation handover and testing checklist, and what happens after that is covered in maintenance and support after installation.

Eight things that actually push the date

In our experience almost every delayed automation project traces to one of these, and only two of them are about the automation itself.

1. Calling the automation company after plastering. The most expensive week in the entire calendar. Conduits and deep boxes now have to be chased into finished walls, which adds cost, adds days, and leaves patches for the painter.
2. Scope changes after boxes are cast. Moving a switchboard 400mm, or changing a four-button keypad to six, is a drawing edit before first fix and a masonry job after it.
3. No neutral in a room someone decides to automate later. Usually discovered at second fix, when nothing can be done about it cheaply.
4. The pelmet that never got built. Curtain tracks arrive to find a 90mm pocket where 150mm was drawn, and the motor does not fit.
5. Late fixture selection. Lights chosen three weeks before second fix rather than at design stage, which invalidates the load schedule and sometimes the dimming type.
6. Painting still in progress. Second fix gets split into two visits, and the second visit competes with every other trade for the same week.
7. No permanent power at commissioning. Systems cannot be properly tested on a construction supply.
8. Ceiling built to a different dimension than drawn. Caught at the mid-gap coordination visit it costs an afternoon. Caught at second fix it costs a ceiling repair.

How to sequence us with your other contractors

If you hand your project manager one page from this article, make it this dependency list. Each item must be finished before the one after it starts.

1. Interior design and fixture selection frozen → automation design begins.
2. Automation drawings signed → electrician begins conduiting.
3. First fix complete and photographed → plastering begins.
4. False ceiling framing up → coordination visit to verify cove depths and cutouts.
5. Ceiling boarded, flooring laid, final paint coat dry → second fix begins.
6. Second fix complete, permanent power live, internet connection active → commissioning.
7. Commissioning complete → curtain fabric measured from installed tracks, stitched and hung.
8. Two to three weeks of living in the house → adjustment revisit and final sign-off.

Most of the friction in a smart-home build comes from steps 2 and 5 being skipped, because the electrician started before the drawings existed or the painter had not finished when second fix was scheduled. Both are calendar problems, not technical ones, which is exactly why they are worth fixing at the planning table. Our smart lighting, curtains, keypads and security all follow this same sequence, so one schedule covers the whole system rather than four separate ones.

How Pert delivers it — a designed solution, not a DIY kit

Pert is a solutions company. We design and install; we do not ship a box of parts for you to configure on a weekend. On a project of this kind that means a measured site visit before conduiting, a drawing set your electrician, ceiling contractor and interior designer all work from, our team present on site for first fix and second fix, commissioning done in the finished room at night rather than remotely, a handover file with pre-plaster photographs and a labelled panel, and a scheduled revisit once you have actually lived with the scenes.

It also means we will tell you when the site is not ready. Fitting keypads onto unpainted walls or commissioning on a construction supply produces a job that looks finished and behaves badly, and the callbacks cost everyone more than the wait would have. If you are still comparing providers, best home automation companies in Hyderabad covers what to check before you sign, including how a company schedules its site work.

Frequently asked questions

How many days does a home automation installation actually take?

About 5 to 8 working days of on-site work for a typical 3BHK, and 12 to 18 for a 3,500–4,500 sq ft villa. Those days are not consecutive: a 2–3 day first fix before plastering, a 3–4 day second fix after the final paint, and a commissioning day at the end, with 6 to 14 weeks of civil and interior work in between during which the automation team is not on site.

Why does a smart home project stretch over three to five months?

Because the elapsed calendar belongs to your civil and interior schedule, not to the automation scope. Conduits must go in before plaster; keypads, fixtures and curtain tracks can only go in after plaster, ceiling, flooring and paint. A retrofit in an occupied flat, where none of that work exists, is usually complete in 3 to 6 working days.

What is the single biggest cause of delay?

Calling the automation company after the plastering is done. Every conduit, deep back-box and neutral then has to be chased into finished walls, adding cost, days and patch repairs. The second biggest is a scope change after the drawings are signed and the boxes are already cast into the wall.

When should the automation team first visit the site?

When masonry is up and the electrician is about to begin conduiting. That leaves 10 to 15 working days for site measurement, a lighting and control layout, a keypad schedule and a load schedule to be produced and signed off, so first fix runs from an agreed drawing rather than from improvisation.