It's been about a month since I flew down to Orlando for Electronic House Expo and sat down with representatives of the Consumer Electronics Association to discuss their brand-new TechHome Rating System. Media outlets, including DIGITAL HOME, have announced its existence, but none has broken it down. Our regular writer Dan Daley has been on the job and wrote up a two-part story. But I've been debating internally what I think about the TechHome Rating System. Now I wanted to share my mental deliberations.

But first off, why do I (and should you) care?

The TechHome Rating System, or something similar (no other exists that I know of), is an important concept. Like LEED or Energy Star, it's envisioned to communicate at-a-glance the extent of a digital home's technology systems; to describe to all involved in the designing, building, buying, and selling of homes the value of home technology. As I said repeatedly to the CEA folks I met with at EHX, I want it—or something like it—to succeed. It would be important to builders, installers, and home buyers as digital homes (or homes with electronic amenities built in, or however you want to describe them) gain prominence. I love this stuff; it's important; and home buyers should be able to rest assured their home has the technology required to support all the cool systems they might want.

But for this or any other rating system to succeed, I think some key questions need answering.

1. Who is meant to "consume" the TechHome Rating? Who is supposed to care that a home is TechHome-rated? How are they supposed to get the information? And when? So much of how you react to TechHome comes around to this. Is it consumers? Builders? Realtors? Appraisers?

The more I think of it, the more I think realtors and appraisers need to care about the TechHome Rating System the most. Which means there will need to be a significant education/outreach program, which CEA says it plans. But those are the arbiters of value. If they decide that a family's single-most expensive purchase is worth more because it includes home technology, those families will care, too, and eventually ask for, specifically, structured wiring to every room, the way they ask for Corian countertops.

What about consumers? Shouldn't they be rolling up to a new home development and looking for the TechHome seal? There's a new development up the street from my home in suburban D.C. that has a giant Energy Star seal outside the sales office. Don't we want a similar TechHome seal right next to it to communicate, "Hey, our homes are high-tech."?

Not surprisingly, the Consumer Electronics Association wants consumers to demand TechHome-rated homes. But if consumers are supposed to care—at least right out of the gate—it brings me to a concern I brought up repeatedly with the CEA TechHome team.

2. What actually is a TechHome-rated house? Here's the scenario: A builder has built several homes and they're all TechHome Platinum-rated—the highest rating a home can achieve. A young couple, with a baby in tow, GPS-es their way to the development, listening to their iPods through their car's stereo system, and pulls up in front of one of the TechHome Platinum homes.

Under the TechHome Rating System as it's currently set up, this couple could step into the Platinum-rated home and nothing "tech" will happen. No music playing in the bedrooms; no Shrek on the home theater (when we built our home, Shrek always seemed to be the movie playing in sales models); no lights automatically turning on and off; no control panels/thermostats in the walls set to 72 degrees.

The new TechHome Rating System is, by design, an infrastructure rating system. Homes are rated for what they could do, not what they do do. To get a TechHome Bronze, Gold, or Platinum rating, a home needs to include varying extents of structured wiring—wiring to support networking, multiroom audio/video, control, home theater, etc. It doesn't have to actually include networking, multiroom audio/video, control, home theater, etc.

Now, builders could add all those systems to their sales model on top of what makes the house TechHome-rated (the wiring), but they'll need to explain to the home buyer who wants a TechHome-rated home that the two are separate. Spec builders (are there a lot of those these days?) would also need to be clear that a home they say is TechHome rated doesn't actually do anything high-tech, if indeed that's the case.

I've been repeatedly reminded that the bar for being an Energy Star-rated home is ridiculously low. Granted. But consumers know Energy Star; they can see and touch the appliances that make up an Energy Star home. TechHome is virtually unknown in the building community, for which it's meant. Which means it's totally unknown to home buyers. They'll bring to the table their own expectations, and I just can't get past the fact that they'll expect a house that's TechHome-rated to be visibly, audibly so.

Which takes me back to #1, and the idea that home buyers aren't the #1 "consumers" of the TechHome rating. That said…

3. How is this going to work? In theory, it would seem a TechHome-rated home doesn't meet the standard until it's built and the wiring is behind the walls. A builder can market a home at the various levels of TechHome rating as options ("Now you can choose if you want a Bronze, Gold, or Platinum TechHome"), but until the wires are in place, before the drywall goes up, it isn't, in fact, certified. A model home could be certified and a buyer could say, "I want that" (keeping in mind, again, that we need to be clear when "that" is just the wiring and not the systems the model might sport). For single-family homes, this would seem like a logical use of the rating system.

And clearly, in the retrofit and resale markets, obtaining a TechHome rating would be key. Moreover, in MDUs, the TechHome rating system makes abundant sense, and to me it's the most likely sector where the ratings will take off.

But what about builders who already build what are considered to be digital homes, particularly in their local markets, where tech-savviness varies? I know one custom home builder who's made a name for himself in his local market by offering standard technology packages which, at this point in the evolution of the digital home, are pretty generous by current standards. But they wouldn't necessarily qualify as TechHome Bronze, in part because, while he runs structured wiring to many rooms, it's not always to all the rooms the TechHome Rating System requires. (In a four-bedroom house, TechHome Bronze requires six structured wiring runs for video, control, and networking including one to the kitchen. It also requires a home theater pre-wire that supports digital video and surround sound).

Yes, structured wiring is inexpensive to pull; and yes, I happen to believe new homes should have structured wiring to nearly every room. But communicating that to people who don't live this stuff all the time remains a challenge. I do believe the TechHome Rating System can help with that challenge.

Anyway, these are just some of the thoughts going through my mind as I absorb the enormous opportunity that is the TechHome Rating System. And I said all of this to the CEA team when we discussed the ratings.

Quickly, just to argue with myself: What if the new rating system were more like the old rating system? What if, for instance, it rated homes on what they could actually do instead of on their wiring infrastructure? What if a Platinum home, for instance, actually required lighting control to all rooms, monitored security (which actually isn't a requirement of a Bronze home under the current system, despite the fact that builders say they install security systems more than multiroom audio and home theater pre-wires by a factor of almost 2-1), distributed AV, and a home theater?

Well, I'd probably have issues with that, too. And it's a central crux in all this. There's nothing like installing a home technology system that's outdated in a year. So, indeed, the wiring is the key.

And I wholeheartedly agree with that. So on balance, the new TechHome Rating System is probably on the mark. I guess if my mental deliberations had a central theme, it would be "How are we going to get people to use, understand, and appreciate this or any other digital home certification system?"

Many builders are looking for something like this. Their feedback actually led to the three-tier system (CEA reportedly was looking at two tiers initially). Now we all need to work together to give it teeth, put it to use, and adjust where necessary.

Kudos to CEA and the many builders and installers I know worked hard on the rating system.