Belkin goes all in on the home of the future

Belkin CEO Chet Pipkin stands next to a WeMo cube at the 2014 Collision Conference in Las Vegas. Donna Tam/CNET

For Belkin founder Chet Pipkin, the company that began in his parents' Hawthorne, Calif., garage wants to go back home.

After building Belkin into a consumer-electronics brand with more than 1,200 employees and a product line that includes everything from Wi-Fi routers and iPad keyboard cases to power adapters over the past 31 years, Pipkin has seen the future. And his vision has him looking back to his humble garage roots as inspiration for the company's next big push: the smart home.

Pipkin, an easy-going, 53-year-old Southern California resident, has already wired his home. It tells the father of seven when his kids leave the house based on their Wi-Fi signal, lets his wife boil water for tea without getting out of bed in the morning, and tracks the use of all kinds of electronics, from an Xbox to lighting fixtures, through a smartphone app.

"I just love it," he said about the ability to open and close his garage door even when he's not home. "If there's a delivery person, I can see them through the camera and I can talk to them. I can open the garage door to let them in and then close the garage door after."

That's the kind of new thinking behind Belkin's home automation line WeMo, which is the company's biggest effort yet to tap into the rapidly burgeoning smart-home market. ABI Research estimates that the connected home market was worth $9.2 billion in 2013, and will grow to $15.1 billion in five years.

That market of opportunity has drawn tech titans including Google, which ponied up $3.2 billion for smart home thermometer maker Nest in January, and Apple, which earlier this week unveiled its HomeKit smart home platform baked into its iOS 8 mobile operating system for the iPhone and iPad.

C. West McDonald / CNET

Belkin already sells switches and motion sensors -- small devices that let people transform an appliance into a smart device -- and a high-definition, Wi-Fi-connected camera for monitoring and communicating. But new products are in the works. In January, the company showed off LED lights, a smart slow cooker and a do-it-yourself maker kit at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Last month, Belkin demonstrated WeMo Echo Technology hardware for monitoring water and electricity usage homes.

Belkin expects to make the LED lightbulbs available in September, while the CrockPot and Maker may go on sale as early as August. The water and electricity products, though, may take another year or two.

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Belkin goes all in on the home of the future