The nature of home automation is introduced. It is argued that end users should be able to define how the home system reacts to changing circumstances. Policies are employed as user-defined rules for how this should happen. The architecture of the Homer home automation system is briefly overviewed. The Homer policy system and the Homeric policy language it supports are explained. A technique is described for offline conflict analysis among policies (the analogue of the feature interaction problem). A substantial worked example shows how conflict detection is performed on a range of sample home policies.