Think Rock Hudson's bachelor pad, circa 1960 movie.

With a flick of the finger, the smooth one would dim the lights, trip the hi-fi and activate a retractable wall, revealing a circular bed.

The Jetsons, too, had a way cool automated home: Jane and George would dial up dinner, then call on the robot for cleanup.

Here at the cusp of the millennium, the automated gadgets we're actually using at home are a bit more pedestrian, and many cater to safety- and energy-conscious concerns: They'll turn on lights in and outside your house as you get out of the car, transform a home video camera into a monitoring system, trip alarms or allow you to adjust the temperature in your home from a remote location, among other things.

And here's the surprising part: Some of these options are portable from one home to the next and inexpensive enough to make sense for the many renters who live in Austin.

Rebecca Helton, 35, bought a key-chain clicker so she can turn on lights in her living room and bedroom before she enters her apartment in Central Austin. She's single and cautious, and $35 seemed a reasonable price for peace of mind.

Helton figures any intruder will be "booking it back out the window," if she hits the lights. "It's just comforting," says Helton, a state worker. "It's light inside my apartment and I can see that no one's there."

Helton's remote control kit came from Casa Automation . Radio Shack sells a similar product for $24.99, and the home automation companies that wire homes with audio, video, security and computer systems also sell such gadgets.

Most products are expandable: You can buy extra plug-in connections (called modules) for additional lights or appliances you want to be able to turn on and off remotely.

The implications are endless -- one Austin mom has equipped her young daughter with a remote control she carries with her at bedtime. The little girl can click the button to activate a plug-in air freshener to "spray" away imagined monsters. Other parents have put lights and lullaby tapes in their kids' rooms on timers, says Minerva Martinez, who owns Casa Automation .

Safety or energy conservation often lure customers, who then discover other applications to make their lives easier, Martinez says.

"It's Jetsonian. It's up and coming. It's just neat," Martinez says, displaying a dizzying array of products -- a bedside alarm clock with a panic button that sounds an alarm and turns on lights in another room ($34.95); a TV allowance device that turns off the television after kids watch a certain number of hours ($89); a PC- based home automation kit that works even when your computer is turned off ($84.99).

People who can't move around as easily especially like the remote control devices as an alternative to hard-to-reach light switches. Senior citizens hone in on a wearable pendant -- when you push it, it automatically dials emergency contacts ($139.9 5).

Then there are people like Fritz Vogt, a self-professed "gadget guy" who can operate all the lights in his Northwest Austin house by remote control -- for no better reason than he wants to.

"My brother lives with me, and it just bugs the heck out of me when he doesn't turn the lights out," says Vogt, 40, a certified public accountant who works at home. "I like the facility of not having to get up from my desk or my bed to turn the lights off."

The cost of this convenience: around $1,000.

Since none of this is new, why aren't these products more popular? There's an assumption that it's got to be terribly expensive, says Michael Smith, co-owner of Mesa Home Systems, which installs the wired version of these products and others, but also sells a few wireless products.

And, Smith says, the world has split into two camps: "You got techies and you got non techies."

For the record, wiring a 3,000-square-foot house starts around 50 cents per square foot, Smith says. Of course it's easy to get carried away. Somewhere in Austin is a home with 11 miles of wiring within its walls.

And Smith notes that the next wave in home automation won't involve wiring at all, but satellite technology that's bound to be more expensive than any- thing on the market right now, at least initially.

Even the so-called affordable portable home automation products can get pricey when you start adding on new features.