What Smart Home Products Are Worth The Investment?
Posted on: 7 April 2020
If you've looked at any advertising in the last few years, you've likely seen a bunch of products being pitched as essential to a proper smart home. While you're probably sure you don't need that fancy internet-connected toaster, you may still wonder what out there is worth the investment. Let's look at four items you might want to buy from a smart home store.
Thermostats
Arguably, if you're going to make any investment in smart home products, a good thermostat is the one you want to shell out for. Smart thermostats allow you to regulate your heating and cooling bills by keeping the temperature down when you're not at home. You can set the thermostat to automatically drop at a certain time, such as after you normally leave for work, and have it come back up when appropriate.
Newer models can be integrated with other smart home products to detect when you're close to home, too. For example, you can have the thermostat raise the temperature when the GPS in your phone tells it that you are coming back from work and are 15 minutes away.
Lights
The argument here is much the same as with thermostats. Smart lighting systems can be designed to turn off automatically at times when there should be enough light in an area. They also can be configured to turn on based on when your phone app or smart home hub tells them to do. Especially for families that have kids who leave lights on all the time, getting and responding to a notification that a light is on is a great way to avoid wasting energy.
Hubs
These are the unifying components in a large smart home ecosystem. They act as traffic cops, letting you tie together your cellphone, voice assistant, thermostat, lighting, and other devices. Even the system in your car can be set up to communicate with the hub. If you think you forgot to turn off the light in the kitchen, for example, the hub will notify you the light is still on and ask if you want to switch it off.
Garage Door
Why keep more devices around than you have to? You can ditch the garage door opener and replace it with a smart system that's activated by your phone. It's even possible with a hub to chain that event to other ones, such as raising the heat inside the house and turning on the lights.
Look online for smart home products to see what might interest you.
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