For anyone who dreamed of flying cars and travelators in every home, the reality of “smart” living may seem ordinary, but that’s the beauty of the latest smart home ideas and trends. They operate in the background and make life simpler.
Use cases of smart tech in the home are unlimited, here are some ways you can start integrating it in your smart home.
- Using smart robots like
- Vacuum Cleaners
- Pet Robot or Companion Robot (Amazon Astro, Miko)
- Smart Lighting and switches
- Smart Apps
- For Nature lover app that identifies plants
- Google Smart Home and Alexa app to control Smart home devices
- Automation apps like IFTTT, Tasker, Macdroid
Once you start to get the hang of these smart tech devices then you can start investing more in other bigger and better hardware devices. Maybe build a home lab server to host things like “Home Assistant”, NodeRed, and N8N. These self-hosted services and no-code tools will help you manage your smart home.
In this article
Your Home with Smart Technology
Here are some of the things you can start doing to upgrade your home to a smart home.
Improve Your Home Wi-Fi
In the current world, everything is connected but if your Router or home Wi-Fi is weak then it will become your smart home’s first weak point.
If you can not upgrade your Wi-Fi router for some reason then make sure you use some Wi-Fi extenders to make the Wi-Fi connection strong in your full house.
Robots in Everyday Life
Robots now started to become part of everyday life sometimes look super helpful but sometimes look creepy or not good for privacy.
Smart Vacuums help you in dusting and mopping your house, timers can be set to automatically clean your house without causing you any inconvenience. As they dock automatically on their charging port after cleaning so you don’t have to worry about their battery, some vacuum cleaners have enough storage to collect dust so you don’t have to clean them every day.
Pet robots🤖 or you can say companion robots that will follow you around your house like Amazon Astro does to help you.
- The global smart home robot market is estimated to expand at a CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) of 21.2%, from 2019 to 2027.
- Vacuuming robots are the largest sub-category in the smart home robot market, with a forecasted value of $5.8 billion in 2026.
- Asia Pacific is projected to be the fastest-growing region in terms of smart home robot market share, with an expected CAGR of 28.9% from 2020 to 2027.
Smart Lights
Smart lights need to be connected to the internet all the time to control it.
Smart lights are the first thing that everyone should start using because it needs the least amount of effort to set up and makes things easier around the home.
Like automatically turning on the porch or door light on your specified schedule. Change the colour of the light if the bulb supports that, you can even dim the lights at night when you need it.
Smart light comes in many shapes and forms like bulbs, tube lights, led light strips, ambience lights, ceiling lights and more.
Smart Thermostats
If your home uses some sort of smart heating and ventilation of AC (HVAC) then you can use Smart thermostats to help you control your home’s temperature according to your need.
You can set it to maintain a specific temperature in your home, it will do it for you taking into consideration of current temperature.
Do note that studies suggest that not properly setting your smart thermostats may cause you higher electricity bills.
- Smart thermostats are projected to save over 1.5 quadrillion BTUs of energy in the US by 2030.
- Smart thermostats can save you an average of 10-12% on your energy bills.
- Smart thermostats are compatible with most HVAC systems.
Home Security
For home security, you can use smart devices like
- Smart security camera
- Door/Window magnetic sensors
- Motion sensors
- Security Alarm System
- Smart doorbell
In the above list, smart doorbells and smart cameras are the ones that I would pick first.
A smart wireless camera is easy to set up and doesn’t cost a lot of money to start with and gives you access to view and monitor your home from anywhere in the world. Just make sure your Wi-Fi connection and home inverter are properly set up.
Door/Windows magnetic sensors can give you peace of mind at night when you don’t properly remember if you closed the window or not. Or give you a quick alert when it is opened or closed for security reasons.
In conclusion: These smart upgrades will make your home smart home and most of the smart devices now support Google Assistant and Alex out of the box so you can control them using these apps.
