How To Setup a Smart Home: A Beginners Guide
All of us have probably heard the term “Smart home” from many people around us. What exactly is a smart home and why are people so into it in 2021? Well, we’re going to tell you exactly what a smart home is and how you can set up a foundation for the journey towards making your home a “smart home”.
What exactly is a Smart Home?
A smart home is a home that uses the latest technologies of this century to automate the experience of the house. It has the power to change our living experience. Automatically locking and unlocking doors, automatically turning on the lights when we enter our home, having a robot to clean your house when you’re not there, and much more. All this sounds exciting, right? Here is how you can make your home “smart”.
Setting up a foundation for your smart home
There are lots of ways to build out a smart home. You can buy lots and lots of components, sensors, security cameras, smart bulbs, and connect them to a hub that helps the components to communicate with each other. The list just goes on and on. Building a smart home is a whole process that cannot be just done in a day. And buying lots of accessories will just cost you a lot of money and time. If you’re just starting on this journey, you don’t need all of that. You can build a foundation with just some inexpensive and important products and you can always expand with time, that is one of the greatest advantages of technology.
The important thing is to make sure that your smart home products are compatible with each other. Having a good wireless router is a must so that the signals can reach everywhere throughout your home. You can use a normal router with Wi-Fi signal extenders or our recommendation is to install a mesh network in your home.
Here are a few products you might need to build yourself a great foundation for your smart home.
Smart Lighting
Lighting works as an entry point to the world of smart appliances. Many smart lighting systems work flawlessly without a central hub while remaining capable of interacting with all the other smart home appliances. Some companies with the best smart bulb range are Phillips Hue, TP-link, LIFX which can communicate over Wi-Fi. While some other great companies such as Philips have a wide variety of bulbs that connect Via Bluetooth to your smartphone. All these bulbs can be controlled by your smartphone and you can configure the times at which the bulb goes on and off automatically. Or, you can control them as you like.
You can also replace the traditional light switches with smart switches for a great futuristic look for your home. These switches can operate through Wi-Fi without the need for any central hub. And remember, all of these can be controlled just within an application on your smartphone.
Smart Speakers
What else could be easier than to just pull out your phone and control all the lighting of your home? Well, smart speakers let you control your smart home just by saying “turn off the lights” or “set the temperature”. In this space, Amazon’s Echo series and Google’s Nest series are market leaders. Most smart appliances such as smart lights and smart thermostats have support for both Amazon Echo and Google Home.
Smart speakers also work as a hub for all your appliances and help them stay connected to each other. “Apple” also has their foot in the smart home game with its HomePod smart speaker.
Smart Thermostat
Smart thermostats help you with one of the most important functions in your home, keeping the temperature great. It’s a hassle to manually set the thermostat every time you feel hot or cold. This is where smart thermostats come in. There are very few smart house devices that provide both comfort and energy savings, a smart thermostat is one of them.
The best smart thermostats are the ones that come with inbuilt sensors that you can place in the rooms you spend the most time in. This way, the thermostat can analyse your room and can trigger heating or cooling based on that. Some great companies produce these types of thermostats such as Ecobee and Google’s Nest series.
Smart Security Cameras
Everyone wants their home to be safe when they’re away from it. A great home security camera will help you in keeping an eye on your house while you’re at work or enjoying a nice cup of coffee in a café. You can install these cameras both indoors and outdoors to keep an eye on your pets and monitor your children.
Some of the best models of security cameras are produced by companies like LILIN, Hikivision and Dahua. These cameras are budget-friendly and can be linked with your FIBARO home automation system to your doorbell, which means that you no longer need to go all the way to the door to see who it is. You can just see anyone from your room. That’s so amazing, isn’t it?
Smart Audio Systems
Let’s talk about sound systems, because who doesn’t want great surround sounds in their home. Everyone wants to just get up in the morning to some good music in the house to start an energetic day. Companies like Yamaha, Sonos, and Denon are one of the best companies that produce audio systems for your home.
For your televisions, it’s better to go with soundbars. You can step up your Netflix binge-watch experience with the help of these soundbars.
Smart Irrigation
We can forget about lawn lovers; these people do everything they can to keep their lawn amazing. But water is a precious resource that cannot be wasted. A smart irrigation system helps to ensure that your garden or lawn is getting the right amount of moisture that it needs to stay healthy and vibrant. You can just sit back and relax, or just take a long nap and know your garden and lawn will be flawlessly moisturized.
All kinds of Smart Stuff
All this is just the tip of the iceberg. You can dig deeper and never run out of appliances to buy, like smart robot vacuums that clean your house, kitchen appliances that can be operated remotely, smart outlets, window shades that open and close with just a touch of a button. You just need to start at some point and you can always go up from there.
Building a Smart Home from the Ground Up
Great! You’ve made it to the end of this article and now you are ready for some smart home action. Before you get started, remember that there is no hard rule book when building your own system so don’t worry too much if something doesn’t go perfectly at first – just keep reading and researching carefully before making any purchases or moving forward with an idea in mind.
And remember, the team at YouHome Automation is always here and ready to help!
Happy Living!