I'm somebody who eats too much and exercises too little because I don't
really have the time between work and housework and kids who are you where
you're from so I'm Phil I'm from England I think
when it comes to smart home dear as an investigator on the Major Crime Team so
dealing with murder isn't like one week you might be dealing with you know
something involved in organized criminals and that's risen from that
another week you may be dealing where the drugs overdose where someone else's
injection so why did you start you said you kind of started a couple years ago
why did you start automating he's died literally with needing a dimmer switch
from my son's room you're going in to give him a feed you don't want to turn
the light on full blast and it was just thinking how I go like this I got one of
the Phillips here dimmer kit which was just a light bulb and the remote no herb
no nothing no remote connectivity I expanded from just like a son's room
into other rooms in the house so we went into the lounge in our bedroom the
garage and then most recently outside in my daughter's room as well the heating
system I'm the sort of person who thinks a lot before I make a decision on the
purchase and I saw the narrative game between Nest and Hive and ultimately I
went with Hive because I work shifts my wife's hours were all over the place
with young kids and only working part time and I really didn't feel that any
of the learning element from Nest was going to add value to us I've actually
gotten up the thermostat here so that's one of the thermostats that there's
actually two of them in my house because we have dual zone it's literally the
displays hidden behind me the actual glass itself my America down to those
two it was because the thermostats offer you full control off the system whereas
a lot of them it requires the app it requires you to you use that to control
things and the other advantage of home is it's all Wireless so it's literally
just runs on batteries in the back and it uses the ZigBee protocol the receiver
connects to the boiler itself and then the
that uses ZigBee to a hub wired into the brew so there's no direct power up there
always needs batteries to run but I've had this for 18 months and I haven't
changed the batteries on it yet so now they've got a whole ecosystem door
sensors motion sensors in your outdoor cameras smart plugs so this is one of
their smart plugs there and it's very much standard smart plug that's what it
is but it is easy so it connects direct to the hub so it's not Wi-Fi over the
network so it keeps it off your network thermostatic radiator valve and there's
a reason that's not my radiator and that's because he's broken most recent
release and I had to take a screwdriver this last month to get out of my
radiator so I've had a bit of a 24-hours with high over that in terms of get it
right but this is their latest product and the idea is you can control
temperature and individual rooms I've never really been a fan of alarm systems
and cameras generally but then my parents offer code in my family home
where I grew up in and that affected me as well as their sense of their anger
you feel well let me know if somebody's gone onto your property and so I bought
the Nest camera IQ for outdoors and I fit it back to the back of my house and
angled it so it gave me a nice view across the back of my property so that
was my next purchase and then I wanted to cover the front of the house as well
I worked for the Nest though because there weren't too many hardware options
in the UK Simon I was already in the Nest ecosystem but as being absolutely
rock-solid since I installed a new Nest IQ how do you find that camera I really
like it the pitch is good the night visions good the HDR doesn't seem quite
as good as with the Nest alone so I've got the the harmony hub which I use of
the TV in the in our program and as a bonus I've got Roku upstairs and because
that's using the direct connection with Wi-Fi as opposed to using the dir I can
control that upstairs as well I can turn my TV on it there and turn it off and
completely browse the interface using Google Home or using my phone
using whatever so Philips hue exercise motion sensors because they came out
last year I think it was tip this one off the fence earlier this is the indoor
one and that's the outdoor one so there's a significant difference in size
the way my likes to set up they come up not knowing anyway but low level and
then when the motion detector except motion it turns the lights on 100% and
then when the motion has stopped for two minutes then it will run back down
against on that low 11 yeah I bought the sonís one when a came a promise with
Google Assistant integration and obviously went on and on and on and on
and on and it's still not launched in the UK well I changed my country to the
US on the account and it works fine them yeah it's going to be honest with you I
think and I've got so many other little Google speakers around the house minis
and the hub I kind of feel like I'm not going to build a second system with so
much so I'm wait till the Nest Hub Max comes out again I think we've had this
conversation and comments as well I'm gonna wait to the hub max comes out
and see what that's all it sounds like and maybe I'll pick one of them maybe
I'll pick up max so I've got the hub in the bedroom which I really like just by
the bed works as a picture frame radio you know listen to some music and just
as the device to control lights it's a TV etc we've got a mini in the lounge
and then two more of them one in each of the kids rooms as well and but I've got
my winnings Wi-Fi scale up in the neuron suite and one of their activity tracking
watch is that I wear pretty much constantly there's not a lot of
integration with other things in terms of it but there's only so much
integration you sort of need but things like that and the other thing I've got
is the tyre trackers on my keys and they're not perfect the Google Home
integration is very old-school a style to do something rather than just asking
direct you know what what's been your biggest
struggle and what's been the most positive things at the moment
something's going on a bit of Google because this morning my speaker in the
bedroom a hub in the bedroom is just not listening to anything I'm saying I'm
seeing words appear on the screen the indoor one which I've got in my garage
because when we go through the side door in there it's dark you can't see it's
nighttime there's kids toys everywhere and the light switch is on the other
side of the garage so to get to it you've got to walk through all that for
over five times and then the field around you the light switch and this
thing's been brilliant the base is magnetic just stick straight to a garage
door on there you walk in the door like Tom with a huge system they gray in the
Highland so it was very obvious to me every time I was open this lights off
flying this lights off blowing this low soft line and the way I've sold that was
a bit of a random a way which was Google Wi-Fi because I was able to move my hub
from the front room where it was to here and that's all in with those issues
what automation do you wish existed but doesn't yet for you I wish that somebody
would build a window cleaning robot that could just take care of my house is one
that is more about more than anything I hate cleaning windows the outdoor ones I
could see not being that hard it's the indoor ones that I I struggle with a
little bit like you've got a scale that wall more or less or you've got a fly up
to that wall or or less and yeah we're not there as a society I think just yet
but outdoors yeah I'm all in on that I've been thinking that cuz I got I got
windows that are high up and quite frankly fell I'm not doing it so I got a
higher someone when they're that dirty yeah you know so no I'm on board