most of us are familiar with the saying they don't build them like they used to well another part of
that saying now is they didn't make them as smart as they do now so how do we fix that
hello I'm wanderer001 and this is my review of smart try the smart home apparatus which you
can make your old non smart dryer a smart dryer there are other solutions for newer dryers that
are brand and model specific which is a module generally that you put into the smart area of
the dryer pretty much that back panels just computer or board now so I have a much older
dryer that came with the house that I purchased and I liked to smarten up my home so the dryer
was the next natural step for me but I didn't want to get a new dryer so here we are with smart dry
this is a very simplistic modular solution that can be applied to any dryer whether it's a gas
dryer whether it's an electric dryer it doesn't matter it works with just three pieces and an app
so what I really appreciated about smart dry is the simplicity of use because they realize that
the person who's going to be trying the smart dry is probably not a super tech person or this
might be the first smart home device that they're getting so here you go they lay out pretty much
what's inside this box when you open it you have the Smart dry sensor you have the power adapter
and you have the Smart Hub and it's all laid out there for you and it even has directions
over in the corner and kind of gives you a step by step what you should be doing during the setup
process now the other thing that I like is when you take out that first panel they provide you
with everything you already have the screwdriver which you need to access the battery panel they
give you an extra battery which is really great and a little thank-you from the the team there
which is a nice touch I will admit now if you like me are concerned about having a battery operated
device inside of your dryer well one we'll say it is not a lithium-ion battery so you do not
have to worry about it overheating and exploding and I have been testing this out for the last two
months regularly you know doing my laundry and I have had no issues whatsoever also it is not
as I stated a lithium ion battery so here on the back you can actually see it's pretty much just
a watch battery that sits inside of this and is held in place by a panel with four screws
that tighten it in place now I will say during the setup process I had already tightened it
down before the setup process so it was a little trickier getting that flap to come out but we'll
talk about that during the setup process now as I stated before this is made up of three individual
components first being the smart dry sensor this is the part that sits inside of your dryer and
these little holes here allow it to use the three internal sensors which are a temperature sensor a
humidity sensor and well you have an accelerometer in there but that doesn't need these holes that
is how this device can tell if your clothes are actually dry or not or if your dryer has stopped
which is a great feature because well you like me probably have a dryer in the basement and
you might not hear it running from your location and you want to know if it stops not only do you
want to know if your clothes are dry but maybe you just want to know if it stopped it's perfect
for that so the sensor itself is made up of a flat matte plastic not shiny in any way shape or form
the back of the device has the door panel that I was talking about which is where your battery is
held and these right here are two very strong magnets that hold it in place and like I said
I have been testing this for the last two months and have not had any problems with it coming off
or giving me false reads now here you can see just how easily it sits in place with the magnets this
is also one of the preferred placement areas which is covered in the installation later
the other two parts of this three-part system are the smartdrive hub and the power adapter now the
power adapter is pretty much just a standard power brick that you use to give power to the smart hub
here and the front you have two LED lights one for power one for data so when it's transmitting
you've got a reset button there and then it's it's just a closed chunky brick I will say the
build quality on this is a little mmm as you could see the the board there for the USB connector it's
not quite sitting straight so to me that was a bit concerning however once you plug it in you really
don't need to unplug it so this is not terrible I have not run into any issues I just kind of looked
at it as startup problems maybe it's a relatively new company and maybe some of the finer finessing
touches will be worked out by the time you get this all right so let's talk about what setup
of this was like first you are going to need to download the app to your smartphone either through
Google Play or your iOS store and when you first open it up the first thing it's going to ask you
is it's going to say you need to allow location permissions during setup you can turn them off
afterwards which I really appreciate that it only requests this during setup and in fact I can state
that I did go back and remove the permission after I was set up and this works perfectly fine after
that it gives you little privacy policy statement which is nice moving on it lets you know that this
device operates on 2.4 gigahertz as opposed to the 5 gigahertz spectrum which is fine because
you don't need this to actually have faster speeds you need it to have longer range and I will say
one of the interesting things is that the sensor that sits inside of your dryer does not actually
stay connected to Wi-Fi that was one of my concerns because the watch battery that's in here
I figured would die like that if it was constantly attached the Wi-Fi network realistically your hub
here is what is attached to the Wi-Fi network and this only periodically pings it during either dry
cycles or when it stops spinning the rest of the time these two aren't talking to each other which
saves this battery quite a lot in fact if your dryer is not running at all it's not sending
any data to the hub and I have actually unplugged this hub when not in use so you know the one day
week I do the drying I plug this back in so once you've established that you have a 2.4 gigahertz
Network for it you move on and it tells you that the hub should be no more than 10 to 15 feet away
for most people they have a plug that their dryer is plugged into you can plug this into the other
socket as long as it's not being utilized by your washer or you're not using an electric dryer that
has a much higher voltage than what this can handle after that it tells you you need to
remove the paper tag that's behind the battery this is where I said before make sure that you
don't tighten down the screws beforehand because then that will be a little tricky and I had to go
back and I had to unscrew it it's actually get the paper tag removed after that what it's going to do
is it's going to scan for this sensor now for me I had to do this twice it didn't pick it up
the first time they call it provisioning which is having these two talk I had to provision twice in
order to find my hub once it showed up on the app it asks you for the Wi-Fi network credentials so
whatever network you're going to put this on and after that you're done it's attached to your Wi-Fi
network and you can successfully use this now it does also attach itself to Amazon echo devices if
you want there is an extra step for that I'll talk about that a little later once you've connected
the device to your network it then walks you through actual placement of the device and then
the last step is if you wanted to do the Amazon echo integration now myself I did do this for
the first couple of weeks that we had it I wasn't as thrilled with the echo integration you can ask
your echo is my dryer running is my dryer done and you get a message that's sent to your account that
blinks all of your echo device is green letting you know that the dryer is either done or has or
the clothes in it are dry didn't find that feature as helpful as I thought it would be so I just kind
of let the app on my phone let me know when things are actually done now that was talking about setup
the other part of this aside from the peripherals here is the application itself so let's see what
you can do inside the app so when you first open the smartdrive app you were greeted with this
screen if you have your smart dry actually running you will see a temperature and dryness level which
will change the longer that your dryer is running you will also see the clothes down here it will
say whether the dryers moving and if the clothes are very dry or not you also have alert for less
dry dry very dry and toggles you can toggle for a notification when the dryer has stopped if
you have a delicate load or if you want follow-up alerts you also have a reset notification area and
you've got a time down here at the bottom upper corners here you have a question which if you tap
will bring you into battery installation video and echo setup you have information which just gives
you information about the device and the company and for assistance they give you the phone number
and the email right there which is very nice last you have your settings here you can set
the individual dryness levels for each less dry dry very dry and a delicate temperature whether
it's in Fahrenheit or Celsius enable notifications sensor name hub setup firmware and installation
instructions so if I were to select firmware and it was plugged in it would check and see if
there was new firmware I will say with the dryer selection here for dry this was actually set at
83 degrees I found that I needed to raise it one degree to 84 to actually notify me correctly when
my clothes were actually dry I found that my socks around the the necks were not totally dry when it
was set on the default things but all of that is customizable so if your dryer is different than
my dryer you can actually adjust that as needed it is a very simple app again this is super user
friendly and I appreciate that and I feel that you will too so here I just have it set to send
me push notifications to the phone when it is done drying and when the dryer has stopped I disabled
the Alexa notifications because I did not find them as useful as I thought I would so the whole
idea behind Smart dry here is to not only make your dryer smart in that it tells you when it's
done it's also to save on either electrical usage or gas usage so realistically how well does this
work well let me tell you I was surprised at how much of a reduction in my gas usage I saw in the
first month of using this now I will say that my home is heated by gas and the other big appliance
that uses gas is my dryer and as you can see on the screen here while I did have a 10 degree drop
in the temperature outside the amount that this drop should not be this steep for just a 10 degree
drop in temperature outside the heat in my place would still be kicking on quite regularly so the
only other thing that I did was use the Smart dry here to slow down or cut down on the amount of gas
that my dryer was using I also did incrementally cut the amount of electrical use that I was using
by the aid of the smart dry here so the question then becomes the benefit of using this is plain
to see however how much does it cost to power this device well if the device is just plugged in and
idling it actually uses almost negligible amounts of power as you can see here and when you actually
are querying the device it uses point six watts so again if you're like me you unplug this when
you're not using it you save yourself even more electricity that was the last question you might
have is how much does something like this cost well I will admit it is a little pricier than most
smart home things that you can get smart dry setup here is $50 u.s. now keep in mind I saw a great
cost savings in the action of gas and electricity that I was using so realistically this can pay
for itself reasonably quickly so $50 to make your old dryer smart seems like a great trade-off to me
and this is also a great way to start yourself in maybe home automation it's not terrible it doesn't
require lots of knowledge to set up it's almost plug-and-play really so if you haven't gotten
the impression as of yet I really like the Smart dry setup here - the Amazon echo integration don't
really see a need for it myself but maybe you do and again for $50.00 to know when your dryers
done to know when your clothes are actually dry it'll pay for itself reasonably quickly
and this is your step into home automation so I have been wanderer001 if you have any questions
or comments please feel free to leave them in the area below and as always thanks for watching