It’s 2023 and smart home tech is still a bit too complex. Whether
you're starting or expanding your smart home, I'll walk you through everything,
you need to know. The first thing you need to do is pick a smart home platform. With
the Matter standard rolling out, and more on that later, cross platform products are going
to become more common in the smart home. But you still need to choose what platform
you're primarily going to use to set up control and automate all of your smart home devices.
This will help guide you on what types of smart home devices your smart home can accommodate
today. If you find the idea of setting up your own smart home pretty daunting. Or you just have
a really complicated install. You can't hire an integrator. If you still need a bit of help,
but don't want to shell out a ton of money, some retailers, like Best Buy and Google here
in the US, for example, will offer consultation services, which are sometimes even free. So which
platform should you go with? Well for beginners who are interested in the offerings from the big
three tech companies in my experience, Amazon and Apple's platforms are the easiest to use
for beginners. They both give helpful hints in their apps and have dedicated sections for tips.
Amazon will even go a step further and automatically set up some smart home
devices when you just plug them in. If you're deep into the Google ecosystem,
though. Then of course, I think it makes sense to look at Google Home. Same thing,
if you're an Apple household, you're likely going to want to look at HomeKit.
But one thing to be cautious of with all of these platforms is lock in and automations.
That’s where third party options like Homey or Home Assistant can be really
useful. Homey is definitely easier to use and get started with, though it does offer
a sandbox coding environment and the new Homey Pro is based on the Raspberry Pie architecture,
so there is definitely something there for the more technically advanced.
Home Assistant is an awesome open source home automation platform,
but I would only recommend it for people who like to tinker and already know what they're
doing and have the time to maintain the install when something breaks.
So now that you've picked your platform you can start buying devices for your smart home.
The first device category I'd start with is lighting. YYou can control a single bulb,
turning it on and off from your phone or with your voice, control lights in multiple rooms at once,
like holiday lights, and even change the color of your lights,
creating beautiful lighting scenes to wake up and go to bed to.
Now, typically the smart bulbs you see will be full color so they can produce a wide variety
of colors. Or you'll see bulbs that can just produce different shades of white. So you have
like a daylight here at like 5500 Kelvin or you go to something that's like 3000 Kelvin which is
a little bit warmer. If you don't need the full color bulbs then I’d at least get ones that can
adjust its color temperature somewhat, that way, you're not going to get a situation
where you have like one fixture that's like candlelight that you can't change and then all
of your smart bulbs are just set to just more of a daylight color and you have a lighting mismatch.
I really think that looks bad in most homes. A lot of people don't pay enough attention to
that but having all of your light that can be at the same color temperature,
I'm a big stickler for and I think just looks a lot better and is just more pleasant to be
in honestly. There are several companies that make smart bulbs including Philips Hue, Wyze,
GE Sync, which is now owned by Savant, Govee, LifeX, and Nanoleaf, just to name a few.
In general, I always try to make the bulb smart first. They're much easier to swap
out and change. They're also very renter friendly as well. If you're renting a home or apartment,
it is just less complicated than trying to replace the light switch in the wall. I do recommend the
smart light switches though but just for fixtures where you can't already make the bulb smart.
The next category of device I'd recommend getting is the smart thermostat. I'd still
suggest going with the Nest Learning thermostat if you like the idea of not having to set a
schedule and just having the thermostat learn your patterns or you could go with something
like the Ecobee or other smart thermostats that allow you to set a schedule in an app.
Next, let's talk about your voice and music. Smart speakers are one of the easiest ways to control
things in your smart home with actions like: Turn off the lights. #*%#, wrong lights. Apple, Amazon,
and Google all make their own smart speakers that we’ve done reviews on and not only are they great
for smart home control, most of the time, but they also bring multi-room audio to your home as well.
Multi-room audio is where you have multiple speakers in a given room or several rooms all
playing the same media at the same time. After testing so many of these speakers,
Sonos to me is the clear winner and brand I overall recommend because of how easy it
is to use their system, the sheer number of different speakers and soundbars they offer,
and because many of their speakers now support both the Amazon and Google Assistant.
So, how do you group all of these different speakers from different companies together? Well,
the tricky thing is, you actually can't for some speakers. The two predominant
technologies for grouping speakers are Google Cast and Apple's AirPlay 2, but some speakers
will only work with one and not the other and some like Amazon's won't work with either.
So just be careful when buying smart speakers for your home and try to avoid as much lock
in as possible, even though all of these ecosystems do have some form of lock-in.
tThis is why I love Sonos speakers, they have their own internal speaker grouping mechanism,
but importantly, they also support Apple’s AirPlay 2.
And even if you don’t have an iPhone or iPad, you can still use AirPlay
to output the sound from other devices like a Mac using the Apple Music app to a group
of AirPlay speakers, or my favorite use for AirPlay, outputting sound from an Apple TV 4K.
This way when I'm in the kitchen or say,
someone's in the bathroom, you can still hear everything going on from the TV.
And yes, this is the perfect feature for a Super Bowl or Oscar watch party.
Devices like the Apple TV, Amazon Fire Cube, and Chromecast with Google TV,
allow you to control content on your TV with smart assistants and even
turn off the entire system with your voice. Next up, safety and security.
Nowadays, many security systems can be integrated into your smart home platform.
This includes systems you get from the big home security companies or the more do it yourself,
security systems. The tech included in these systems includes things like cameras,
motion sensors, video doorbells, window sensors, alarms, and more.
But there's also a second part to security in your home that I think is equally important,
like smoke and carbon monoxide detectors and leak detectors, which you can place behind objects,
like your hot water heater or toilet and get notified as soon as a leak is detected.
The last category of devices you can add to your smart home is appliances. Many Stoves,
Ovens, and Refrigerators, are now equipped with WiFi, allowing you to do things like remotely
turn off the oven, or even get alerts when the Fridge detects you’ve run out of something.
Robotic Vacuum cleaners also fit in this category and not only automate the boring
task of vacuuming, but a lot of them can learn your floor plan as well.
And in extension of this technology, is now being applied to robotic mops for hard floors. And yes,
there are also robotic lawn mowers coming onto the market now, as well. Other appliances you can add
to your smart home include air purifiers, like the Blue Air DustMagnet we reviewed, HVAC systems and
ones with dehumidifiers, and even smart showers. They have precise temperature control,
sauna steam automation, and music speakers in showerheads with smart assistants built in.
But if you really want music in your shower, I'd recommend getting a smart speaker that has
Wi-Fi built-in and is waterproof, that way, you don't always have to connect
your phone to it over Bluetooth just to play music. Next up Blinds and curtains,
this is another big category of devices to automate. You can go the more expensive route
and get smart wood blinds or roller shades from companies like Lutron,
and if you’re doing new construction or a remodel, you can get an electrician
to wire power up to where you plan to have your blinds or shades installed. There are
also robots that can open and close curtains made by companies like Aqara and Switchbot.
Speaking of Wwitchbot, they make this cool little nifty robot that can basically automate any device
in your home that can be controlled by the press of a button. The last device you can use to make
any device in your home smart is the smart plug. These can control any device you have
plugged into your wall outlet and are great for decorations, christmas lights, fans, heaters, etc.
So that's my list of devices and categories for the smart home. But of course, that's only half
of the smart home equation. The whole point of connecting all of these devices together
is the ability to control and automate them. The big three smart home platforms have pretty
basic routine and automation functionality with Homekit now, even letting you create automations
by just using your voice with Siri. Set all lights to turn off at 2:00 a.m. every night.
If you want a platform that has more advanced automation features that can
connect to more services, but still be easy to use. That's where I think Homey in particular,
would be a good option and we'll be testing out their new Homey Pro device that you can use to
run all of your automations locally, once they ship out here in the US.
Now in general, there are two main types of automations for the smart home. You
have scheduled based automations and trigger based automations. And here
are a few examples of automations I've set up here in my own smart home. My espresso
machine turns on every morning at 8:00am. My thermostat is set to 73 degrees at 9:00am. The
blinds automatically close at sunset. My lights turn to a sunset color at 11:30pm
and slowly fade out for 45 min. And all lights are set to turn off after 1:00am.
All of those except for my lights changing to a sunset color were set up using the
smart home automation platforms from the big three tech companies for the lights,
most of the big platforms, aren't advanced enough to do what you can do in the Philips Hue app.
Now, the second category of automation you can
do within a smart home is trigger based and there are a few subcategories within
this family of automations as well. And the first one is voice commands,
Like saying “movie time” to your assistant and your lights dim down and blinds close.
Sensor-based triggers are the second sub category, for example,
when your motion sensor detects no one is home, your lights can be set to automatically turn off.
qara actually makes a new millimeter wave sensor that can detect respiratory rates,
so it knows when you’re still home and won’t turn off the lights on
you if you’re just sitting down to read a book.
The last cool trigger you can set up is one based on other smart devices.
For example, when you tell your smart assistant to turn off your TV,
as soon as it does that, your lights slowly dim up.
Now, the last thing to talk about is the new smart home Matter standard. And if you
followed my advice from last year's video, you remember that I said, you should just wait until
these Matter devices come on to the market before buying devices for your smart home.
Now that it's been a year, that advice turned out to be misguided. The standard took a bit
longer than anticipated to be finalized last year. However, now that it has been finalized
and is rolling out, my advice this year is to buy the smart home devices you need today,
but if you can, make sure they either support Matter or will be updated to
Matter at a later date. And for a deeper dive into the Matter smart home standard,
how it works, how it changes the smart home, and most importantly, what do you actually need to
make it work? Check out the explainer I did and you can get to it by clicking the thumbnail here.
And for all of the reviews and videos we've done on the products I've mentioned in this video,
plus the purchase links for them, so you can check their current price. All of that
information is in the description below. Hit that thumbs up button if you liked
this video and most importantly, you found it helpful. Thanks so much for watching.