- The term smart home gets thrown around a lot
because companies love marketing to you,
but what smart home basically means is a connected house.
That the gadgets in your house can kinda talk to each other
using wireless communications like WiFi or Bluetooth.
Your thermostat can talk to a plug,
can talk to your lights,
that's pretty much it.
There's a whole range of smart homes though.
Everything from being able to utter a command
and have the entire house change around that
to just being able to turn your heat on
when you're on your way home from your phone.
We're gonna talk about that one,
the not-so-smart smart home,
but just like a modern update to where you already live.
My house has DSL, so it comes in through the phone line.
I wish there was cable modem, there isn't,
so my router's gotta be here.
This is what the phone company gives you for a router.
The problem is that the wireless signal
gets weaker as it gets away from your base station.
Don't settle for that.
These things are okay,
but especially if you're gonna have a smart home,
you need a really really robust WiFi setup.
This is something from a company called eero, E-E-R-O,
and it's a router system
that's actually using something called a mesh network,
which means its got a bunch of little nodes
scattered throughout my house
that pick up and amplify the wireless signal.
This is important because a lot of your smart home gadgets
are gonna be talking to each other
via the wireless network,
just helps the communication between them.
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You gotta control your smart home from somewhere.
Used to be that you could have a bunch of connected gadgets
and everyone would have a different app,
or website, or whatever you had to play with.
But now there are a couple of really good options
for just controlling something from one specific place.
We're gonna use Google Home,
because Google Home is a really easy streamlined app,
it's free,
and it works with most of the good smart home products.
This is how I can turn on the lights from a vacation,
like flick 'em on and off
so robbers think that I'm here playing with my lights.
Or I can turn the heat up a little bit
if I know it's gonna get really cold out.
We're gonna keep it pretty simple today
and we're just gonna add stuff like a thermostat.
Set up new devices.
JMF house, that's my house.
Oh, see, this is where it all goes wrong.
It's looking for devices and we haven't set up any devices.
So, let's go set up some devices.
Hunter Set n' Save 1, 1993 vintage,
obviously a legendary thermostat.
And when its got this broken-ass LCD in it,
even more sought after.
But just for the purposes of this video,
we're gonna replace it with something from this century,
with a 2018 vintage Nest.
The idea here is create this main zones thermostat
for the center of the house.
Nest is a motion-sensing thermostat,
it lets you program things in through a smartphone app,
it's really super streamlined.
What we're gonna do though, when we take this off,
there's a little bit of a roulette wheel situation,
which is do we have a C wire or a common wire?
Common wire pulls power from the furnace
in order to keep your thermostat on.
These old ones, they use a battery.
Oh shit, I just turned off my thermostat.
If it gets cold, I'm sorry.
Well, modern thermostats are on WiFi,
they're motion-sensing,
they're running all sorts of programs,
so they need a constant stream of power.
I'm done.
Ah, I'm just kidding.
- [Tom] Looks beautiful.
- Thank you, thanks, Tom.
I think we're gonna need a Phillips head screwdriver.
Honestly, you can use a needle nose pliers for everything
so you might as well have one of those on you
and then I have a wire stripper here
and a flathead screwdriver for prying stuff.
And I brought a volt meter also,
because we're working with electrical,
it's always nice to know if something has power
before you shock yourself.
Alright, since we're being responsible,
I'm gonna read the instructions.
And also because furnace makes fire.
Switch off power, we did that.
Some covers pop off, others need to be unscrewed.
I'm looking in the back of this thing
and if you look at the thermostat up close,
you can see that there's like
a red wire and a white wire coming out of the wall.
Good news is that there looks like there is a blue wire
tucked behind the wall here
that may be our common wire, I really hope it is
because that would be cool.
I love this when you take something off a wall
and you see that somebody has done just like a stupid job
of making a hole in wall.
How much work is it really to make a nice hole?
Anyway, we have a common wire.
We have a common wire, I'm so happy.
Yes.
Which I'm very excited about,
'cause it means that my Nest is not just gonna be like
(snaps) pinging my furnace for power
anytime it wants to connect to WiFi or whatever.
I'm just gonna strip this common wire now.
Woo-hoo.
And now I'm gonna get ready to install the Nest.
And then this thing snaps into there pretty handily.
Common wire, get in there.
Hey hey, look at that.
Maybe now we were just being impatient.
- [Tom] Oh yeah!
- Woo, hey, we have green light!
Yes!
You have to use a little rotary to get it onto your Wifi
to select the password,
and then it calls to the Nest servers.
So, once you put it on your home network,
it's gonna update its software
as most little computer things do.
Once it's charged up,
we're gonna set it up with the Google Home app.
One of the most common things people like to smart homeify
are their lights.
You can change colors sometimes for mood light,
you can set up actions that dim everything
for a home theater experience,
you can freak out your Airbnb guests.
This is a bulb from a company called LIFX
and it's an LED light bulb,
but it also has a WiFi receiver in it.
And these things, you can screw 'em into your light
and then just control 'em with one of your apps
like Google Home or Amazon or anything.
It's super easy.
So now I'm just trying to get everything into Google Home.
Right, the whole idea here is to control everything
from this one app.
So I'm now adding Nest to Google Home,
which is a little harder than it should be.
I'm sure they're unifying this stuff
but in order to add your Nest to your Google Home,
currently you've got to go to Google Assistant,
go into services, go into home control,
find Nest, link it with Google.
So, it's telling me my accounts are linked now,
which is great.
Alright, so now I've got a pretty good smart home base.
Nothing fancy, just be able to set the temperature
from anywhere and have the energy efficiency benefits
with a newer thermostat,
and then the beginning of a smart light system.
I think I'm gonna get some more of these LIFX bulbs.
And that's really enough for people like me
who just want a connected house that's modern,
but not necessarily something super duper wiz bang fancy.
Because after all, who wants to just like bark
at their house all the time?
Not me.
Google, turn off the cardboard lamp.
- [Google] Sure, turning the cardboard lamp off.
- Alright, that's kinda fun.
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