- Even just a few years ago, smart homes were not a thing.
Or, they were, but you had to be
a total nerd or super rich to have one.
Now everything's different.
If you have an Amazon Echo, you have
the beginning of a smart home.
If you have any appliance you can turn on or off
from your phone, you have part of a smart home.
It turns out that smart homes are really easy
to start building, now a days.
And you can do some pretty cool things with them,
like control your lights, your heating, your TV.
You're often more limited by what would
be dumb and excessive, than what you actually want to do.
So, how do you get started?
We're gonna go to my apartment and I'm going
to show you what you can do for under $200 dollars
to make you're home a little bit smarter.
(snappy upbeat music)
Alright, so the first place to start is a voice assistant.
I'll admit, these can be kinda creepy,
but once you start to get used to them,
they actually turn into a fun and pretty convenient way
to control your stuff.
I chose the Google Home Mini.
It's $49 but they're on sale all the time,
so don't pay that much.
Obviously, you can use this to look stuff up,
or play music or podcasts, but I mostly use mine
to turn my lights and air conditioner on and off.
I could just use a button or do it in my phone,
as I see a lot more convenient a lot of the time,
especially if I'm on my way out the door
or going to bed.
Now, we're going to get into the smart lights
and how I turned a dumb air conditioner
into a smart one, but before I do that,
I want to talk about how all these devices
are talking to each other. 'Cause there's a lot going on
and it can get pretty confusing.
(energetic music)
You're probably familiar with Bluetooth and Wi-fi.
Bluetooth is great for things like fitness trackers,
headphones, mice and keyboards.
And Wi-fi is great for, well, bringing internet
to your laptop, smartphone, smart tv, and so on.
But they're using different gagets for a reason.
They're designed to do different things.
Bluetooth is pretty slow at transferring data
and it can't travel very far,
but it doesn't use a ton of power.
Wi-fi is really fast and can travel farther,
but it does use a ton of power.
There's really only one distinction
that you have to remember.
Bluetooth gadgets usually aren't connected to the internet,
so, unless you connect them to some kind of hub,
you can't control them while you're out of the home.
Where things get more complicated
is when you get deeper into smart home tech.
Turns out, Bluetooth and Wi-fi
just don't fit the bill for everything.
Neither are great for things like lightbulbs
that need to be reached at the way far end of the house.
For that, there are other wireless technologies,
like Zigbee and Z-wave.
These use really tiny amounts of energy.
So, you can have sensors sitting around
on battery power for months.
But that means they're super slow at transmitting data.
They're also built to travel much farther,
because their messages can jump around.
So, one lightbulb can transmit an off command
to the next one and the next one, and so on.
What this means is that, if you're buying something,
you'll have to make sure it actually works with your stuff.
One of the things that you're gonna need a hub for
is smart lights.
I think the best smart lights are from Philips Hue
and you'll want to start with their starter kit,
because it comes with that hub, which is gonna hook up
to your router, so that everything can talk together.
The starter kit costs $64 dollars.
It comes with a bunch of bulbs and, while Philips
has a bunch of, like, color changing stuff, too.
Don't worry about that.
It's just more than you need.
Smart lights are great for just
a bunch of little conveniences.
You can have them automatically come on when you come home
or when the sun goes down.
I bet you have at least one speaker in your house
that isn't smart or could be smarter.
For $35 you can plug a Chromecast Audio into it
and it will be able to do a lot more.
So, I have this two speaker system here.
It's old, it's from 2004 or something, but
if I hook the Chromecast Audio up
by pluging into the AUX port, I can now control it
from my phone or do this, I can say
"Hey Google, play Childish Gambino on those speakers".
[Google Voice] - Alright, Donald Glover from Spotify...
- And there we go.
- [Google Voice] - Playing on both speakers.
("This is America" playing on the speakers)
- Alright, so the last thing is a smart plug.
It's basically just an individual outlet
that you can plug something into and then turn on and off.
I got TP-link's Kasa, you can get
a two pack of them for $45 bucks.
So, these things are really cool because they're all at once
really versitle, but also really limited,
because they literally just turn things on and off.
So, I connected my two air conditioners to them,
so that I can control them and turn them on
when I'm coming home from work.
Now, some caveats.
They are literally just killing power to these things
and turning them back on.
They can't control anything at all.
So, my air conditioner, it turns out,
will automatically resume it's prior state
when it turns back on.
So, because of that, this works out really well,
because, I can just flip it on and it's just gonna
start making things cool again.
You can use this for things like fans and lamps, too,
that are just gonna automatically resume their same state.
So, that's it, that's just about $200 dollars.
But there's a lot more you can do with
the stuff you already have, if you want to get
a little bit more complicated.
Using apps in your phone, you can hook things together
to do even more.
There's a service called IFTTT, If This Than That.
That's really good for this.
So, for instance, I set up a rule saying that
if it's over 80 degrees in Brooklyn, my air conditioner
will automatically turn on and you can do that
for all kinds of stuff, with your lights,
with your speakers.
Now, I really think the best way to get
into your smart home is to do it piece by piece, like this.
Buy one thing, see how it works for you,
and then get whatever else makes sense next.
Now, I went with the Google Home Mini,
but it might make more sense for you
to go with Alexa, or if you use tons of Apple devices,
to go with the HomeKit system.
Just start with whatever works for you
and then add on, bit by bit, and before you know it,
you're gonna have a much smarter home.
Hey, thanks for watching.
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