Smart homes! Should you be installing a smart home system into your home?
Let’s start with understanding exactly what having a smart home means. A smart home allows you to turn your ordinary bricks and mortar home into something that resembles the Jetsons, although sadly without the flying car! Automation is the key word when it comes to smart homes, allowing you to take control of many aspects of your home via an app on your smartphone, smart device (Amazon Alexa or Google home) or a smart thermostat like the ones offered by companies like Hive and Nest.
This is the ultimate upgrade from the old fashioned clapping lights situation, now you can press a few buttons or even just speak from the comfort of your armchair to change the temperature across your home, turn lights on and off, control security systems, close and open blinds and more. Along with this unparalleled convenience there are many benefits that can come from having an automated home, energy efficiency is one of the key selling points for smart homes, from your phone you can adjust the temperature of your heating, your lighting and electronics allowing you to remotely control these aspects of your home, so if your out and your heating is going to come on at 7 but you miscalculated and are actually going to be a few hours late, then you can simply adjust your heating to come on 15 minutes before you get home, that way it will be nice and cosy for your return and you’ll be saving energy as you won’t be heating an empty house!
Not only does that make you happy because you can save on your bills but it’s also beneficial for the planet and that is a win-win situation if you ask us!
To get an understanding of a few of the possibilities with smart home functionlity, take a look at this video by youtube Danny Winget, where he gives you a little guidance to some of the products that you can use to smarten up your home.
There are a couple of concerns about smart homes and their security, as you are connecting a lot of your home appliances and systems to the internet, this can open you up to the possibility of having your home hacked and that is quite a scary thought! You have to consider a few things though, with a good security system for your wi-fi you will curtail most attempts at someone trying to hack your home but the biggest thing to consider is that its not common it would be fairly unlucky for it to happen to you. Think of having a good wi-fi security setup like locking your car, a thief is much less likely to steal something from a locked car then an open one.
To conclude our little article, we are pretty sure that we would all welcome smart home integration into our own homes. The convenience that a smart home system allows is quite amazing in most cases, it really seems like we are making steps into the future much like those retro visions of the future!
