I do not know if it was because of movies I watched ten years ago or if it is only because when I think about having a smart home, I imagine an extravagant neighbourhood downtown with smart homes or its gadget almost turned into a dream.
A couple of years ago, when I decided to search and learn about smart homes, I realized how affordable they could be and how any house can become more competent. Depending on how deep you want to go, you can have an expert set up your smart home to a level where even your regular appliances are activated from your phone or by voice commands. However, in this blog, we won’t go into that much detail and focus on the first steps to ease your life. Nevertheless, do not think those steps are unnoticed or smalls. Even without spending much or with a few gadgets, you will notice the before and after you take this step and decide to start this adventure.
So, first things first, at this point, you probably might have seen or at least heard about smart speakers, even when you can find many of them in the market, the most famous ones are Amazon Echo Dot (Alexa), Google Nest and Apple HomePod. Initially, you do not need to spend much on those speakers. You will not need the last generation to have an excellent product, so having a 3rd generation Echo Dot is more than enough to get started. These speakers will help you not depend on your phone but rather to speak and see the magic happen. In my opinion, the best first step is to have that intelligent house feeling.
However, when thinking about a smart home, something that comes to your mind is controlling the lights, which features that we used to watch in movies about a clap or a finger snap (No Thanos’ finger snaps please) to turn lights on and off. Well, let me tell you that that is as simple as changing the bulbs in your home. You can buy a couple of simple bulbs and see how you can set your home to turn the light at a specific time or with a simple sentence. But, and there is always a but, it can become trickier when you are not using bulbs in your house, with the new led technologies, or with allogenous lights, you might consider your path to becoming your house into a brighter one has ended. You would not be further from reality. Something I founded and love is the smart switches. They can help you not only with the light but with anything you are controlling with a switch like your food crushing machine. It will require you to do more things or even have some tools to ensure you are not connecting the wrong cables, but it will be like a piece of cake with some time.
Finally, to complete those first steps, I recommend you buy a smart plug, the gadget to transform any appliance at home into a smart one virtually. How? You simply just connect those plugs into your regular plugs, and you will start seeing your hydro bill go down and how you protect your devices by deactivating your plugs at a specific hour of the night. As mentioned, these are your first steps. Later on, we will talk about going deeper into turning your home into a smart and cosy house.