Once you’ve paid the up front cost, Smart Home devices can save you time and distraction. As our wonderful free market often provides for us, the number of choices and options are overwhelming. It’s hard to tell what you might need or not. It might all feel vaguely foreign and not worth the trouble. I’m here to tell you that you don’t need to be a complete nerd to get in on the ground floor of some of the great benefits Smart devices have to offer.
I estimate that my current Smart Home setup saves me a staggering 2.1 hours per week. This is equivalent to 100+ hours a year, and doesn’t account for the time savings it gives to my family as well, the energy efficiency benefits, and the simple enjoyment and convenience of customized automation. Just like the vacuum cleaner, washing machine, and dishwasher, this is quickly becoming a time-saving technology that you would be remiss to ignore. Based on my extensive experience working with Smart Home stuff, there are a few simple additions you can make to your house that are easy to add and will have a significant impact on your quality of life.
The things you should consider:
- Smart doorbell
- Amazon Echo (or another voice assistant)
- Smart thermostat
- Smart outlets & smart bulbs
- Get a Smart Hub before going further
A smart doorbell
Our first major Smart Home device was a Ring Pro video doorbell, which proved incredibly helpful for keeping our front door safe in a not-super-safe neighborhood. Here are the main benefits:
- We don’t need to walk to the door, get out of bed, or even be home to know who is at our door.
- It helps us keep track of when packages are delivered.
- It has an intercom to let us communicate with people at our door, to give instructions like “leave the food at the door, please!”
- When we miss a ring, we’re able to go back and watch the recording (though recordings can be disabled if that bothers you).
This saves you time and stress: you don’t need to walk to the door, or even be home, to check who it is; you can get on the intercom and give instructions like “leave the food at the door!”; cloud services keep recordings so you can know who was at the door even if you missed it.
As a longtime user, I recommend the Ring Pro, which has a solid app and features as well as a cloud recording service. There are several alternatives:
- Cheaper: The Ring (non-Pro) Doorbell
- Another cheaper, non-Ring alternative: Eufy Security Video Doorbell (2K)
- Battery powered installation: Eufy Wireless Video Doorbell
- For Arlo fans: Arlo Video Doorbell
An Amazon Echo
Voice assistant technology has developed tremendously over the past several years. Echo can tell you about the weather (‘Alexa, what’s the weather outside’?), answer miscellaneous questions (‘what’s 2,112 times 1978?’, ‘Who is the Queen of England?’), play music (‘Alexa, play the Beatles’), among hundreds of other skills. Some versions of the Echo come with a screen, which makes it great for your kitchen. They also allow for video calls.
Our vast network of Echo devices in our two-story house saves our family hours a week by streamlining our smart home control and communications.
To start, you could pick up a regular Echo or Echo show 5. There are cheaper options in the Echo Dot (smaller speaker) and Echo flex (tiny speaker). If you’re feeling more adventurous, you can pick up a full-sized Echo Show, which has a large screen. I’ve found the full-size Echo Show to be a valuable asset in the kitchen: we use it for research, recipes, viewing our doorbell, viewing our baby monitors, controlling our fire TV, and entertaining the kids with Alexa skills and games.
A smart thermostat
Smart thermostats are a no-brainer in the Smart Home world, because the provide the maximum mix of remote control, automation, and energy efficiency. The average American household spends approximately $300-$500 per year on air conditioning costs alone, while programmable thermostats can reduce that cost by $180-250. I easily spend $2000 a year on cooling & heating our 2500 sq. foot home each year. Here are the simple benefits of a smart thermostat:
- You don’t need to get out of bed to set your temperature.
- You can change the temperature from anywhere in the house or outside the house.
- Smart thermostats can automatically turn down heat/AC based on occupancy, or run on a schedule
- You can get usage and runtime stats from your apps to better understand how your money is being spent.
In this vein, there are several extremely good competitors in the Smart Thermostat space. I recommend the Ecobee4. Alternatives include:
Cheaper, older gen, but still good: Ecobee3
The ‘other brand’: the Google Nest thermostat
The other brand’s cheaper version: The Google Nest E
A solid competitor: Honeywell Home T5 Smart thermostat
A few smart outlets or smart lights
You can easily try out smart devices by purchasing some of the cheapest options in outlets and lights to get a taste for what Smart devices can do for you. One of our first applications of Smart Outlets was for our Christmas Decorations – we scheduled them to automatically shut off late at night (instead of our old method of unplugging the tree and lighted garlands). For Smart Lighting, we picked up some Philips Hue bulbs and used them as bedtime/night lights in our kids’ room; they loved the ability to choose the color each night and keep it on at a dim level, while we would be able to schedule it to turn off automatically after an hour.
If you have existing light fixtures, Smart Lighting can be achieved at low cost by screwing in new bulbs. Philips Hue requires a hub to work, while many smart bulbs connect directly to Wi-Fi. These bulbs generally aren’t super bright (especially the color types), but work great in desk and standing lamps.
Recommended: Philips Hue Starter Kit
Some reasonable alternatives in the smart bulb space that are significantly cheaper than Philips Hue are:
- Sylvania Smart+
- Some generics: Treatlife, NiteBird, OHLUX, and MagicLight multipacks
Think you might go bigger? Get a smart hub
Many advanced Smart Home devices require a hub (e.g., Samsung SmartThings), but you can start with devices that operate over wi-fi and you operate via a mobile app connected via a cloud service. Most mainstream Smart Home devices, like the Ring Doorbell, work directly off the cloud and don’t need a hub. However, smart light switches and dimmers and motion sensors, among many more Smart Home devices you’d install in bulk in your house, are often best used in a hub which also permits automation and scenes. Z-wave light switches and dimmers are far more cost effective than, say, Philips Hue light bulbs. For full Smart Home automation, I strongly recommend sticking with the Z-wave protocol and using Samsung SmartThings.
There are some credible other options, such as the Google Nest Hub and Apple HomePod (and Homepod mini). The Amazon Echo 4th generation ecosystem also functions as a kind of smart hub, but only works wtih Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and Zigbee. Ultimately, Samsung offers the best customizability of all Smart Home hubs and seems to have weathered the storm as an industry leader.
Is Smart Home for you? Is it worth the investment?
Some new technologies take time to mature, and it’s safe to say a lot of Smart Home stuff has become incredibly accessible and cost-effective. Eventually, builders will start broadly including Smart home capability directly into homes under construction.
I’ve found the experience of bringing Smart Home on board incredibly powerful and useful. In all, I’ve probably spent less than $1500 to achieve an incredibly sophisticated Smart Home setup, whose time savings of 100+ hours a year have more than paid off for me over the last few years. While I adopted even before Smart Home products were totally mature, today my family cannot live without the smart capabilities. I’ll hear it from my wife occasionally when the Ring doorbell isn’t working, or a smart lighting scene is not quite to her liking (“this light is too bright at night”). She was the original skeptic on this stuff, thinking I was just a boy with gimmicky toys. Now she’s the end user, and I’m on tech support duty. That’s the thankless job of being an efficiency pioneer.
