There are on the market plenty of tools that claim home automation, the understanding of home automation at our current time is any IoT (internet of things) device that can be triggered using voice commands using one of the most common voice assistants Alexa Echo, and Google Assistant devices. I do not see this as real home automation, just another fancy and trendy switch, instead of the manual switch we used in the past now it’s voice. After using both voice assistants for more than 3 years now I just see them as just another fancy switch and not the real home automation.
Real Home automation is when your devices at home act on their own, that’s when your house becomes really smart.
- I’m going to give a couple of examples of automation i setup myself
- The brain of the automation what we call Automation Hub
- Some of the Devices i have used and available on the market
Imagine you leave your home, your house will understand that no one is there anymore and it will automatically turn on the alarm, lock the door if you forgot to do so, turn off all the lights and start vacuuming, This is a smart connected home.
When you get close to home, your system will detect that you came back it will disable the alarm and open the garage door for you, now that’s considered a smart connected home.
A small leak starts under your kitchen sink, the main valve of the house directly shuts down the water, to avoid any water damages.
In different times of the day, 7 am or maybe sunset or sunrise, different lights turn on and off, and the blinds open and close all by themselves
Those are some examples I have set up at my home and many others, to achieve all this automation a hub is required or what I call the brain of the house. Some of the good home automation hubs available in the market are SmartThings or Hubitat, at the time of writing this article, Google home is not one of my best options for a Hub same for Alexa devices because of the lack of connectivity and most importantly automation capabilities.
To choose the right Automation hub for you a couple of factors need to be taken into account and the hub needs to have some important capabilities
- Different wireless connection protocols, WIFI, ZigBee, Z-Wave, BlueTooth and lately companies are working on a unified protocol called Matter. You want your hub to has as much as possible to allow you to connect to more possibilities of devices
- Good automation capabilities, this is an important part that allows you to make your home really smart
- Geo-Fencing capability, this is important if you want your home to do different actions when you or your family arrive or leave the house.
I am currently using Smartthings Hub v3 as the main brain of my house, Samsung stopped producing this hub and now they are licensing the hardware to other companies like Aotec. This hub also Support Geo-Fencing that you can set up on your phone when you install the SmartThing app
Some of the devices I am using in my house
To control lights I’m mostly using at-home Sengled Smart LED Daylight, which requires a ZigBee hub to connect and the Smartthings Hub has that capability.
For the Door Lock, I am using August Smart Lock, it’s very easy to install, and most importantly you keep the manual key from outside as a backup, I never had to use to manual key but it feels safer and more in control 🙂
Controlling the window blinds is one of my latest gadgets, you can buy an out-of-the-box smart blind or you can just buy a motor to convert your existing blind, almost the same result it’s just cheaper. this link (Smart wifi Blinds motor) should give you an idea of what’s available on the market. For curtains, you can just install a switch bot.
Vacuuming your floor is one of the first things you want to automate, think about it who likes to vacuum the floor, at first I was a little skeptical but now that we had a robot vacuum for almost 3 years we can’t live without it anymore. The is so many models on the market with a different price range and many different options, we have the Irobot i7 (depends when you read this article different model will be on the market) on our main floor and a cheap 150$ robot for our basement
I’ll keep updating this article the more I make my house smart with new devices that come out, hope this helps you in achieving a real smart home