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7 min readIf you wish there was more time in the day, home automation can help. Once it’s set up, simple voice commands or mobile app finger taps keep the ball rolling.
Whether you're looking for your first smart device, expanding your collection, or making your devices cooperate, here are four steps for smart home beginners to leap into home automation. Before you know it, you’ll be living in a twenty-first-century smart home.
There’s no tried-and-true definition of a smart home. Generally, a smart home uses smart devices to automate and control household functions—often through mobile apps and voice commands. Smart homes have four benefits that save money and time: convenience, security, entertainment, and energy efficiency.
There are thousands of ways to automate your home—making it easy to go overboard on smart devices you don’t need. We suggest starting slowly with one or two smart devices before gradually adding more.
Below, we highlight some of our favourite products for smart home beginners that are easy to use, affordable, or too good to pass up.
We also include links to relevant comparisons of the best smart home products and possible combinations of devices to help you choose your next smart product.
A digital assistant or smart speaker is probably the best way to start automating your home. They work using voice commands, which are useful for setting timers, playing music and podcasts, and controlling other smart home products. The Amazon Echo Dot (5th Gen) is an affordable smart speaker that uses Amazon's Alexa smart home platform. And it supports hundreds of devices.
What to pair with your smart speaker
Smart light bulbs are one of the cheapest and easiest ways to start automating your home. While we like multicolour light bulbs for their flexibility, we think the Philips Hue White A60 Smart Bulb is a good starting point (for around $30 each). It's easy to schedule and dim using a mobile app or your voice. It doesn't support multiple colours but is an affordable option from one of the best smart home brands.
What to pair with your smart light bulb
Smart plugs are budget-friendly, easy to use, and turn virtually any appliance or electronic into a smart device. After setup, you can use an app to set timers and schedule lights. We like these affordable Meross ones, which are under $50 for a four-pack.
What to pair with your smart plug
A smart thermostat boosts your home's comfort and energy efficiency. For example, it can shift your house’s temperatures higher or lower during periods of low activity (like when you're asleep or away). Our favourite smart thermostat is the Sensibo Air Smart Thermostat (about $160) because it learns your preferred temperature settings and works well with Apple HomeKit, Google Assistant, and Amazon Alexa.
What to pair with your smart thermostat
Video doorbells are essentially security cameras for your porch. They allow you to see and speak with visitors at your door without opening it. One of our top doorbell camera picks is the Ring Video Doorbell, which is incredibly affordable and works using either a rechargeable battery or existing doorbell wiring.
What to pair with your video doorbell
A smart lock can arm and disarm a security system, track when guests enter and exit, and eliminate the need to hide a spare key near your door. You can also remotely unlock it to free up a hand while carrying groceries. We like the Ultraloq U-Bolt Pro (about $250) for its versatile unlocking options.
What to pair with your smart lock
While a security camera's primary goal is to record events in and around your home, it can also act as a video intercom thanks to two-way audio. The Arlo Pro 5 is one of our favourite security cameras because it boasts excellent video quality and is compatible with tons of smart home devices.
What to pair with your security camera
The biggest dilemma in the smart home is which platform to use. Using a single platform, your devices can talk to each other and you can control them in a central place.
This allows you to manage everything remotely through an app on your smartphone, or computer, or voice control using digital assistants like Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri.
A smart hub is traditionally a device that controls other devices through protocols like Z-Wave and Zigbee. Although this type of tangible hub still exists (Samsung SmartThings), it's becoming more common to see virtual hubs that link accounts of different Wi-Fi devices over the internet (Alexa, Google Assistant, and IFTTT).
While you want to maximise your devices' compatibility with each other, you won't find a single smart home system that works with everything. For now, your best bet is to use devices that work with multiple smart home platforms.
Not always. But hubs can be useful for managing a large number of devices—particularly ones that use Z-Wave and Zigbee. Hubs are also great for reducing the number of Wi-Fi devices on your home network if they're slowing down your internet connection.
Once you sample what a smart home can offer, it's hard to resist adding more devices. As you do, consider these four categories to achieve balance: control, entertainment, security, and utilities. These categories can help turn your tech daydreams into a smart home that's helpful and uniquely yours.
A smart home's ultimate goal is devices working together to streamline your day. There are two ways to make your devices work for you: routines and automations.
Routines group device functions together under a single command—some companies call them scenes or shortcuts. This allows you to change multiple settings at once to skip the burdensome and slow process of using manual controls one by one on a smartphone app or smart speaker.
Scenes and routines are useful in two ways:
While the process for creating routines, scenes, and shortcuts varies slightly from app to app, the steps are often universally easy:
Automations use a cause/effect structure that allows devices to react automatically to changing conditions in your home. While they have a longer setup process and require more critical thinking than routines, they're the pinnacle of smart home convenience.
Setting up automation consists of two parts: choosing what activates the system and specifying how the system reacts. Here are some common triggers and actions you can mix and match in most smart home systems:
One of my favourite automations is a night light that uses a colour smart bulb and a motion sensor. I created a routine where the motion sensor turns the light on at a dim orange setting to avoid blinding me when I walk down the stairs. This triggers a second routine: the light turns off when there's no motion for two minutes. Both routines start working when I tell my Google Home assistant that it's bedtime and turns off automatically at sunrise.
Homes vary in size and layout, so it's difficult to put an exact cost on a DIY home automation system. Depending on the devices you choose, expect to spend $500–$2,000 on smart home equipment.
The interconnected nature of smart home technology means there's always a chance that someone can hack into your equipment. You can minimise threats by sticking with trusted manufacturers, using strong passwords, and setting up two-factor authentication if available. Check out our guide to protecting your smart home from hacking for more tips.
