Your Guide to Smart Home Devices (Part 1)

We’ve all seen Hollywood’s visions of “The Home of the Future.” From Rosie the robot housekeeper on The Jetsons and the automated appliances in Lost in Space, to SARAH, the smart house on the TV series Eureka or J.A.R.V.I.S., Tony Stark’s A.I. virtual butler on Iron Man, we have been obsessed with the idea of a house that can do things for us automatically for quite some time. Thanks to the latest smart home devices, the future is now! While you still can’t ask your virtual assistant to help you build a robotic flight suit (I tried), you can install devices that allow you to turn your lights on and off, adjust your thermostat, open and shut your front door, and much more, all with your smartphone or just the sound of your voice! Here is a comprehensive guide to the best smart home devices and how well they work with each other, to help get you started on building your own version of the Home of the Future.

Amazon Echo, $179.99 (Amazon.com)

Meet Alexa. The nerve center of your entire smart home, the Alexa Voice Service featured on Amazon Echo will help you control smart home devices with hands-free efficiency, all by simply speaking a trigger word or phrase. For example: want to raise your home temperature by two degrees? Simply say, “Alexa raise Hallway temperature to 74. Boom! Done! Alexa is also quite efficient as a music player and can play songs from the Amazon Prime Music library as well as Pandora, IHeartRadio, Spotify and more. Not only that but she is incredibly personable, for an A.I. entity. She’ll tell you a corny joke, share an amazing fact, and even sing Happy Birthday- all you have to do is ask! The Amazon Echo, and by extension, Alexa, works with a multitude of smart home devices and is adding compatibility with new ones every week, so she is your best bet for realizing your dream of talking to your house and making your appliances work.

Pros: Sleek, futuristic cylinder design with attractive blue light upon saying wake word. Good speaker for playing music. Works with most major smart home devices and appliances. (Bonus: You feel like a rockstar genius every time you tell Alexa to perform a task and she does.)

Cons: Alexa doesn’t always hear you. If you have the volume turned up and are playing music, it may take a few tries to get her to respond when you call her name. Also, while it is enjoyable to speak to Alexa in a conversational tone, it is far less efficient to have to say a lengthy phrase such as, “Alexa, tell LIFX to change brightness of kitchen lights to 60%,” rather than just, “Alexa, dim kitchen lights.”

LIFX bulbs, starts at $29.99 (LIFX.com)

If you want light bulbs you can control with Alexa, or via a well-designed app on your smartphone, look no further than LIFX. At just under $30 per bulb, they are an incredible value for the functionality they provide. Choose from white or colored bulbs and use the app to create scenes (“Morning,” “Rainy Day,” etc.) or moods with your home lighting. Best of all, each LIFX bulb is fully dimmable and can change colors and be programmed to work in a variety of ways, either individually or as a group.

Pros: Easy to install (just screw in the lightbulb, connect to wifi and you’re ready to go!), clever and easy-to-use app makes changing colors and brightness a breeze, compatible with Alexa.

Cons: Bulbs will go offline if someone makes the grievous error of flipping them off with a light switch like some sort of time traveler from the past. Putting them back online is as simple as flipping the switch back on, but if you are away from home you will be unable to control the bulbs until you return and manually flip the switch.

Nest Learning Thermostat, starts at $299 (Nest.com)

Being able to control the temperature of your home at different times of the day not only increases your comfort but also can help reduce your energy bills in the long run. The Nest Learning Thermostat, as its name implies, actually “learns” your temperature-control habits and house schedule over the initial two weeks or so after being installed, then uses that info to automatically adjust itself throughout the day. Best of all, the Heat-Cool mode will actually allow you to switch between using your furnace and your A/C unit, which can be perfect for those crazy days in the fall and spring when it’s freezing in the morning and scorching by noon.

Pros: Works with Alexa, gorgeous design actually makes you want to put it somewhere prominent on your wall, easy to control via well-designed smartphone app, allows you to save energy and money on electric bill.

Cons:We’ll let you know when we find one.

There are so many delightful, user-friendly innovations in the smart home arena these days, it is going to take more than one article to share all of them with you. Check out Part 2 of our series!