SMART HOME SURGERY

Your connected-home queries answered by T3’ s experts

Our resident experts dish out the answers to your smart home queries

Q Dave Jo rdan, Truro What is the best multi-room system for £500?

A Duncan Bell replies: For pure quality, the best multi-room Wi- Fi speaker is the Naim Mu-So (£995, johnlewis.com). But for your budget, my top recommendation is the Sonos One (£199, sonos.com). It has wide compatibility with everything from Spotify to Tidal, with Apple AirPlay 2 incoming, and enlists Amazon Echo’s Alexa to work as your digital PA .

You can easily pair two Sonos One speakers for proper stereo, or to use as rear speakers in a surround setup with the Sonos Playbar (£699) or Playbase (£699). Despite the tedious claim of “room- filling sound from a small box”, it honestly serves up high- quality audio.

The Sonos app isn’t the greatest thing invented, but a recent update smoothed some of the roughest edges, and it does offer support for just about every music service out there. You can do anything from sending the music on your phone to the Sonos One, to constructing playlists on the fly that use multiple sources.

The real clincher in terms of value for money is the inclusion of Amazon’s Alexa AI . The implementation isn’t perfect at the moment – the array of mics in the Sonos One is sometimes not sufficient to hear your instructions, even when there’s no music playing or other loud noise in the background – and there are other quirks, like the way it cuts off every Sonos in your house to listen when you speak to just one. If you think of the Sonos as a superb speaker that happens to have Alexa, it’s worth the purchase.

Q Lauren Breene, Guild ford

How can I keep my home cool at night?

A Becca Cadd y replies: Sleep experts agree that a cool bedroom is a one-way ticket to snooze town, but it’s not always easy to achieve this in the summer. Handily, there are ways to keep your home breezy at night and minimise how much it heats up during the day. Of course, the big challenge is finding a silent solution.

Dyson’s Pure Cool purifying tower fan (£499.99, dyson.co.uk) keeps you quietly cool, delivering 290 litres of powerful air per second. The fan also removes 99.95 per cent of allergens from your home, leaving it not only cool but also fresh.

If the heat has your home feeling more like a swamp than a serene living space, ditch the fan and opt for a dehumidifying system. The Meaco 12L Low Energy Dehumidifer and Air Purifier (£179.99, meaco.com) helps prevent damp, condensation and mould year round.

Consider ways to stop your home heating up so much in the day, too. Somfy’s motorised blinds (£ Various, somfy.co.uk) are designed to block out intense sunshine and heat. They’re also remote controlled, which means more control over how much light gets in.

Did you know incandescent and halogen bulbs can be a whole 50 per cent warmer than LE D alternatives? Use the summer heat as an excuse to revamp your lighting system. The Philips Hue White Personal Wireless Lighting LE D Starter Kit (£ 54, meethue.com) provides you with smarter, more energy efficient lighting that’s heat wave-friendly.

Q Mark Brown, Leeds Is there a camera I can put in my oven so I check on my food?

A Claire Davies replies: While there’s no camera currently available for you to safely attach inside your own oven, there are solutions. However, these depend on your budget and whether you’re willing to shell out on a new oven.

The most apt solution will arrive this July in the form of the AEG ProCombi Plus Smart Oven (£1,499, aeg.co.uk), which features an in- oven video camera, enabling you to see from your phone how your food is cooking. Another option is the Hoover Vision 33701860 Electric Smart Oven (1,399, hoover.co.uk), equipped with an integrated HD camera that provides an up- close view of the food cooking inside. You can view the camera’s stream on your smartphone or tablet, via the Hoover Wizard app, or on the oven door’s interactive touchscreen.

Also check out the June Oven Pro ($1,995/£1,448, juneoven.com), a built-in intelligent convection oven designed with integrated HD camera. Through the iOS app, you can view a live feed of your food being cooked, and you can control the oven remotely. Once the Oven Pro senses your food is cooked, it will ping you a notification, so all you have to do is dish it out. Now all we need is a robot butler to serve the food.