Create a healthy, welcoming atmosphere
A cooler home, a warmer home, a healthier home – it’s easily controllable
There’s a big, obvious clue in the name: creating a smart home is all about making your home
smarter. And that doesn’t just mean scattering chatty speakers or app-controlled routers around. Sometimes, it’s important to emphasise the ‘home’ portion of the equation – a true smart home is one that keeps close tabs on itself, feeds that information back to you, and adjusts your environment either automatically or on demand.
This isn’t about being lazy, although that’s a fun side effect of most smart kit. You’ll still need to be involved, in some small way, since the majority of climate-focused devices don’t yet know how to open or close a window by themselves. But going smart can help you to spot things you might not have known about, and fix them before they turn into an issue.
Let’s look, as an example, at the Awair air quality monitor (£159). Just upgraded to its second edition as we went to press, it’s a combination of snazzy LED display and sophisticated sensor that looks at your home environment to ensure you’re getting the best quality air possible. If it detects toxic chemicals, excess carbon dioxide, humidity imbalances or even fine dust particles, it’ll let you know to get ventilating or to switch on your humidifier for a while. Like many other devices, including those we’ve reviewed this issue, it also allows you to track those metrics over time in order to discover patterns and potentially (if you’re savvy about it) find the source, correcting environmental issues before they worsen.
Sensors don’t have to go to quite that extreme to be effective – something as simple as a smart thermometer (another skill of the Awair) or a contact sensor for your windows or doors is really all you need to start building a climate control ecosystem.
Thermodynamics
Of course, if you’re looking at temperature, the real headline-grabbers of the past few years have been smart thermostats like the Nest Learning Thermostat (from £219) and its many competitors. There’s a good reason for this. Smart thermostats aren’t unfathomable upgrades; in many ways they act exactly as a normal thermostat would, triggering your heating system when the temperature in your home dips to a certain level, and switching it off again afterwards.
So far, so straightforward. If you’d like to just set your temperature and be done with it, you’re welcome to; modern smart thermostats are highly attractive, accurate and simple to interact with directly. But the benefits of going smart extend beyond putting a good-looking device on your wall. Internet connectivity, and the apps that generally go along with smart thermostats, mean you can manually warm your home wherever you might be – if you’re heading home you can trigger your heating, or if you’re out for the day you can switch it off.
Some thermostats go even further, intelligently sensing a human presence in
your home to ensure you’re not wasting energy by heating an empty house (with the option of detecting or ignoring pets, depending on your preference for keeping your pets cosy) or linking to cameras or motion sensors to keep tabs on individual rooms.
You don’t have to go down the often complex and expensive route of getting an engineer in to replace your existing thermostat, by the way. Localising your controls using the new breed of individual smart radiator thermostats is an easy way to install the same – or perhaps better – effect yourself, and introduce room-by room temperature controls while you’re at it.
Most thermostats, particularly if they offer HomeKit support, will give you further options – triggering other smart devices when your home reaches a certain temperature, for example. Think of the possibilities; you could do things like switching on a fan or air conditioner via a smart plug if they hit a top-limit temperature, or tying space heaters to your general heating system if your radiators aren’t doing the job.
Trigger points
This automation can work the other way around. Placing contact sensors on windows or doors will mean you can avoid wasting heat disappearing outside by automatically shutting off your radiators, or you could rig up just about any link to your heating, however esoteric – how about turning it on for half an hour using one of last issue’s smart buttons?
Employing sensors as triggers can make a huge difference to your home. Using a humidity sensor in conjunction with a smart plug and a humidifier has clear benefits, and while it might sound complex, setting up a link like this is incredibly simple, and to pause or manually override if you choose to.
The fact that you can essentially brew up your own climate ecosystem with the help of Apple’s HomeKit platform, or web-connected services like IFTTT, definitely makes up for the lack of smart functionality and network connectivity in many appliances.