There is so much smart home tech on the market today, it's hard to know what is a worthwhile investment and what is a waste of time, writes AdamMaguire
Asking your home to do something for you – or having it automatically adjust to your needs – may seem like the stuff of sci-fi. But the glut of smart home tech now available means that the home of the future is actually relatively easy to create today.
In fact, pressing the ‘on’ button is probably the easiest part of the process – so you’re not really saving much work. But it’s questionable whether that would actually work in the real world, though. And even if you do think the feature sounds useful, it’ll cost you.So what about the smart tech that’s actually useful?
You can also set lights to a schedule – like having some lights come on at sunset, or at a certain time. You can even add sensors so lights automatically come on when you walk into a room, and go off when you leave. The likes of Ikea sells smart bulbs that are only slightly more expensive than regular ones, for example.But smart bulbs are generally LED, which means they’re low energy. They use about 20-25% of the energy an old incandescent bulb needed.
And you can really fine tune the schedule if you want – setting different temperatures at different times on different days. You might be looking at €150-250 for one, and you would need to spend a bit more if you need to get it installed too. That means you can respond to a caller no matter where you are – and, depending on the camera, it might also act like a CCTV device that lets you watch back on the camera feed afterwards if there’s something you want to check.
There are also smart smoke and carbon monoxide alarms that also send an alert to your phone, so you know if there’s an issue even if you’re out But you should tread carefully when it comes to less well-known brands, especially the cheaper stuff that you might find online, as some have been found to be unusually active in sending data too and from their company servers.
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