Nowadays there are a lot of smart home devices in the market. It is important to understand what they do and how they can help you make your life easier. Here are some of my favorite ones.
August Smart Lock:
What I like of this lock is the ability to keep your actual door lock key (still have to considere some compatibility http://support.august.com/customer/portal/articles/2156679-deadbolt-compatibility?b_id=10917. But most of the time will work with regular locks)
This smart lock is perfect for airbnb type of business you can change passcodes and give new passcodes with an expiration date really simple from your phone. You can get notifications when the door opens, if it was left open and even who is arriving home with personalized access codes so you can know when your kids arrive home.
Now you can add a doorbell with camera to the same august platform and it is compatible with Nest and Harmony.
Rachio:
There is a lot of technology that most of us don’t realize for the crops and the fields. With Rachio you can bring this technology home controlling your sprinkler system saving money and having a great looking yard.
Rachio has what the call flex schedule and they use different algorithms to know when your plants need watering based on type of plants, soil, sun exposure, nozzle type and square footage.
With all this it calculates when does your plants need water and combines this with the weather station so you don’t water your plants during rain anymore.
It has what they call smart watering cycle that splits time of irrigation, for example, if you are watering one zone for 15 it will split the time in 3 cycles of 5 minutes and separate them, that way the water penetrates to the roots and not run off to the street.
Another advantage is that some cities will give a discount or an incentive to install this smart device that saves water.
Nest Thermostat:
The Nest Thermostat is an easy way to control your AC system the thermostat learns from you, so the more you change the settings the more it learns about temperatures and times you like.
It also has a motion sensor that uses your phone location to know if you are home, and if you are not home it will go into an away mode saving a lot of money on your power bill. You can control this thermostat from your phone and it will send you monthly reports with the savings you did that month.
And if you get it from a Nest Pro like Grizzly Tec you get 5 year warranty instead of 2.
Logitech Harmony Pro
Having multiple devices could be painful especially if you have to deal with a lot of remotes and instructions just to watch tv. Harmony Pro is a universal remote that can control all your multimedia devices and more.
Imagine being seated on your couch, ready to watch a movie, and you forgot to turn off the lights and set the thermostat, well, with harmony you can do that from your remote or even from your phone because they have an app too.
They added a button called logitech pop in which you can set certain activities with the touch of a button, but it does not end here, they just launched their hub extender that allows you to control Zwave and Zigbee devices.
Eero
With the Internet Of Things now everything is connected even in your home, and when it works, it is really good and enjoyable, but when something starts failing it could be a nightmare.
The best way to control this is having a good network at your home and one of my favorite devices is Eero a TrueMesh WiFi system. The system allows you to have repeaters all over your place, having more coverage and the same bandwidth. The difference of this system compared to a regular extender is that the extender will extend the amount of signal it receives lowering the bandwidth.
With the TrueMesh it uses its own protocol to send the data like a wired connection between the antennas, so they can transfer that data to your devices connected to the WiFi.
The system has an app where you can see who is connected to your network, you can create profiles and managed the internet access to the devices on each profile, having the control of your network at all times.
