If you’re just getting into smart home technology, you might be wondering what the best smart gadgets for your home are. You’re not alone: tons of people are interested in making their house a smart home but don’t know what products are the best for doing just that. Today, we’re helping you figure that out with our buying guide for smart home technology.
Best Smart Home Devices
Amazon Echo
The first part of any smart home is the hub. You need something to act as a central hub, or a brain, for your smart home. While there are a ton of options on the market, we recommend Amazon’s Echo line of products. There are products at all price points in the range, from the budget-friendly Echo Dot all the way up to the larger Echo Show and standard-sized Echo speaker. We highly recommend the Echo Dot to people who haven’t used smart speakers or smart home technology before.
The Echo Dot 3rd Generation can be found at Amazon for $50, though if you go with an older generation you can get a speaker for even less than that. The Echo sports Alexa, Amazon’s stellar virtual assistant, who you can issue vocal commands to in order to control your smart home technology. Turning on your lights, ordering off of Amazon and even locking you door can all be controlled with your voice through Alexa.
TP-Link Kasa Smart Plug Mini
Smart plugs are the go-to smart technology for anyone just breaking into smart home tech. The reason? It can turn pretty much any simple device into a smart device. Let’s say, for instance, you have a favorite lamp in your living room, but it’s in an awkward position that’s hard to get to. Well, all you need to do is hook up a smart plug, name that plug “living room lamp” and synch it with your smart home hub.
Once you’ve got it hooked up, you can use your hub to command the lamp on or off through your voice alone. Simply calling out “turn on the living room lamp” will signal the plug to send a current to the lamp, and like that, you’ve got a smart lamp without having to buy any other new technology. With some creativity, you can see how useful these smart plugs can be for someone just starting out.
Philips Hue
If you want something a little fancier for your smart lighting, we suggest the Phillips Hue line of products. These smart bulbs connect to your smart home hub and then you can use either the Hue app or your voice to control them. True to their name, these lights can cycle through a wide variety of colors and shades, so you can light a room to whatever color or lamination you’d like.
Nest Thermostat
One of the most useful smart home devices is the Nest Learning Thermostat. As its name suggests, this is a smart thermostat that learns your patterns to help make sure your home stays comfortable. Once it knows when you wake up, when you leave for work and when you get back, the thermostat will start to automatically set the temperature to your comfortable ranges. This is more than just convenient: it means you’ll likely see lower power bills.
Beyond that, you can also use normal voice commands to change the temperature in your home. Little beats calling out to your smart hub to drop the temperature a bit and having your home not only listen, but follow through. It makes you feel like you’re living in the future to assume command of your home with your voice.