Miscellaneous articles, news, tips and tricks relating to smart home tech and home automation devices.
I had always been a bit unsure about smart lighting due to their cost, but I realized of a perfect smart light usecase around my home (turning on and off four side lamps in the evenings). So I went out and purchased four E14 candle Hue bulbs (White Ambiance), along with a B22 starter kit … Read more
When you plug a device into a smart plug, it’s sometimes easy to forget that the device itself isn’t suddenly smart. And by that I mean that it’s still the same old device, merely plugged into a smart plug which can turn it on or off. A standard light – even one which supports dimming … Read more
When reading about smart homes, you’ll probably have seen ‘Amazon Alexa’ and ‘Amazon Echo’ used almost interchangeably, but they’re actually quite different. It’s almost like the difference between a guitar player and the guitar… one (the player) uses a tool (the guitar) to do something (play music). An Amazon Echo is a voice activated, internet … Read more
I previously written about the disadvantages of smart homes, and somehow came up with a list of 19 reasons. Whilst everything I covered is valid, there’s more that’s good about smart homes than bad – so I wanted to cover 25 reasons why I think smart homes are awesome here. Whether it’s getting news and … Read more
If you search for “Nest Protect” – the smart smoke and CO alarm – you’ll be greeted with Google’s logo and the words “Google Nest”. It’s clearly a Google smart home product: So logic would dictate that you can manage Nest Protect in your Google Home app, right? Well, for over half a decade, this … Read more
When it comes to controlling your new smart home device, you’ll probably see that most devices nowadays “support Alexa”. Some support Google Home, too. However you may also have seen people talk about their ‘SmartThings Home Hub’, or perhaps their ‘Home Assistant hub’ running from a Raspberry Pi. So what gives? Do you need a … Read more
Ceiling fans are a great invention: they make a room’s temperature feel around 5-8 degrees cooler than it otherwise might. The light is often adjustable too, allowing for the light to be dimmed to provide ‘mood lighting’ as required. But sometimes you’ll want more control over the lighting than the current fixture provides – which … Read more
Various sci-fi and futuristic TV shows and movies cover people controlling technology with their minds. This might be via brain waves being captured by a funny looking hat, or by putting a small implant (chip) near/into the person’s brain. Whilst this sounds like pure fiction, senior Intel researches predicted in 2009 that we would soon … Read more
Smart home tech has exploded in popularity over the past decade, and it’s sometimes hard to keep track of every new product which is available – especially when ‘Google Home’ rebranded to ‘Nest’, or when Amazon Echo are up to their 4th generation of certain devices! So that’s where we come in! We have spent … Read more
When thinking about the disadvantages of smart homes, I remembered a time when my internet router broke. I changed this, and so I had to manually re-configure 5 smart home devices… along with a couple of TVs, my printer, two tablets, two Kindles, three mobile phones and two laptops. Ugh – changing 17 devices manually … Read more