My Best Smart Home Devices
Source: https://tech4gods.com/
I have been building my smart home over the past few years and have installed a number of smart home devices and gadgets that have made my family life a little bit easier, plus who doesn’t love a bit of helpful tech? So in this post, I am going to run through the different smart home devices that I have from my smart lighting to which smart assistants I am using.
Amazon Alexa
let’s start with what smart home assistant we are using in my household. We have a number of Amazon Alexa devices, we have the Amazon Echo, Amazon Echo Dot and the Amazon Show. These Alexa’s are situated all around the house I would say that the device that we use the most would be the Echo. This is mainly because it sits in our kitchen so I use it to turn on the lights (more to come on those), re-order items on Prime, and find out things such as what the weather forecast for the day is going to be.
The Echo Dot and Echo Show are located upstairs and are mainly used for controlling the smart lights and I will occasionally listen to the radio on the dot in my office. I find that the Alexa voice assistant is pretty good, I would say that she doesn’t always find the answer to my questions, and I am not sure the Google Assistant would be better in this area. I find that the voice command is pretty responsive but I have had some issues with Alexa staying connected to my smart devices at times. I think this is more the app to be fair but it can be annoying and sometimes I do find myself asking to turn something on multiple times before it kicks into action.
Smart Lights
So we have several Smart Light brands around the house so I will cover them one by one in this section.
Philips Hue
These are the light bulbs that we use for the main lighting in each of the rooms in our house. One of the main reasons for getting these was that with them being LED they are a lot more economical to use for our smart lights. We went for the warm white bulbs but I think next time I will try the coloured bulbs as it’s quite nice to be able to change the colour of the main lights.
In terms of setup, it was relatively easy but a bit fiddly. You also need to make sure that you get the hub with these lights for you to be able to use them. This is a bit of a pain as of course it’s a bit more expensive and another bit of kit to plug into your home router.
The Hue App is well laid out for you to be able to use. You can name all the rooms so you can easily control the lights, you can also set up some automation e.g. when you want them to come in the morning or go off at night. It’s also nice and easy to add more lights to your setup within the app. In terms of voice command, you can link this to your Amazon device as well as others such as google home. I do really enjoy this as I can use my amazon Alexa to turn off the lights where ever I am in the house.
Lepro Smart lamp
I have a few of these smart lamps, I have one in the office and also in the bedrooms. These are great for the evening and you are reading in bed or in the office and I just need a bit of light and not the main light. They have white and RGB colours which are dimmable so perfect for your bedside lamp.
They are very straightforward to use via the Lepro app and also have controls on the top of the lamp to switch the light on and dim the light. You can change to the RGB colour using the switch but to change up the colours you will need to use the app.
The smart app has a nice layout and like the Hue lights, you can schedule when they come on or when to turn them off. These lights can also be controlled using your smart home assistant, so I have this linked to my Amazon Alexa Devices.
Govee TV and Floor Light
These are the newest smart lights I have added to my smart home setup. let’s start with covering off the TV backlights that I have set up, these are the Govee LED TV backlight with a Camera and they are great. I wanted something that would give a movie night light effect when we were watching TV at night and generally just to give a nice ambience.
There are two light bars which you can stand or attach to the back of your TV, they are nice and bright and have a great colour spectrum so you can set an already created scene in the app or create your own. These smart lights also come with a camera which sits on the top of your TV and when in Movie mode adapts the colour to that the colour in the scene.
The second smart light that I have from Govee is the floor Lamp. This is no ordinary lamp it’s a long strip and again has white and RGB colours. This is great for in the evening and provides plenty of light, I love it as I don’t like having the main light on all night even though they are dimmable.
Now, this does mean another app to add to the collection but it’s nice and easy to use and like the other, you can customise your scenes and set timers. I would say that I found that these were the easiest to set up and took the least amount of time.
Smart Plug
I do have a couple of smart plugs which has come in useful in some instance. I have one smart plug in my daughter’s room which allows me to turn on her night lights which are just plug in lights. And the other instance is at Xmas when I use it to control my Xmas tree lights. Other than that most of the other smart devices can be linked and controlled by Alexa.
You will still need to use an app to link the smart plug to but I was able to set them up on the Lepro app which was straightforward enough to do. You just need to select the device and it will sync up.
Blink Camera
The blink security camera is the home security that we decided to go with. They are not the most expensive and battery-operated so you can place them around your home. We have cameras both inside and out, they are great for when you are out or away as they detect motion,
Once they detect any kind of motion it will send a notification to your smartphone so you can see what triggered the notification. For the camera system, we have you need to have a hub in which the cameras sync. So if you are looking for a smart security system then these are good security camera systems to think about.
Robot Vacuum
This is possibly the best gadget I have gotten as a Christmas present from my other half. We have a Deebot vacuum which is affectionately known as Dave. I hate hoovering so this was amazing as you just set him going using the app or via your smart assistant and watch him go.
I have been surprised by how much dirt the Deebot picks up. We have a dog that malts a fair bit and this certainly helps us keep on top of keeping the floors clean and free of dog hair. I would certainly recommend getting a robot vacuum in your life.
These are just the smart home devices that I have and there are many more out there if you want to look at making your home a smart home. hopefully, these will give a good idea as to some of the devices that you can add to your home.
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