If an electrical device exists, there’s almost certainly a smart version of it by now. Unfortunately, a lot of smart tech is smart for the sake of it and doesn’t offer much practical use. Despite this, there are plenty of ways that a smart home can still be useful.
Saving Money on Heating (or Cooling)
Heating or cooling your home can quickly become one of your biggest household expenses. I live in a home that’s over 125 years old and, in winter, heating costs a small fortune. Installing a smart thermostat has made a huge difference to my bills.
One of the key benefits of smart thermostats is that they can use presence detection to tell when you are home. When everyone leaves the house, the thermostat will turn everything off, so you’re never heating or cooling an empty home.
I also have smart thermostats on the radiators in each room. This allows me to turn the heating on or off for each room. During the day, I can heat the living room without heating the bedrooms, since these rooms aren’t used during the day.
According to the app, my smart thermostat saved me 21.5% on my heating bills last month, and that was during a fairly mild month. My smart thermostat has paid for itself many times over with the savings I’ve made.
Answering the Door
Video doorbells are popular smart home gadgets, and for good reason. Though there are many “smart” devices that offer little more than their “dumb” counterparts, video doorbells are definitely an exception. Once you’ve tried a video doorbell, you’ll never want to go back.
The biggest benefit is that you can answer your door from anywhere, even if you’re on the other side of the world. There have been plenty of times when someone has rung the doorbell when I’ve been out or lying in the bath, and I’ve been able to speak to them over the two-way talk feature.
Video doorbells also double as security cameras, as most of them offer motion detection. You can capture video of anyone who passes in front of your video doorbell, which should be enough to deter many potential intruders.
Controlling the Lights
Being able to turn your light on and off from an app is fine, but it’s not that different from just going and flipping the switch. Where smart bulbs come into their own is with automation. You can group lights together, meaning you turn all your lights off at once and create timers to make your lights automatically turn on when the sun sets.
Colored smart bulbs offer even more utility. I have a Hue smart bulb in my son’s room that turns on a dark blue when it’s time to get up. If he wakes up before the blue light comes on, he knows to stay in bed, and if he’s still asleep when it comes on, it’s not bright enough to wake him so we get to enjoy a rare extra few minutes in bed.
Turning Appliances on or Off
A smart plug is one of the most useful smart home gadgets out there. That’s because, with a smart plug, you can turn almost any electrical device into a smarter version of itself.
My favorite use of a smart plug is for the electric blanket in our bed. I have a control for the plug in the iOS 18 Control Center on my iPhone, so when I’m ready to go to bed, I open the Control Center and tap the control to turn the electric blanket on. By the time I’ve got ready for bed, it’s lovely and toasty.
Smart plugs are also great for sockets that are hard to access. Every year I use a smart plug for the Christmas tree lights, which would otherwise require me to crawl around under the tree trying to reach the switch. With an Alexa routine, the lights turn on and Christmas music starts playing whenever I say “Alexa, Merry Christmas!”
Keeping the Air Clean
Until I bought an air quality monitor, I never realized just how poor the quality of the air in your home can get. There are plenty of household items that can impact air quality, such as wood-burning stoves, air fresheners, the paint on your walls and furniture, and more.
I have an air purifier with a smart plug that’s linked to my air quality monitor. When the air quality drops below a certain level, the smart plug turns on and the air purifier kicks in, helping to keep the air in our home a little safer to breathe.
One unexpected consequence is that I always know when my wife is having a well-earned gin and tonic when I’m out because alcohol increases the levels of Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) in the room. When the alert pops up on my phone that the VOCs are high, I know exactly why.
Keeping Mold at Bay
My cold and poorly insulated home means it’s a real risk for mold. When rooms get too cold and humid, they have the perfect conditions for mold to grow. I use temperature and humidity monitors in my home to keep track of how cold and humid the rooms are and alert me if the mold risk gets too high.
I also have an automation that compares the dew point outdoors to the dew point inside calculated from the temperature and humidity sensors. In the morning, if the dew point inside is significantly higher than outside, I get an alert telling me to open the windows to let some fresh air into my home.
Culling My Army of Remotes
This is probably the single best thing I’ve done with all my smart tech. I was sick to death of having to use about five different remotes to control the various AV devices in my living room. One for the TV, one for the DVR, one for the Apple TV, one for the surround sound system, and you could guarantee that whichever one you needed most was the only one that was missing.
After a lot of searching, I finally managed to find a Wi-Fi remote that I could use with my Home Assistant setup. I then set about using the integration with my smart TV and an IR blaster that can send out the same infrared signals as my TV and surround sound remotes.
With several hours of tinkering, I finally managed to replace all of my remotes with one remote to rule them all. The best part is that I was able to add extra functions that the other remotes don’t have.
I now have a button that can fast-forward for the approximate length of the ads when I’m watching something recorded on my DVR. I also have a button that automatically enters the different passcodes for my Netflix, Disney+, and other accounts.
The real kicker is my Aqara Cube controller. This is a fun Zigbee device that you can use to control smart tech using gestures such as shaking it, sliding it, or turning it over. I have my six most used streaming services on each face of the cube, and when I flip the cube, my TV automatically switches to the service that’s showing on the top face. It’s a real joy to use.
Whole Home Announcements and Audio
Amazon Echo smart speakers have never really lived up to their hype. They still do pretty much the same things that they could do when they were first introduced, despite having been around for years. One of the best features, however, is that you can use them for whole-home audio.
I remember being incredibly jealous of the expensive whole home audio system that a family member had installed, but now I have all the same features (if not quite the same sound quality) just by having a smart speaker in every room. The great part is that you can use them to make announcements to the whole home, too, which saves a lot of yelling for people to come and eat.
Home Automation (Not Home Control)
One of my biggest bugbears is the way companies that make smart home tech seem focused on home control rather than home automation. Products such as the Amazon Echo Hub let you control your smart home devices from the screen, but you still need to get up and go to where the screen is to do so, which is no different from a bank of dumb switches.
There are plenty of apps that let you control smart home devices, but these still require you to get out your phone, find the right app, and push the right button.
Home automation is a different thing. It makes the devices in your home do what you want without you having to lift a finger. A simple example is a smart bulb with a motion sensor, that can turn your lights on when you enter a room, without you touching anything.
Unfortunately, the only way to get effective home automation right now is to use software such as Home Assistant and OpenHAB and create your own automations. There is a fairly steep learning curve to using these solutions, so they’re currently mostly the domain of dedicated tinkerers.
I count myself in that number and have some useful home automations set up in Home Assistant. My favorite uses a motion sensor to detect when I first enter the kitchen on garbage day. It then gives an announcement from my kitchen smart speaker to remind me to take out the trash. It even tells me whether I need to put out the general waste or the recycling, which are collected on alternate weeks.
This is true home automation. It’s a useful thing that helps me remember to do something I would otherwise forget, and I don’t need to do anything to make it happen other than walk into the kitchen, the same way I do every other day of the week.
There are plenty of smart home devices that aren’t useful at all. Smart fridges, I’m looking at you. However, there are still plenty of ways that smart tech can be genuinely useful in your home, making your life a little easier and even saving you money.
