IT’S ABOUT 8 p.m. on Thursday night, and I’m at the gym, frantically trying to finish a workout. A friend from Virginia is visiting on Friday, and there’s still an entire basement to clean up, and a refrigerator to stock and … did I take my clothes out of the dryer? Are they even dry?
Then I remember: I can slow down. I pull out my phone and open the Samsung SmartThings app, and all of 8 finger-taps later, I’m back in my training zone. My house can now take care of itself, and I can work out with peace of mind.
Just a few short years ago, this could only have been a scene out of the Jetsons. But early on in 2022, I leaped headlong into the world of the connected appliances, transforming the finished basement of our house into a completely connected space. And the results have been magical, a combination of stress relief and constant curiosity about what my Samsung-powered kitchen, laundry room, and movie room can combine to do next.
And from washer to dryer to range to fridge to TV to robot vacuum (because what living space is complete these days without a robot vacuum?), the entire space is capable of plenty. I can run my entire house from anywhere (as I did that Thursday night), or I can plunk myself down on the couch for a Madden marathon and get critical alerts in the corner of my Samsung Frame TV.
No matter the situation, it seems, this Samsung-powered basement can make things happen.
HOW MY BASEMENT BECAME FULLY CONNECTED
The entire experience has transformed my view of the fully connected household. For the first few years of our home ownership, I viewed a fully connected household as a pointless luxury–in part because it’s not an easy thing to pull off.
That’s especially true in the New York City area, where you’re almost always buying an older house or apartment. Often, that space comes with older appliances already in it, and shelling out thousands of dollars to upgrade everything at once doesn’t always make for a smart financial move.
So you wait for something (say, the dishwasher) to break down, then replace that. Months later, the fridge breaks down, and a different brand replacement is on sale, so you pick that up. And on and on it goes until you have a LG this and a Samsung that and a GE that, along with a Sony TV in another room. And everything technically “works,” so why mess with relative success?
Late last year, however, when the remnants of Hurricane Ida slammed New York’s Westchester area, where I live, I found myself in a different scenario. Four feet (yes, feet) of water flooded into my finished basement, instantly wrecking everything that was down there–the washer, dryer, and fridge that had come with the house, our cinema-quality movie room projector, six sets of LEGOs I’d been hoping to build (a story for another day). We needed to rebuild everything–so we went all in on Samsung.
I’ve been a fan of their products for years, dating back to the first plasma TV I bought when I moved to the Big Apple, and I’d covered their Galaxy phones since their earliest Notes. Samsung had long been on the cutting edge of throughout-the-home connectivity; it’s Samsung that first pushed your phone’s Android operating system onto larger screens with the DeX station a half-decade ago.
If anyone could truly Jetson-ize my home, it would be Samsung. And halfway through 2022, that’s proven to be completely true.
THE SETUP
There’s something uniquely liberating about deciding to go fully connected in your house; it instantly makes the process of selecting appliances that much easier. We start with the washer and dryer, going with Samsung’s extra-large capacity front-loading washer and a 7.5 cubic-foot smart-dial electric dryer. Both are front-loading, so once they arrive, we stack them, a critical space-saving move in our tiny laundry room.
Down the hall to the kitchen, we focus our rebuilding efforts around Samsung’s Family Hub refrigerator, which, at 29 cubic feet, is the largest refrigerator I’ve ever had. It’s also the most aesthetically elegant fridge I’ve ever seen, too. With shiny, brushed aluminum doors and a giant touch panel that can do everything from tell me the weather to playing YouTube videos, it seems like something out of Star Trek: Home Edition. Just a counter away is a Smart Slide-in Gas Range, and this is so much more than a tiny basement stove. All at once, it’s a stove and oven, and it has air fryer features too,
In a corner by our couch sits that obligatory “smart” vacuum cleaner, often the first smart device to infiltrate a home. Smart vacuums have been around for several years, and this one is my third one, but Samsung’s Jet Bot AI+ manages to be smarter and more elegant than them all, a glassy white hew that works perfectly with our new walls.
A series of TVs tie the entire experience together. The bedroom has a 50-inch Frame mounted to the wall, and the movie room experience is now driven by a 75-inch QLED TV. A floor above (and this is more important than you think), we have a 65-inch Frame. In a way, this frame will serve as a hub of operations for our connected home. Along with my Samsung ZFold 3, this network of TVs offers me a variety of ways to track and control my connected floor. There’s no more running frantically downstairs in the middle of the night to make sure I’ve shut down the stove. I simply log into SmartThings to check, then refocus on getting the Z’s I desperately need.
The entire setup leaves me plenty of room to get more sleep too. Just about every task I’d normally micromanage, from laundry to keeping the floors clean, I can relax on. And that’s not what I was expecting.
I FINALLY TRUST MY VACUUM
The “smart” vacuum cleaner has been popular for longer than any other connected home appliance, so it makes sense to start our tour of my connected floor there. And it simply doesn’t get any better than Jet Bot AI+ from Samsung. Anyone who’s had a smart vacuum knows that such vacuums often aren’t quite as bright as advertised. My parents got me a smart vacuum for Christmas several years ago, and yes, I enjoyed how efficiently it sucked up dust and dirt. But I refused to leave the room when it was running, for fear it would get stuck in a corner for hours (which has happened), or knock over our tiny basement wastebasket (yup, that’s happened too).
Samsung’s Jet Bot AI+ offers an elegant solution to this problem: LiDAR sensors and AI Object Recognition tech prevent it from randomly bumping into everything it sees. Not that I trusted this at first. The first time it vacuumed the basement, I did what I’ve done for all my other smart vacuums, walking alongside it, carefully moving lighter obstacles out of its way, or sliding heavy obstacles into its path to prevent it from going where I didn’t want it to go.
The next two times it vacuumed, I sat on the couch, doing work and watching it roam the area. But as I watched Jet Bot AI+, I realized something else, too: It was automatically vacuuming around my feet, not running into them. And now, I have no problem setting Jet Bot AI+ to work, even when I’m not home–which is exactly what I did on that Thursday night.
Read more: Best Robot Vacuums
I DON’T THINK ABOUT LAUNDRY
It’s all about these little things when it comes to connected home tech. The overall process for doing laundry, for example: I still have to grab a load from the hamper, walk down to the basement, and put it into the machine.
But every single smaller part of the process has changed for the better. The most prominent change: I no longer micromanage my washer and dryer settings, because the machines handle all that labor. Whether I’m washing jeans or fitness apparel or T-shirts, I simply throw the load in the wash and turn the dial to the OptiWash setting (and head out to the gym or to dinner or wherever I want).The machine itself then “senses” the load, determines the amount of detergent needed and the length of the cycle, and handles the rest.
I receive just enough notifications to know that things are being taken care of. The default OptiWash lasts 45 minutes, but if Samsung alters that, it pushes an alert to my ZFold 3. Naturally, I test this, in large part because I don’t trust it. Plenty of apps promise to track this or that for us, and in practice, the processes are often buggy, or don’t work at all. So just days after installing the washer, I place exactly one clean shirt in the machine. Can it actually figure out that the shirt doesn’t need much more than a rinse?
I head upstairs and get ready to go to the gym, an episode of The Boys playing on my Frame. And as soon as I’m done lacing up, as I’m fine-tuning my lifting mix, a notification pops onto my ZFold. Samsung has changed the cycle to 10 minutes and added minimal detergent. The soil level of my single shirt was low, hence the changes.
Load after load of this gradually changes my micromanaging laundry tendencies, especially once I learn some of the machine’s other powers. The best of these (and the one that takes center stage on this Thursday) is the dryer’s intelligence. I have an awful habit of leaving clothes in the dryer, getting sidetracked, and leaving them there for days. But on this Thursday, midway through my workout, I’d already received a notification that I’d left clothes in the dryer earlier in the day. I couldn’t frantically rush home, obviously, but the dryer had a fix: At regular intervals, it’s rotating the drum, preventing my clothes from getting wrinkled.
Suddenly, the dryer is one less thing I need to stress on laundry day. I can comfortably leave my clothes until the next day, knowing that my dryer will help me out. And sure, these things seem small, but they’re adding up to reduce my sky-high stress levels.
THE VERSATILITY OF THE KITCHEN
No room is more about stress reduction than the Samsung-powered kitchen. So much can go wrong in a kitchen, from leaving the stove on all night to forgetting to close the fridge door to overcooking that chicken when family is on the way over.
And I’ve had nightmares about each thing, mostly because I’m a scatterbrained wreck when it comes to food prep. Protein shakes I can handle. Baked chicken is another matter entirely–and a matter that SmartThings has made just a bit easier. I can preheat the oven without even being downstairs, then come in later, drop my chicken in, and easily set a timer. And like a classic oven, I can choose from a host of settings for my Samsung (everything from bake to broil to convection roast), but tight explanations on the app help me understand those settings better. Equally exciting is the air fryer setting; we’ve started cooking fish and sweet potatoes this way for quick, nutritionally sound meals.
More interesting, however, is how much time I’m spending in the kitchen. Historically, it’s been a room I’m in and out of swiftly; grab the food and take it elsewhere. But Samsung’s take on the kitchen has suddenly made the room … fun. The giant touchscreen on the Family Hub fridge, for example, isn’t just utilitarian. It’s essentially a fully functional extra screen in your kitchen, Alexa-enabled, with Spotify and YouTube and Samsung’s underrated TV Plus.
Suddenly, I’m watching an Athlean-X Youtube video, then an episode of MacGyver as I cut veggies for stir fry. It’s all kinds of underrated fun using the Family Hub’s screen–and the little touches of the fridge make things even better. The SmartThings feature I’ve heard most about, the ability to look inside your fridge while you’re at the store, is cool. But the micromanagement of the fridge is even cooler: I can adjust its temperature via the app. Until now, I’ve never known nor cared about exactly how cold my fridge is; with Family Hub, I pay attention to those things, enamored by the novelty.
That novelty is one of the most underrated things about Samsung’s latest generation of connected appliances. I’ve always loved to tinker with apps and tech (and in our tablet-obsessed society, I doubt I’m the only person like that). So it’s fun to tinker with the wash machine settings, getting them just right for my ultra-dirty workout clothes. And it’s fun to play with the Steam Sanitize setting on the dryer. And it’s way way too much fun to pinch-and-zoom a small box in my living room, then set Jet Bot to clean only that box, equal parts (successful) experiment and drone with a purpose (cleaning!). Connected appliances have made the mundane uniquely interesting and addictive.
Read more: Best Kitchen Products
THE FRAME TV THAT TIES IT ALL TOGETHER
Actually, all the TVs throughout the house tie things together. Because let’s be real: As “fun” as the new fridge may be, nothing’s overpowering the fun of my next Netflix marathon. But as I sit down to that marathon, I still get continuous updates on what’s going on throughout my home, via a tiny notification in the top righthand corner of my TV screen.
It’s large enough to see, small enough to ignore if I’m in the middle of an NBA 2K showdown or a Bond movie marathon. And it delivers only critical information: The wash machine cycle is complete, my 30 minutes of salmon baking is up, Jet Bot is done cleaning that tiny square in the hallway. It’s just enough to keep me connected and aware, never enough to overwhelm.
Those same notifications are what I see when I open the SmartThings app at the gym, too. And the control I can wield from any of these screens, whether ZFold or tablet or Frame, is exactly what I need to have peace of mind. Things get even more robust, too, once I start integrating “automations.” These are essentially ultra-quick programs that command a host of devices to activate at once. For example, I program the TV to turn on to Sling TV and the oven to preheat to 300 every Thursday morning at 6 a.m., letting my wake up, hit the rower, then throw in my next week’s salmon meal prep.
At a base level, these little commands make me smile: Sure, I could get up and handle each of these functions myself on that Thursday with little problem.
But every so often, it’s nice when tech makes my life just a bit easier. And that’s exactly what Samsung’s connected appliances have done.
Read more: Best TVs
Ebenzer Samuel, C.S.C.S., is the fitness director of Men’s Health and a certified trainer with more than 10 years of training experience. He’s logged training time with NFL athletes and track athletes and his current training regimen includes weight training, HIIT conditioning, and yoga. Before joining Men’s Health in 2017, he served as a sports columnist and tech columnist for the New York Daily News.
