Smart Home Update: Integrating The Newest Tech

In today’s day and age, one of the most enjoyable parts of buying a new home is integrating smart home technologies. It truly makes you feel like you’re living in the future and simplifies your daily tasks. When you finally have everything integrated and establish a routine there so many things you can accomplish with little effort. You can have your morning coffee waiting for you when you wake up, program your thermostat so that it runs efficiently, monitoring your home’s security for peace of mind, the list goes on and on.

Smart home features integrate into your daily life, making everything flow as seamlessly as possible. At the end of the day, all we have is time and we should always be striving to maximize it. Don’t be afraid to upgrade parts of your current configuration with the coolest and latest technologies.

1) Smart Hubs

If you’re smart home hasn’t been upgraded in a while, odds are you don’t have a smart hub. Smart hubs, like the Amazon Echo, can be taught to integrate with most of your smart homes features. As opposed to physically changing your preferences, smart hubs allow you to do it via voice command. Not only will you be able to adjust your thermostat, brew some coffee or dim the lights with a simple voice command, you can do things like ask it questions and have it play music for you.

2) Smart Bulbs

Smart bulbs, like the Philips hue white LED, have the ability to be turned on, off or dimmed remotely via a hub. The bulbs come with unique serial numbers that you can program into your hub for full remote control from anywhere! On vacation? Turn your lights on and off or program them to intermittently turn off and on during normal hours to ward off burglars. You can bridge the hub with your main hub (like an Amazon echo) and control it all via voice command.

3) Sous Vide Cooking

Sous vide cooking is the newest craze to cook your food to perfection. The process is as follows; vacuum seal the food and dip it into a controlled water bath that cooks it for a precise time at a precise temperature. For example, can’t cook your steak to perfection? Set it for ‘medium rare’, once done all you need is a quick searing with your favorite spices for a perfectly flavoured and balanced steak. The Anova Culinary Precision Cooker works on wifi and can be integrated into your current network. Now you can monitor all the important steps of the cooking process from the comfort of your couch.

4) Ecobee4 Smart Thermostat

There’s a variety of smart thermostats on the market, but the Ecobee4 takes the cake. Like all smart thermostats it has wifi and can be remotely controlled with your phone or tablet. Beautifully designed with great features like hot and cold spot detection, the biggest departure from its predecessor and all other smart thermostats, is that it has a built-in Alexa (the voice assistant from the Amazon Echo).