The practical guide to making your house digital
Smart thermostats
Few smart home devices can match a smart thermostat’s ability to deliver both comfort and cost/energy savings. These devices go far beyond establishing a heating and cooling schedule based on when you anticipate being home to enjoy those benefits. They can detect when you’re home and when you’re away, so that your HVAC system operates only when it’s needed.
The latest trend on this front is to equip thermostats with sensors that you can put in the rooms you occupy most frequently, so that the thermostat operates on the basis of where you are in the house, instead of triggering heating and cooling cycles based on the thermostat’s location, which is typically in a hallway you only ever pass through.
The Ecobee SmartThermostat with voice control has a built-in Amazon Echo speaker and can respond to voice commands. It also has remote room sensors that help to eliminate hot and cold spots in your home. This high-end device can even serve as the hub for a broader smart-home or home-security system.
Nest also has some great thermostats, including the all-new $129 Nest Thermostat, and Wyze Labs recently jumped into the market with a $50 smart thermostat that deserves your consideration if those other models are outside your budget.
Ecobee
Left to right: Ecobee’s smart thermostat, room SmartSensor, smart camera, and door/window SmartSensor.
Home security cameras
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Ring Video Doorbell (2nd Generation) Read TechHive’s review $99.99 See it on Amazon (Prime Eligible)
A quality home security camera will enable you to keep a watchful eye on your home, especially while you’re away. Indoor models can help you monitor your children and pets, while outdoor models can catch prowlers in the act—and hopefully discourage them from coming around in the first place.
Some models—from Ring, Arlo, Netatmo, and Maximus—incorporate lights that can illuminate your way. Cameras incorporated into doorbells can monitor your front porch and let you interact with visitors without needing to approach the door—or even be home at the time.
Multi-room audio systems
Sophisticated multi-room speaker systems from the likes of Sonos, Yamaha (MusicCast), and Denon (HEOS) are largely self-contained, enabling you to drop speakers in multiple rooms in your home so you can stream music from your own collection or from online services such as Spotify to all of them in sync, or to send different tracks to each one.
Michael Brown / IDG
Using the soundbar in front of your TV to control the lights in your home theater? It’s easy with a speaker like the Sonos Beam that has both Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Google Assistant onboard.
Several companies have soundbars in their collections, so you can improve your TV- and movie-watching experiences when you’re not listening to music. In each case, a smartphone or tablet is all you need to control everything. Some Sonos models even include Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant onboard, rendering them capable of controlling other smart home devices (although only one or the other can be activated—you can’t use both at the same time).
Smart smoke and carbon monoxide detectors
Conventional smoke and carbon monoxide detectors are inherently dumb devices. Their alarms might be loud, but if no one’s home to hear them, what good do they accomplish? A smart smoke detector will sound a local alarm, too, but it will also send an alert to your smartphone—and to anyone else you authorize as a contact—if danger is detected.
