GMH Home Improvements LLC
Smart technology for your home is one of those topics that divides many homeowners. While it delights the techies amongst us it can intimidate the less tech savvy amongst us to a degree that the issue is avoided altogether. The good news is that there all levels of technology that can be easily adapted and customized to the comfort level of each individual home.
On the high end you can network a home to control everything from lighting, window treatments, climate control, door locks and audio/visual equipment, to name a few, from a single app on a phone or tablet. However, if you’re not quite ready to dive into the deep end of the technology pool or aren’t ready to cede that much control over your home, you can always ease into things by converting a single lamp or outlet or even a robotic vacuum for starters.
Take Amazon’s Alexa for instance, (officially a digital voice assistant), it can be used to set reminders or timers, play music, listen to the news or even ask for word spellings or internet searches. But in addition to these helpful tasks, it can also be used as a home network hub to control individual electronic items in your home. You can add smart plugs, light bulbs or control your smart tv or even make a “dumb” tv smart through an Amazon Fire tv device, (Roku is another system that performs similarly for your TV). All of these items can be kept and run separately or networked into groups, such as turning on all the lights in a room or playing music throughout the house. You can also set up routines that can turn those lights on and off at certain times or when certain conditions are met. Amazon makes a lot of its own smart devices but it also works with most third party devices and almost all of it can be controlled through voice commands, once the device(s) have been set up. It’s really up to you how much you want to add and control.
I used Amazon Alexa as the example for this article but very similar digital assistants are available such as Google’s Hub or the Apple HomePod so it may depend on your personal preference or which company’s environment you are most invested in.