Make Your Smart Home Really Work: Easy Guide

I still recall vividly the day my smarthome turned on me. I was enjoying a dinner party when out of confidence I told my voice assistant to “set the mood lighting.” Instead every light in my house suddenly started flashing like a 90s rave, and my security system went off. Not quite the classy evening I had in mind.

If you have ever felt like your smart home is in fact smarter than you, you are in good company. The futuristic convenience that smart home devices boast often yields us gadgets that are less helpful and more troublesome. Let’s take a moment to discuss why, and how a regular person (not a tech genius) can make smart home technology work.

The commercials make it look so easy: a trendy-looking person walks into their cozily decorated, immaculate home, casually says “I’m home,” and everything magically activates just how they envisioned.
My experience? Three apps, two different voice assistants that don’t always interpret me as expected, and lights that work sometimes. Recent surveys suggest I’m not alone; about 60% of us have at least one smart device, but only 12% report feeling like our home is actually “smart”.

My friend Jamie put it best: “I’ve got smart lights that don’t talk to my smart thermostat, which ignores my security system, and none of them will acknowledge my smart speaker’s existence unless Mercury is in retrograde.”
Each brand wants you in their exclusive club, using only their products and their app. It’s like having five remote controls when you just want to watch TV.

If you’re just starting out: Pick a team and stick with it. Whether it’s Amazon’s Alexa, Google Home, or Apple HomeKit, choosing one ecosystem keeps things simpler. Yes, you’ll have fewer options, but the stuff you do have will actually work together.

If you’ve already got a mixed bag: Consider adding a smart home hub like Samsung SmartThings that can act as a translator between your different devices. It’s like hiring an interpreter so all your gadgets can finally understand each other.

Keep an eye out for “Matter”:There’s a new standard called Matter that major companies are finally adopting (took them long enough!). Look for this label when shopping – these devices are designed to play nice with others regardless of brand.

It’s almost comical how quickly you can feel your patience disappearing when you ask your smart speaker to switch off the lights, wait 10 seconds in silence, and hear “Sorry, I’m having a problem connecting right now,” after you’ve manually flipped the switch.
You added another smart device, and that device wants its bandwidth and starts competing – like kids fighting over the last cookie. Eventually, all you’re devices are slow and crawling.

Create a separate smart home network: Your smart video doorbell doesn’t need to be on the same network as Netflix. Many routers will let you create a guest network anymore. You may as well use it for your smart home stuff.

Use a mesh Wi-Fi system: Traditional routers are notorious for poor coverage in larger homes. Using a mesh system like Google Nest Wifi or Amazon eero will blanket your home with signal eliminating dead zones that many devices go to disconnect.

Hardwire where you can:Use an Ethernet cable to directly hardwire important systems, like your security hub, instead of using Wi-Fi. Using ethernet may be seen as old-school, but sometimes the old-school way is the best and most reliable.

Am I being listened to all the time? Who has access to my camera? My shopping application is advertising things I said out loud while in my kitchen!
These questions concern many of us, causing a sleepless night or two; and rightly so, we ought to be worried. Smart homes mean opportunities for our information to leak.

Change your passwords periodically: I know, I know – another password to memorize. But, changing your smart-home passwords each few months can be likened to changing your locks every few months. Good habit.

Turn on two-factor authentication: This will involve an additional step to your sign-in, usually a code sent via text to you. Slight inconvenience, huge increase in security.

Find devices that perform the workload locally:Some newer smart devices perform the computing on the device itself rather than in the cloud.

A real smart home shouldn’t require a degree in engineering to install or manage. A smart home should recede into the background, to simply make your life better: better comfort, security and efficiency.

Start small. Solve the real issues in your day to day living, and stop worrying if you are getting the latest gadget. Be patient with yourself during installation phases and remember, even the techie technical experts screw it up.

And above all, please don’t let perfect (a fully automted house) get in the way of good (a partially smar home). A partially smart home has lots of benefits – you don’t have to automate every action in a smart house, just being able to know whether you left the garage door open on vacation is already a pretty good deal.

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