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Home Automation Tools

I believe the prehistoric man is in many ways jealous of the success of the modern man. Compared to his crude tools he used in his cave, the modern man has found a way to not only improve virtually every aspect of his life with technology but do so at an incredible speed and efficiency too. One such area that the modern man has admirably improved is his home, through a process simply known as home automation.

Just so you know, there are several impressive tools, designed with cutting-edge technology, which you can use to convert your orthodox home into a Smarthome. In this article, we look at some of the important tools of home automation in the industry. It is important you read this piece carefully as you will be discovering tools that can help you convert ordinary homewares such as clocks and doors into sophisticated technology as you see in James Bond movies.

Top Home Automation Tools

Without mincing words, it is possible for everything in your home to connect to the internet. I mean everything. In this section of this article, you will read about some of these home automation tools. So many products exist in this industry, and they control virtually everything in the house ranging from lights to humidifiers. But then, we will begin with hubs.

Hubs & Controllers

The following tools and products can be classified under hubs and controllers. We begin with Amazon’s Echo and Echo Dot. To better understand how sophisticated hubs have become, consider the two products that follow.

Amazon Echo and Echo Dot

When Amazon decides to move into the production of a tech piece, we expect something as huge as the eponymous river the giant company came from. Very certainly, Amazon does not disappoint. Amazon Echo and Echo Dot is simply a Bluetooth speaker that takes voice instruction. Designed to interpret owners’ instructions, it will work with devices that run with Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and more.

Wink Hub 2

Amazon’s Echo may be really great at what it does, but there is another equally powerful tool in this category: the Wink Hub 2. This hub sits atop the rest because it has the flexibility and versatility that no other hub in the industry has. For a start, it is compatible with virtually all systems in the home automation industry, such as Bluetooth, ZigBee, Wi-Fi and Lutron Connect. Now, this tool has so much renown that leading reviewers in the industry- PCmag, for instance – recommend it to everyone looking to make their house smarter than it already is.

2. Surveillance Cameras

The next category of home automation tools we are looking at is surveillance cameras. Considering the rapid increase in crime and terrorism worldwide, the importance of having surveillance cameras installed in your home cannot be overemphasized. Important as surveillance cameras are to homeowners, they will actually be useless if they cannot run on their own and capture important information as at when due. Having noted this fact, we may now consider the leading surveillance camera producers in the industry.

Icontrol Networks Piper NY

Now Piper products may not be as cheap as many would want, but what you can be very certain about is the fact that the cameras from Piper are one of the very best in the industry. Piper has a lot of indoor and outdoor surveillance cameras which are connected to mobile devices such as smartphones. This means owners can comfortably monitor what happens in their homes even if they are several miles away from home.

But that is not all. Not only does this camera give you information about your home even if you are thousands of miles away, it also gives you different magnification, views, and brightness of captured images so that you will more easily interpret what you see.

Nest Cam

Nest Cam camera has both outdoor and indoor product with one not being too different from the other except in a few differences such as the weatherproof materials that were used to case the outdoor camera.

This surveillance camera steps things up by sending videos of about 1080 pixels to users over the internet. This means homeowners who have installed these cameras can monitor their homes from their phones several kilometers away from home. Interestingly, this company has a couple of subscriptions that allow you to save your favourite videos for some time on the internet, and gain access to see them for as many times as you’d want.

3. Locks and Home Security Systems

The next category of home automation tools we look at here is the locks and home security systems. The importance of having sophisticated locks in homes cannot be overemphasized. If the prehistoric and medieval man can devise advance means of protecting their homes and treasured objects and documents with encryptions and lock combinations, then, the modern man must do even better to ensure security where necessary. Let’s consider one lock and security system company now.

August Smart Lock HomeKit Enabled

At a time, you had to manually pull the bolts on your door before gaining access to a room. Then came the remote controls. But today, we have the voice controls. That’s right. Whether you are attracted to this tool because it’s cool or because it saves you energy, we can both agree that these systems help you save time. Additionally, you can control these locks conveniently with your smartphone.

4. Heating and Cooling

Few things can be more annoying to a sleeping man than to wake up at intervals to manually control the temperature of his home with humidifiers, AC, and the kind. There happens to be a number of companies that are performing well in the heating and cooling niche of the home automation industry. Consider the following:

Nest Learning Thermostat

This tool allows you to regulate the temperature in your home from your mobile gadgets such as smartphones and tablets, and even your personal computer. All of these are made possible by its Wi-Fi connectivity with the said devices.

Ecobee3 Smart WiFi Thermostat

As the name implies, it’s a Wi-Fi-enabled thermostat that works almost the same way with the Nest thermostat. It can monitor the temperature of your home just from one point, and it does this by regulating the temperature changes in the sensors in all of your rooms.

5. Lighting

This is self-explanatory. Lighting as it relates to home automation is just about having your lights turn on and off at the right times and on their own.An example of one of the companies that produce some of these brilliant tools is Philips Hue Bulbs.

Generally, however, the smartest lighting systems in the home automation industry have these basic standards:

  • Wireless connection to the lights in your home.
  • Ability to work with multiple systems which can range from Siri to Alexa
  • It should be affordable.
  • Lastly, they must be automatic.

6. Cooking

If simple activities such as opening a door, turning the lights on, and cooling the home can be automatic, then, an activity like cooking should be made as simple as possible. This is the ideology behind automated cooking.

Cooking systems such as the Anova Culinary Precision Cooker makes use of Wi-Fi technology to enhance the cooking process. With this technology, you can cook from a distance since inbuilt dials of these cookers let monitor, set, and control your cooking temperature. And how do you know what the temperature in your cooker feels like? You will get notifications on your smartphone or tab via the app designed by the company that owns the product.

7. Cleaning

With the new, improved technology in this niche, cleaning just got better. If you do not fancy having to manually clean your rooms every day, you need not worry about cleaning by yourself. You also need not worry about a maid.

New day robot cleaners, such as the Neato Botvac Connected cleaner have been designed to navigate your home as they pick up dirt. They work with laser sensors which guide their movement, and their U-shape only means that they can enter the tiniest of spaces.

8. Outdoor

Are outdoors art of your home? Well, modern day home automation companies think so, and that is why they have both indoor and outdoor home automation tools to make life easy for you. One such tool is the automated lawn sprinkler.

Automated Lawn Sprinklers

Far from the orthodox sprinkler you may be used to, recent sprinklers are quite smart. They don’t sprinkle water when it is raining or when the atmosphere is very moist. But as soon as temperature drops or dryness is detected, they resume sprinkling. These sprinklers can cover a large area of lawn land depending on the type you purchase. Beyond this, some of these sprinklers can work with other products such as Alexa, to provide multiple automated services at the same time.

Automated Lawn Mowers

They work like robotic home cleaners except that things are a little bit different. While the home cleaners sense’s and picks up dirt, the robotic lawn mower senses and pick’s up blades of grass that are taller than the required height. For impressive automated lawn mowers like Amazon’s Robomow RS622, handling a lawn as great as 22,000 square feet is a piece of cake. All the lawn owner needs do is set the required perimeters and the machines does the rest on its own. Interestingly enough, the cut grass blades are immediately mulched back into the soil; hence raking of grass blades after mowing is

Conclusion

These are just some of the many tools you can use to automate your home. If you are still having doubts as to whether or not your home can get better with the use of sophisticated machines, you have seen proof of it here. There are tasks that you need not waste time doing if there are machines that can easily do them.

There is a lot to gain from upgrading from a traditional home to a Smarthome. Apart from having that sweet feeling that you are the James Bond of your neighbourhood, you will derive more comfort from the way your Smarthome works.

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