My Affordable SMART Kitchen: Fully Automated!

Welcome to my smart kitchen. And don't worry, you're not gonna find expensive smart appliances here like a smart fridge. Instead, I have a lot of inexpensive smart home devices, automations, and the crown jewel, my kitchen dashboard that I've been obsessing over the last little bit. And this alone is packed full of goodies that I can't wait to show you. Like how it's connected to our dishwasher, which is not smart. It's just a normal, dumb dishwasher. In fact, it's so dumb that the door kind of broke and it won't stay up partially. It's a piece of junk. And this is a problem when the dishes are clean because we like to open it and have the air dry the dishes a little more at the end. But when it's all the way open, our two-year-old sees that as an invitation to come in here and grab silverware and plates and all of that. So when she's around, we'll close it and that turns off the clean light. So it's not very obvious if the dishes are clean or not. Yes, I know, our life is chaotic, but there's an easy solution for this. I got a smart outlet that monitors power usage and plugged our dishwasher into it. That way our smart home knows if the dishwasher is running or not. When it runs, a big green button appears on the dashboard that anyone can see across the room. That way everyone knows the dishwasher is clean. Then when someone unloads the dishwasher, they just tap on that button and it disappears. Easy and cheap since that smart outlet's only about 10 bucks. Besides that smart outlet I have under the sink, I also have a water leak sensor. And if you're gonna get anything from this video, at least get a water leak sensor because it can save you thousands of dollars in damages. And I like this one because it has a sensor on the top and the bottom to detect water. Instead of just notifying my phone that there's a leak, I also display a notification on the dashboard. That way I don't accidentally dismiss the water leak notification on my phone and make this pretty much pointless. I have another cool automation here in the sink area that I love. At night when we're doing dishes or dishing up some food here on the counter, the lights will automatically get brighter here so we can see better. And this just happens naturally as we're going about doing all this stuff. And the reason for that is that underneath is a vibration sensor. And this is a SmartThings or Aotech multipurpose sensor. And it's very fast at detecting vibration. So it's perfect for this automation. And I have magnets on it. That way I can detach it easily and swap out the batteries. And my kids love this feature. Peek-a-boo, peek-a-boo, peek-a-boo. Hey, thanks guys. Then if there's no vibration for 10 minutes, the lights go back to a dim setting. So of course the kitchen is all about food. And as you can see, I like food a lot. I sometimes will cook, but I mainly like to eat what Allie's cooking up. So we have some kitchen gadgets, automations, and dashboard items to make it more enjoyable. Starting off first with a robotic stirrer. No, not one of those robotic arms we've seen at CES or the Tesla bot. I'm not ready to die in a Black Mirror episode yet. This is definitely the budget version. It kind of looks like one of those head scratcher devices, but it automatically stirs things like sauces, soups, and gravy. It's not strong enough to stir heavier foods, but Allie was making an Alfredo sauce and it did a really good job at keeping it stirred while the sauce simmered. And it's pretty easy to clean since the top just pops off and you can wash the bottom part. It takes AAA batteries and there's three different speeds it can stir. Another kitchen gadget that we're using is this shelfy refrigerator device. And it keeps produce in the fridge nice and crisp longer. And I hate when vegetables go bad, but we've noticed this makes a big difference. There are a few negatives though. The rechargeable battery doesn't last a long time and it is slightly expensive, but it does work. So if you eat a lot of produce, then it might be worth it for you. Okay, so here's the age old question. What's for dinner? My kids ask it all the time. I sometimes ask it because I don't want my lunch to accidentally be what we're eating for dinner. That would be horrible. So we finally figured out a good solution. Using a shared list between Allie and I on the app Todoist, we can know what we're gonna have for dinner and then it will show up right here on the dashboard. And I have it showing only what's for dinner today and tomorrow, so it's not cluttering up the dashboard, but I love this so much and my family loves it. So very high spouse and family approval factor. Another kitchen device that we've used for years, as you can see by the tape holding this thing together, duct tape fixes everything, is this hard boiled egg maker. And it makes hard boiling eggs a breeze because it cooks them perfectly every time. There's also this electronic salt and pepper grinder that's become my new favorite. All you have to do is press this button to turn it on and then you tip it over and it starts grinding the salt. And then it has this little light so you can see how much you're adding and it has a rechargeable battery that charges with USB-C, but it only charged with the included cables. It didn't work with some of my other USB-C cables, kind of weird, but besides that, it works great. Okay, here's a quick tip on what not to do. Hey Allie, we're out of almond milk. Can you add that to the shopping list? Instead, I can say it straight to the voice assistant. Hey Google, add almond milk to my shopping list. Got it. I added almond milk to the list called my shopping list. That adds it to a specific Google Keep list that's shared with Allie and it makes it so much easier to manage our shopping list items that way. High spouse approval factor, but hold the music because the next one has even higher spouse approval. During dinner time, this big huge orange button shows up on the dashboard and when pressed, it lets everyone know that dinner's ready by flashing the kids' bedroom lights on and off, then leaves their lights off so they're more likely to leave the room. Of course, it also announces it on the smart speakers. Dinner is ready. But obviously I had to take it up a notch. So using room presence detection, I can detect who is in the room when pressing the button and that way I can send the other person a phone notification if they're not nearby. And we're talking off the chart spouse approval factor when she gets this notification and I'm cooking. You might remember we used to use the Echo Show 15 here in the kitchen and it worked well until recently when they started to display ads. And these aren't the self-promotional Amazon ads we've seen before. These are full-blown ads for products and it made me so angry. I tried everything to disable it but there didn't seem to be anything that worked. And I'm so sick of Amazon pulling these kind of bait and switch practices by adding ads down the road. The problem is Ali uses the Echo Show 15 more than anyone else in our family, but she finally agreed to get rid of it with some stipulations. Anything I replace it with has to have the same functionality like our family calendar, be able to play music, and start timers with our voice. And I was like, fine, challenge accepted. I'll do whatever it takes to get rid of these Amazon ads in our kitchen. Seriously, there's nothing more jarring than when I'm interrupted with an ad, unless it's a really good ad like today's sponsor, Delete.me. Obviously, I don't like the big tech companies collecting my data, but what's even worse is what the data brokers are doing. They sell your phone number, address, and age so it can come up on a quick Google search. Yikes. So I signed up for Delete.me earlier this year so I could have more control over my data. And the process was simple. I just put in my info and the team went to work contacting these data brokers to, well, delete me. And I had no idea how much was out there until they started digging in. Since I signed up, I haven't done any more work, but I've received three privacy reports showing how many listings were removed. And look, just last month, they removed 47. It's alarming what data brokers knew about me and my family. This is why protecting your personal data is so important so you can safeguard yourself and your loved ones from things like stalking and identity theft. Delete.me has been working for me in the background all year, monitoring and removing my info from so many brokers. There's no way I could have handled all that myself. Get 20% off Delete.me US consumer plans when you go to joindelete.me.com slash Smart Home Solver and use promo code smarthomesolver at checkout. Thanks to Delete.me for supporting the channel. Okay, back to trying to replace the Echo Show 15 with my own dashboard. For the hardware, there are a lot of screens and tablets I could have used, but I ended up going with the Pixel tablet and I'll explain why in a second. For the actual dashboard, I'm using Home Assistant and there's an app called Fully Kiosk Browser that pulls up the Home Assistant dashboard when the camera detects motion. It works very well and I highly recommend it. Now for the features of the Echo Show 15 that I need to replicate. One of the things that I had that my family really liked was a giant calendar that made it really easy to see what was next at a quick glance. Luckily, Home Assistant integrates really well with Google Calendar, but the default calendar card didn't really work well for what I needed it to. It was kind of small and once something happened as an event, it didn't disappear, but I found one created by the community that works exactly how I need it to. Actually, it works even better because there's a progress bar that shows up once the event is happening and there's tons of settings that I can dial in. The only thing I had to do myself was change the color and the size. And I'm not gonna get into how I did that in this video. I'm making a second channel video that will explain how I did all that. So I'll link that down below once it's done if you wanna do this yourself. I also added a massive clock on here and let me tell you why. This clock on the microwave right here is the bane of my existence. I set it to the right time, go to sleep, wake up the next day, it's five minutes fast. I wish I was joking and that's why we're using the clock on the dashboard. Another thing that I added that we used on the Echo Show 15 is the outdoor temperature, but I made it way better because now it uses the Tempest weather station in our backyard. So it's way more accurate than what was being shown on the Echo Show 15. I also have some smart home controls that I can quickly press to change the lights. And if I need to do even more, there's a button right here that will pull up even more buttons to control my smart home. This is the bubble card pop-up and I love how this looks. I can quickly make some changes and then get back to the dashboard. So there are a couple of reasons why I'm using the Pixel tablet for my kitchen dashboard. The first reason is that it's pretty good about picking up my voice from a distance. The second reason is that it doesn't charge the battery above 80%, so I don't have to worry about the battery exploding or something since it's always plugged in. And the last reason is that magnetic speaker dock that sounds pretty good when we're listening to music here in the kitchen. Essentially it does everything that our Echo Show 15 did but even better and has more functionality. So take that Amazon. Now I can sit and eat my bowl of cereal ad free. All right, let's talk lighting which is essential here in the kitchen. We're using dumb bulbs in the ceiling that are controlled by Lutron Caseta smart dimmer switches and the bulbs are cool white so we can see better while we're cooking during the day but it led to some, let's say a friendly discussion between Allie and I on what color these filament bulbs should be in the pendant lights. Allie wanted warm lights, I wanted cool lights. Let me know down in the comments if you're team cool whites and if you're team warm lights. Yeah, just don't comment. But Phillips Hue luckily made some smart filament bulbs that can do both warm and cool white so it was exactly what we needed. I love how these look and they match our cool or warm lighting perfectly. Now if I change the lights to set the mood it's really easy to do. You might be wondering what I used to open up that bottle of cider with and it's called Pop the Top. I learned about it when I visited Riley's house in Georgia and it's super easy to use like anyone can use it and it's pretty fun to open up bottles with this too. It's only about 10 bucks so I think it's totally worth it and thanks Riley for showing me this cool kitchen device. One big smart home problem that I get asked about all the time is how to control smart bulbs from a light switch like these Phillips Hue bulbs. I could use this Phillips Hue wireless light switch to control them and it would work just fine but I would need to cover up the physical light switch. That way someone doesn't accidentally turn off the switch and kill power to the bulbs and then my smart home wouldn't be able to automate the bulbs anymore. But what works even better and what I'm using here in the kitchen is an Inovelli Red on-off switch. This will always keep power to the smart bulbs but it also allows me to program the on-off buttons to send automations to control the smart light so it kind of works like a normal light switch. I love it. Of course all the lights here in the kitchen are automated with a motion sensor. Now I'm using the HomeSeer Z-Wave motion sensor and I like it because it doesn't use batteries and it doesn't take up any kitchen space. It also has a RGB light on it for notifications and I have the light turn red when our garage door is open which is super useful. I know these lights are a little more expensive than some of the budget options out there but between Lutron, Zigbee and Z-Wave they're extremely reliable and the last thing I wanna be doing in my kitchen is fiddling with the lights. So keep that in mind when you're shopping for smart lights in the kitchen. Something I added recently here in the kitchen is air quality monitoring and it's super useful because maybe you were cooking up some bacon and it's really smoky in here because we forget to turn on the vent fan. Well, I have an air quality sensor right here helping me out and this is the air gradient and I really like this one because it's very accurate and it has these little LED lights on top to tell us how good or terrible the air quality is. Sometimes though, we don't see the little LED lights changing while we're cooking so if the air quality gets bad enough an automation will run. Please turn on the vent fan or open a window. I can barely breathe. But opening up the door isn't always the solution because it can be really dusty and bad air quality out there as well. So we have an outdoor air quality sensor and it will tell us if we should close the door. Please close the door. The air quality is really bad outside. If the air quality is bad in both, well, it's time to put on the gas mask, family. I also wanted to learn if the kids are playing outside and the air quality is bad out there but I didn't wanna bombard ourselves with voice notifications coming from the dashboard all the time. So I made a really big red banner with the outside air quality that shows up and it's really easy to see but it only shows up if we need to see it. For example, if the back doors are open or if the lights are on back there because the kids are playing. That way we don't become numb to the notifications on the dashboard and we know we need to do something about it. I love all the automations and tech here in my kitchen, especially that new dashboard. And part of me is kind of happy that Amazon put ads on their Echo Show 15 or else I wouldn't have been motivated to replace it with my own dashboard. So thank you, Amazon. I'll have links to everything I covered in the video down below and thanks for watching. Dad, the dashboard doesn't show everything. It doesn't even show the doorbell. No, no, it does. It will show up here if the doorbell detects somebody. Okay, but it can't see me though. Actually, it can.