10 Underrated Smart Home Gadgets That Changed My Life!

Smart homes are getting more and more complicated and trying to get devices that work well together is a bit of a minefield. This one supports Alexa, this one is Apple Home, this one is Google Assistant or Alexa only, this one doesn't support anything and uses its own app. But I have come across a way to solve this problem with 10 underrated smart home gadgets that have had a genuine impact on my quality of life. So today I want to show you what they are, how they work, how they solve the challenge of everything working differently and also how they all get the wife approval seal. The first one has been such a good purchase that we now have two of them, one for upstairs, one for downstairs. Now this robot vacuum cleaner has hugely outperformed and outlived even the most expensive Dyson's that we've used over the years, but with the added benefit that you don't even need to be there when it's cleaning. This thing uses the built-in cameras and tons of sensors to literally map each room and floor of your house so that it can navigate around it effortlessly. Now those same cameras and sensors also mean you don't actually have to worry about leaving things on the floor when this is going because this vacuum avoids these and will actually snap photos for you to respond to inside the app as to whether it's a temporary obstacle or something more permanent you want to avoid in the future. Now once it learns your house you can even tell it to go and clean specific rooms or avoid certain areas. Now the only drawback I found here is that you do still need a handheld for the inevitable mess of kids and crumbs on the sofa or cat hair left on cushions. Now in other things that save you time, this is the outside equivalent of the robot vacuum. Now it's not as intelligent though it doesn't learn or map your garden out but instead you lay a wire along the boundaries of your garden and the robo lawnmower will drive in a straight line until it reaches the wire then it will just turn around and goes in a straight line and again and again cutting your lawn in just random directions until it gets an overall like even cut. Now this is supposed to be great for your lawn because rather than collecting the grass cuttings it feeds it back into the lawn but we have just come out of winter here in the UK and just before winter I decided to try do some like moss treatment on the grass myself and well yeah I basically just killed the grass anyway so yeah excuse how awful the grass does look perhaps they could invent one that does all the grass treatments for you as well. That aside this thing just sits here most days in its charging station and then goes out for a few hours a day just to keep everything level. The only thing I've had to do here is lay the wire around the edge and remember to bring the mower in if the temperature you know drops below zero degrees over winter but otherwise it's been yet another hassle-free smart home product that saves me yet another job every single week. Plus if you hold out these things can normally be found discounted on amazon or even on amazon marketplace. The next smart tech is actually a combination that's been a few years now since I carried around any form of keys with me. My car uses my phone so I don't need a car key. For my garage I fitted a pretty cheap garage door opener which is actually a home kit compatible and this wires into any traditional garage door system and I can access this from my android phone but more on how that works in just a moment. So I don't need to carry around car keys or a garage door clicker but for my front door the UK has some pretty strict regulation which means most smart locks aren't possible. The one that is is the Yale smart lock which either uses your phone via bluetooth or these NFC tags which are kind of like you would get for your alarm or to go to the offices at work. You can also create and send guest keys to people if for some reason you need someone else to be able to get into your house maybe a cleaner or a family friend or something like that but with combination of these three the the car garage door and the front door I no longer carry around a set of keys with me. I literally just carry around a phone which can do everything. It does mean that if my phone dies then I have a problem but I am currently using the S23 Ultra which is an absolute king of battery life and it lasts about I think like two days so as long as I charge this every single day then there's little to well pretty much zero chance I'm going to run out of battery by the end of each day. Now the next one is an energy saving one and that's with one of these and now I have a few different kind of makes and models of these around the house but these smart plugs allow me to both monitor and control devices across the home. For example my home theater system actually uses a ton of electricity even when just in standby so just using one of these I can make sure that it's switched off at the plug when it's not in use. I also use these to switch off devices around the house when nobody's at home to save even more energy and I can use them to monitor to see which devices are the biggest consumers as we try and reduce our you know carbon footprint and reduce our overall energy costs at a time when energy and inflation is a hugely all-time high. The next one to go through is another money-saving one here heating. Now I compared a couple of different heating systems last year but if you haven't seen that then a smart heating system is an absolute must-have. So most houses here in the UK at least are built with a single central thermostat control that's typically in the hallway and then your whole house heats up until that hall area hits you know whatever temperature you've set. But with a smart heating system I can control the temperature in each separate room of my house which means I can be more efficient with moving the heat around. Now if you don't use a room for a few hours a day then there's no reason to heat that room for a few hours a day or overnight for example you can just heat the bedrooms. You can even use the predicted weather to control what your boiler does so there's no need for the boiler to warm your house up if the sun's going to do the same thing you know just a few moments later. So using smart tech can save you money on your heating bills. Now this system also detects when we leave the house to switch the system off and then detect when we're getting closer to the house so it starts warming it up again so the house is at the right temperature when we get home. It's one of those systems that you buy and set and then forget because it just does what it's meant to do but it is still one of the first things I would do when moving into any new house. The next one is a fairly recent addition and that's been the Apple TV. Now before this I actually used Amazon's Fire TV but being mostly in the Apple ecosystem and until very recently this has actually been really really good. Now it's fast which is the main thing that annoyed me with the Amazon fire sticks after a while they just kind of slow down but the integrations with Apple HomeKit have actually been really great here. Now I've been able to set this up with my ring doorbell and also some other ring cameras and other cameras I have around the house to pop up on the TV when the doorbell rings or when there's motion at certain places around the house. Now it pops up a video feed on my TV so we can see who it is and it saves us having to you know pull out our phones from our pocket or just get up and answering the door like people used to do I guess. Now a handy tip for those of you with young kids we also have a camera on the landing upstairs so that if they get out of bed late at night it also comes up on the TV. For us that has actually been really handy for when they outgrow needing like a baby monitor but you still want to make sure they're you know actually going to bed at night. Now this next one can be as simple or as complicated as you can make it but it starts with just two parts. You've got a motion sensor and a light switch. Now there are a ton of options you have here from the likes of which everyone knows but essentially I have these set up all around the house so when you walk into a room the lights turn on. Now if there's no movement in that room for also a set period of time then the lights switch off. That's another handy tip for saving energy but we've also used this with the kids where they're about the age when they wake up far too early in the morning and now help themselves to breakfast and you know watch some TV downstairs before the rest of the house wakes up. So being able to trigger the lights to turn on automatically when someone walks down the stairs in the early hours of the morning just saves them disturbing us and waking us up to then turn the lights on because they're small and they can't reach the light switch. And all of this is made possible by a number of ways really. Now firstly lots of these services have their own apps their own integrations. They'll integrate pretty well with both iPhone and Android devices. With iPhone I have a few set shortcuts as well as a few widgets to get to some of these things and I can also use voice to trigger certain things too. And on Android I like being able to have some of these in the pull-down shortcuts at the top here so I can quickly open doors or trigger lights and things like that. But the one thing that holds all of this together that keeps the wife happy with being able to control everything around the house and also the way that I can have all this tech in my house but still use either or whatever it is and it's totally free and that is a piece of software called Home Assistant. So with Home Assistant once it's installed you can hook up pretty much any smart device and once it is hooked up you can do pretty much anything like stuff that goes far beyond Apple's own HomeKit or Google Home and it's why I've never really bothered using those apps because both of those apps keep you enclosed within their own devices. You can install Home Assistant on pretty much anything there's a version that runs on this kind of tiny Raspberry Pi computer. I also have mine running on my Synology NAS behind me and it's been pretty flawless like it did take me a bit of time to get my head around some of the integrations but there are a ton of forums and guides online to help you with that. But with Home Assistant now I have a whole dashboard that shows me what's going on around with all the smart devices in my whole house regardless of which ecosystem they're using and because it talks to everything I could do things like when the alarm is armed because we're not at home then switch off all of the plugs around the home and turn off all the lights and maybe even send us a message if any of the windows are left open. But the one thing I've done recently has been something that has been a personal victory for me what with inflation and rising energy costs and all that kind of stuff. Now a few years ago I had a six kilowatt solar system fitted along with a Tesla Powerwall battery backup and whilst that's done a great job at reducing my energy bills it's not the only thing. Now using Home Assistant I can detect when my electricity supplier is offering me cheaper electricity and when there's a cheap slot I can then switch a ton of devices on around the house. Now the main thing here is being able to charge my home battery my Tesla Powerwall on electricity that's a quarter of the cost cheaper than charging in peak hours but I can also create a domino effect around the house. I turn on the washing machine or the tumble dryer or send notifications to our phones to even switching on air conditioning units around the house to soak up the additional cheap electricity instead of paying for either expensive electricity or when I'm full paying and exporting that energy back to the grid. Now that is admittedly a big upfront investment for the solar and battery storage but many houses nowadays are being fitted with solar and battery storage as standard and so automation such as this can have a dramatic like dramatic effect on your home energy costs. Now it's going to be different from house to house as to how quickly this will pay for itself but with prices just going up as fast as they are that payback time is getting much much faster. Now I am still interested to see what Apple and Google can bring to the home automation piece that seems to slowly be getting there but as far as I'm concerned unless you want to be tied to a specific brand and stuck paying premium Apple prices for their approved products then Home Assistant actually provides a great option for you to still buy whatever devices you want and still have them working together. Until the next one!