In recent years, the smart home technology market has evolved into a world with exciting potential for interested customers, but the entry price to turn your home into a smart home can be a little intimidating.
In this article, we want to show you that you can clean up your house without breaking your money. In fact, you can add some smart home features for as little as $ 50 by purchasing a smart home assistant like the Google Home Mini.
Of course, this is not the same without integrated smart technologies in the home, so we have included some other options that will add more functionality for a little money.
If you want to get serious, read some suggestions on other existing smart home technologies before the end of the article.
Why convert your home into a smart home? span>
Many people wonder why they are turning their home into a smart home. To confront doubters, I have two simple answers. The first is convenience, the second is energy efficiency.
Smart outlets, lights, blinds, and other smart home gadgets can make it much easier for you to manage everything in your home. Some smart equipment even self-controls automatically. It adds convenience to your life that is easy to overlook when you have it.
With this added convenience and additional level of smart technology, it also becomes easier to reduce energy costs. Smart thermostats can help monitor your heater or AC usage and create more comfortable and more accessible profiles for you.
Smart lighting can be configured to turn off when you are not at home, and smart plugs can be configured with profiles that turn on and off to suit your lifestyle. span>
Get started with Voice Assistant – Google Home Mini for $ 49
The best way to start your smart home is buying a voice assistant. There are several options on the market, but the cheapest options are the Google Home Mini and Amazon Echo Dot. Both are available for $ 49.
We’ll be using Google Home Mini technology for this article, but you can easily find alternatives to Amazon Echo. We also think that Google Home Mini integrates better with Android smartphone users. (And even for iOS users if you download the Google Assistant app).
The Google Home Mini is a smart speaker that you can plug into your home. Without any other smart technology, this is essentially a Google voice search for steroids. You can ask Google Home for any information available on the Internet, you can use it to check your schedule, or you can complete tasks using the built-in apps available from the app store on your smartphone.
Google Home Mini adds convenience to your life that you would never know existed. The Google Home experience gets better as you add additional technologies that you can use with it.
Make Lighting Smarter – Hue Starter Kit – 2 $ 69.99
One of the cheapest smart gadgets you can bring into your home is Wi-Fi enabled light bulbs. You can then turn off, turn on and dim these lights in the app on your smartphone or by talking to your home voice assistant.
You can pay a little less for smart bulbs with less functionality, but we recommend the Philips Hue Starter Kit for $ 69.99. This gives you two bulbs and a powerful Hue Bridge that you can use to control your bulbs even if your internet goes down.
Philips Hue allows you to customize profiles for different times of the day or schedule so the lights turn on slowly in the morning to gently wake you up.
If you want to go light bulb crazy, you can spend $ 99.99 on a starter kit of 4, or spend $ 15 to $ 50 on different types of bulbs for standard white lighting and ambient lighting. and much more.
Philips also sells light strips and Hue lamps, so over time you can turn your entire home into a home lit with one app.
Get smart energy with Smart Plugs – 4 for $ 50
Smart plugs are a great way to control power consumption, remotely turn off unused electronics, and set up unique profiles.
You can purchase a set of 4 smart plugs from Etekcity on Amazon for only $ 50. Installing these outlets is simple: you simply plug them into your standard outlets and then plug the electronics into an Etekcity smart outlet.
With the included app, you can control all your electronics over Wi-Fi, so you can even turn off your devices when you’re not at home. You can set timers on your outlets, which is useful when you want to charge your gadgets for a set time, but don’t want to constantly check them.
You can also create schedules to have outlets turn on and off at specific times. Etekcity even includes a power consumption graph so you can keep track of how much electricity is being used.
Finally, you can name each of your outlets and then manage them through Amazon Alexa or Google Home.
Save money on heating with Smart Heating – Nest Learning Thermostat for $ 245.99
The Nest Learning Thermostat isn’t a cheap smart home appliance, but it can help you save money over time.
The Nest Learning Thermostat can be used with Google Home or a smartphone to remotely control heating and air conditioning. You no longer need to get up to manually adjust the heating.
More importantly, the Nest Learning Thermostat will learn your usage patterns over time. As you use it for longer, the Nest will get better at setting it to a comfortable temperature while keeping it energy efficient. Nest takes about a week to learn your basic habits.
Another great Nest feature is the ability to monitor and control the temperature in your home while you are away. Nest can know when you are leaving the house, and you can manually turn on the heating or air conditioner just before you return home so that you are at a comfortable temperature when you return.
other great ideas for a smart home
If you want to go further, you can get your hands on tons of other great smart home gadgets. We have included a list of some of the existing types of smart gadgets.
- Smart home assistants with great speakers for listening to music
- Autonomous Intelligent Dynamics
- Smart security cameras and baby monitors
- Smart Blocks
- Smart Smoke / Carbon Monoxide Detectors span>
- Smart doorbell cameras
- Smart kitchen appliances
- Smart blinds
- < span style = "font-weight: 400;"> Robot vacuum cleaners span>
summary
I hope you enjoyed reading our guide to affordable smart home hardware. Do you have questions about the technologies mentioned in this article? If yes, do not hesitate to post a question and I will contact you.
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