If you watched Smart House as a kid, building a smart home might feel a little bit more like science fiction than real life. While you aren’t going to have PAT in your home, how about Alexa? You probably already talk to Siri on your phone, so why not add another handy helper?
Learning how to build a smart home and what it takes to get smart home design right can mean the difference between a convenience and a disconnected mess. Continue reading this article to learn the best practices for building a smart home.
The 411 on Building a Smart Home
Welcome to the future. It’s time to create A Connected Home and the following tips will help you do it the right way. You won’t have to work over your home with major constructions and you won’t need to have networking skills so stay tuned.
1. Determine How You Want It to Function
Before you get into the physical work of creating your smart home, you need to get specific about how you want it to work.
Are you focused on energy costs? Do you want to make it easier for you to access your home?
Figure out what your main priorities are before you get started. Some people might need a more complex system than others depending on their goals.
2. Know Your Budget
Smart homes can start to skyrocket in price when you start shopping around for devices and service. When you take care of step one and know what you want, it is a little easier to plan your budget. You have to be realistic but you also shouldn’t break the bank just to get a couple of extra fancy gadgets.
3. Determine How Long Are You Willing to Spend On the Project
If you don’t care about how long it is going to take you on this project, you can work on it at your leisure. Most of us want to get things done so we can start using our new toys.
Determining how much time you have to get things done will allow you to break your project into small bite-size chunks. You might give yourself a week to do the planning and a week to get the smart home up and running. Determine your timeline and map it out so you know what’s expected of you.
If you’re hiring someone to do the work, you might have to ask them what their timeline is but you can at least see if it is going to line up with yours. If their timeline doesn’t line up with yours, look around for other people to do the job.
4. Make Sure Your WiFi Is Strong
Your smart home needs strong WiFi if it is going to be helpful to you. If you overlook this part of your smart home plan, you’re not going to get the full benefits that you want.
Wherever you want to use your WiFi smart devices needs to have a strong signal. Even if other areas of the home have good WiFi, that’s not going to help when you put a device in a dead zone in your home.
5. Don’t Forget Security
The last thing you want is a hacker to get into your network. Smart device use is growing and so are the number of people that are interested in learning how to hack them.
Make sure you have a good firewall, up-to-date routers and router firmware and don’t forget to create strong passwords. If you can’t remember your password, put it in a note somewhere that you can access it at a later date. Don’t make your password something easy to make it simple for you to log in because hackers are going to think it is just as easy.
6. Look at the Current Devices You Have
Before you go out and start buying devices for your home, see what you already have. You might have a smart speaker that you forgot about or even a smart light bulb that your partner put in without you knowing it.
If you don’t need to replace something — don’t. This can help you save money and you’re still getting the results that you want.
7. Choose Your Smart Home Hub
There are some choices for smart home hubs and you need to figure out which one is the right choice for you. These smart home hubs allow you to control all your devices so you can see what devices are available to you.
There are different types of smart home hubs. All of them have their benefits and disadvantages so you’ll need to check through and see which type you want and then you have to pick a brand.
The different types of smart hubs are hardware hubs, software hubs, smart speaker hubs, and combo hubs. Once you determine the kind of hub you want, you might start to notice some of the brand names like Amazon Echo.
Once you choose your smart home hub, use the instructions in the box and connect your smart devices and you’re good to go. Welcome to your smart home.
Learn More About Making Technology Work for You
Now that you know how to go about building a smart home, why stop learning there? Technology is the way of the future so whether you want to work in the technology sector or you just want to be tech-savvy for everyday life, we can help. We have many articles on these topics and other related topics that can help you.
Browse our site, find your favorite section, drop a bookmark and come back soon for more great reads.
