How is a smart home connected
How to Start a Smart Home in 2020
If you've been curious about turning your home into a smart home but if you
don't know where to begin because everything out there just seems kind of
overwhelming with the amount of smart home solutions out there, this is going
to be the video for yo.u My name is Josh Teder I'm from 6 Months Later and in
this video I'm going to take you through how to start a smart home in 2020. I'm
going to take you through some of my personal experiences with smart home
devices, as well as give you the latest information on what the smart home
landscape looks like in 2020. Let's dive in. When looking to turn your home into a
smart home you can typically go to routes, the first of which is a
do-it-yourself route where you buy all of the different smart home devices you
want, you set them up and then you connect them all through a similar
platform which is typically either the Google Assistant, Alexa, or Apple's Siri/
HomeKit. The second route is to use an integrator. These are companies
that make home automation platforms and have regional installers that will come
out and install an integrated solution for you.
Some of the popular platforms that these installers use include Control4,
Savant, and Crestron, which all mainly target the luxury home market. So which
one do you go with? Well, it actually depends on a couple of factors...one, how
many pieces of your home are you planning to automate? Two, what's your
budget, how much are you willing to spend? and then three, how comfortable would you
be setting up all of this stuff yourself? The experiences with integrators in this
space can vary widely depending on how their user interfaces are designed and
the third party platforms they can work with. Thankfully things have been getting
better in terms of what these systems can actually integrate in to, but there's
also been quite a bit of disruption for the integrators coming from the larger
tech companies. For example, if you look at the Google Nest page it's obvious
that Google, with its Nest brand, is making a play to consumers who want the
type of whole home solution that the traditional smart home automation
companies provide. And now not just the luxury home players are offering in-home
consultation services and installation services. You've got some
pretty big retailers in this space now as well like Best Buy. Best Buy will
actually come out to your home and do a consultation for free and they also
offer paid installation services. The products that Best Buy will steer
customers towards are products that are going to be more mainstream but perhaps
not as fully integrated as the services from the high-end home automation
companies. Now for the rest of this video, I'm mainly going to focus on the
mainstream consumer tech companies because their products are the ones that
I think most people are going to actually buy in 2020. The first part in
setting up one of these systems in 2020 is choosing which core platform to go
with that all of your smart devices will talk to and will be the central point of
control for your smart home. The major mainstream platforms you can choose from
out there are Amazon's Alexa devices, Google's Google Assistant devices, or
apple's HomeKit-enabled devices. There are others though like Samsung
SmartThings, but I would consider Amazon and Google to be ahead in this space
because of the dominance of their voice assistant platforms. Now luckily in 2020,
most smart home devices now work with both Amazon and Google's platforms and a
lot of devices also work with Apple's HomeKit. Apple is actually the company
that is going to gain the most out of a new alliance that was announced late
last year between Amazon, Apple, Google, and ZigBee, called Connected Home Over IP.
This Alliance hopes to form a common standard for the smart home which should
make the ecosystem as a whole less fragmented, however, it will take years
for this alliance and their new standard to be implemented, which is why my advice
right now is to still go with Amazon or Google in 2020. If you already have a lot
of Apple devices though and want to stay in their ecosystem, that's certainly a
reason to stick with HomeKit. I personally use the Google Assistant to
run my smart home. I do have Alexa and Siri / HomeKit as well so I could
use any of the assistants, but I typically find that the Google Assistant
is more useful for my needs. Once you decide
which core platform is right for you to run your smart home, now it's time to
talk about the devices that actually make your home a smart home. Typically
you can divide the types of devices into several main categories including: music,
media, lighting, climate, security, and appliances / accessories. First let's
look at music with whole home audio. This functionality allows you to play
different music in different parts of your home. Now typically through a voice
assistant. You have various options here. Amazon, Google, and Apple, all make their
own speakers that natively play music from various music streaming services.
There are also third-party speakers and systems you can buy from companies like
Sonos and Bose that can work with all three companies' platforms. Some Bose and
Sonos speakers will even allow you to have Alexa and the Google Assistant
directly on their speakers. We've done reviews on quite a few smart speakers
including the Google Nest Mini, Nest Hub, Nest Hub Max, Google Home, Google Home
Max, and Amazon Echo. The Nest Hub, Nest Hub Max, and Amazon Echo Show have the
added benefit of having a screen on them as well, which makes controlling your
media as well as your other smart home devices even easier. If you're interested
in learning more about these devices, I'll link our videos about them in the
description below. Next, let's take a look at controlling your media rooms within
your smart home. Typically this involves controlling your TV and associated
speakers as well as the lighting in your media rooms. we'll get to lighting though
in just a second. Right now, the best integration with your TV from the
consumer companies would either come from Amazon or Google. They sell devices
that can control your TV, turn it on and off with an assistant, as well as deliver
content from all of the major streaming services you'd expect and they're
relatively affordable, only costing between 30 and 70 US dollars. Google's
chromecast in particular is pretty powerful thanks to its casting feature.
You can cast media from your Android, iPhone, or any Chrome browser over Wi-Fi
to chromecast enabled devices which makes it easy to cast a media from
phone to your TV and then pause and cast it to your bedroom TV. Google's newer
versions of the chromecast devices can also turn off and on your TV and
receiver and other devices connected to it through a technology called HDMI CEC
Amazons Fire stick also has this feature as well. Amazon will even go a step
further with integrations with receivers, sound bars, and TVs through its Fire Cube
TV product which will switch HDMI inputs and other functions with your voice
through Alexa. Both companies allow you to use your voice to control your media
hardware as well as tell either Alexa or the Google Assistant what media you want
to play on a specific screen. Now the Apple TV unfortunately can't be
controlled to turn on and off your TV using Siri. Overall through, I quite like
the Apple TV. It has a dedicated remote which the Google Chromecast doesn't have,
and it also has something similar to casting called Airplay where you can
stream media from pretty much any Apple device with a screen to your TV. Next up,
let's talk smart lighting and this category is pretty interesting because
neither Amazon, Apple, or Google, produce their own smart lights. Unlike with the
speaker and media device categories, there are generally two approaches to
doing smart lighting in your home. You either make the light bulb smart or you
make the switch smart. You can also use a combination of these two approaches
because some light fixtures you find just are not going to have a smart bulb
equivalent to the ball that the light fixture takes. The main players in smart
lights right now are Philips, GE, Lifx, IKEA, and Eufy. These smart light
manufacturers make LED bulbs that can typically be categorized into three
groups: plain white, bulbs that go from daylight to warm white, or multicolored
bulbs. These types of bulbs either connect through Bluetooth or Wi-Fi and
some may require a hub that you will need to connect to your Wi-Fi router.
Smart lights save you a lot of time and steps throughout your house. You can turn
all of your lights off at night with just your voice, you can make sure you
turn them all off while you're away from home through the smartphone app.
typically you can create routines with them so you wake up with your
lights dimming up with sunrise colors and you can usually set geofencing with
your lights so they automatically turn on when you arrive home and turn off
when you leave. There are also other accessories you can get with your smart
lights like wireless dimmer switches that you can assign to control a variety
of lights in your residence. Philips Hue probably has the most accessories and
different types of smart lights available today and they're the brand
that I have in my residence and we did a review of the Philips Hue lighting
system, which if you're interested, I'll leave a link to that below. For smart
light switches some popular brands out there are Wemo, Casa, Ecobee, and Lutron.
These switches connect to your home's Wi-Fi network and replace the switch you
have in your existing wall, allowing you to either control the lights with the
switch, a phone app, or with a smart assistant. These are a great option if
you're doing a home remodel or building a new home where you already need light
switches anyways or if you just don't want to or can't put smart bulbs into a
fixture. Next up, let's talk climate control and mainly we're talking smart
thermostats here. These are thermostats that are Wi-Fi connected and can be
controlled by your smart assistants. Some popular ones include the Nest Learning
Thermostat made by Google, the Ecobee 4 which Amazon has a sizable stake in, and
various smart Honeywell thermostats. Some you can program like more traditional
thermostats with weekly schedules, while others like the Nest, learn your usage
patterns and use AI to predict what the temperature should be set to. Most of
them now allow you to stick sensors in different rooms around your house to
aggregate the temperature data in your home to give you a true home temperature.
Most smart thermostats will also work with the big three smart assistant
platforms and their installation is pretty easy. Next let's talk smart home
security systems. Home security has been around for a while with brands like here
in the US like ADT, CPI, and Brinks, but there are also new players in this space
now as well ,that give a different type of experience to their customers,
allowing them to place sensors, base stations, cameras, and other equipment
anywhere in their home that they want. The three new main players in this space
are Nest, Ring, and of course, SimpliSafe. Each of
these players does come with a monitoring service, but they're optional.
Nest's monitoring service is through Brinks home security where SimpliSafe
and Ring have their own in-house security systems that are cheaper than
the Brinks service, which is a bit more pricey. With all three services, the types
of devices offered are somewhat similar. There is usually a home base, sensors for
the doors and windows, motion sensors, cameras, smart locks, smart
doorbells, and a key fob to disarm the system. Do note none of these services
offers long term contracts. Besides the monitoring service and consumer tech
focus, the other benefit of these services is that they typically
integrate with the main platform assistants, so you can ask Alexa to arm
your alarm, or ask Google to see the downstairs living room camera etc. Some
of these services also offer smoke detection and water leak detection
devices etc, they're not just keeping your home safe from burglars but also
safe from other issues that can affect homeowners. The last and final category
of smart home devices is appliances and accessories. The basic concept is that
these are smart devices like your typical home appliances such as your
stove, refrigerator, washing machine, but also home accessories that can connect
to your smart home platform like smart blinds, robotic vacuum cleaners, smart
scales, smart plugs, etc. Smart accessories are typically going to cost you less to
buy so if you're just starting your smart home, my recommendation would be to
get some smart accessories first that mesh with your smart home platform and
then get appliances as you need them over time. My go-to smart home accessory
over the past few years has been smart plugs. They turn any appliance into one
that can be simply turned on or off by any of the major smart home assistant
platforms. They're especially handy when it comes to the holidays for decorating.
For example, during the holiday season I use five to eight smart plugs from
various companies to help link my holiday lights to the Google
Assistant. I group all of them into a room called Christmas lights and then
when I ask Google to turn on the Christmas lights they all turn on. Once
you choose your smart home platform and start buying devices and accessories for
your smart home, you're just going to be amazed at how easy it is to start
automating some of the most mundane aspects of your life. Like turning off
the lights in every room of your house with your voice, or do things you could
only have dreamed of years ago like a thermostat that you never have to adjust
because it's learned how you like to keep the temperature in your home, moving
through your house with the same music playing on multiple speakers in multiple
rooms, or asking your smart assistant for your Roomba to clean the kitchen after
you've finished making dinner. Smart home devices have the power to really change
your life for the better and they're an important part of what we do here at 6
Months Later. So if you'd like to learn more about smart home products, make sure
you're subscribed to our channel and if you have any questions about the smart
home landscape or you want to see us review a specific smart home product,
make sure to leave a comment below. Well, that's it for our video on how to start
a smart home in 2020, I hope you found the information in this video
informative and useful ,and if you did, make sure to hit that thumbs up button
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one, and hit that Bell icon so you never miss out on another one of our videos.
Well that's it for me, I'm Josh Teder for 6 Months Later,
thanks for watching.
