Smart homes are the way of the future, and many new home builds are already coming equipped with smart home packages. But what is a smart home? What are the best options to choose if you want smart home technology in your Edmonton home renovation?
If you live in Edmonton or the surrounding area, we’re going to answer those questions here so you can start planning your own smart home improvements for your upcoming renovation.
What is A Smart Home?
If you are thinking about renovating, then using the latest technology makes it possible to ensure that your home is easier to maintain and more adaptive to our seasonal needs.
Simply put, a Smart Home refers to a convenient home setup where appliances and devices can be automatically controlled remotely from anywhere with an internet connection using your mobile phone (or tablet).
This technology allows homeowners to control appliances, thermostats, lights, and other home features remotely using a smartphone or tablet through an internet connection.
While research shows that the right smart technology provides significant benefits to individual wellbeing, there continues to be some concerns with security and tech “bugs” for both users and makers of smart home products that will continue to be resolved over time.
That being said, advances to smart home technology are happening rapidly, and many people consider it a wise investment. If you are doing a renovation, here are some of the best smart upgrades you can consider including.
Smart Faucets
Smart faucets are no longer just about touchless on and off. Installing smart faucets throughout your home can help save time and build ease into your day-to-day activities in the home.
Some benefits:
- Now come in touch, touchless and voice activation
- Can deliver custom, preset amounts of water such as sink filling or common cooking measurements like 1 cup
- Preset specific temperatures (no more waiting around for boiled water for your hot cuppa)
- Water monitoring for water quality
- Automatic shut off (great for kids who don’t turn it off all the way, or if you need to step away and forget it’s running)
- LED lighting to avoid scalding
As renovators, perhaps our favorite aspect is how aesthetically pleasing smart faucets are. There are styles available for all tastes, but they tend to be sleeker and less clunky looking than traditional faucets.
Smart Stoves
If you are thinking about making your kitchen space smarter, appliances are a great way to do it and a smart stove is a great one to start with. You might be wondering what benefits a smart stove can really have, but there are a surprising number of benefits that make this investment worth it if you spend a lot of time in the kitchen cooking.
The more obvious benefit is having the ability to set oven to preheat, adjust cooking temperature, and turn the oven off from anywhere using your phone. This is great if you leave the house and can’t remember if you turned it off. Or, if you get stuck in traffic and worried your pot roast will overcook.
If paired with a smart thermometer, you can monitor the internal temperature of meat by simply looking at your phone. This allows for precise cooking when it matters – such as steak.
Perhaps the most intriguing feature is that smart ovens offer more flexible cooktop configurations and induction burners than a traditional stove does, including convection, infrared heating elements, and even the option to add, combine, or relocate heating elements for more precise cooking and a wider range of surface use.
Lighting
As Christopher Null from TechHive points out, “For most people interested in living in a smart home, lighting is the entry point.”
Smart lighting can be hooked up as a stand-alone system, programmed to integrate with other existing smart features in your home, or used as part of a whole-home smart panel, which we will discuss next.
Having lights come on automatically might sound like an overly lavish feature, but once in use, the convenience of it will make you wonder why you waited.
No longer will you be slogging through the snow in the dark as you find your way to the back door from the garage, and your lights will know to automatically dim when you start a movie.
Smart Panels
Another possibility is to add smart panels for a whole-home system. Panels are the most common and available choice if you want to control most of your home’s behavior from one central hub.
Once installed, these panels offer programming for an endless number of things in your home including heating/cooling, lighting, water temperature, security systems, speakers, lighting, dishwashers, even specific things like filling your bathtub at 8pm every night for your nightly bath.
For residents in Edmonton and surrounding areas, a panel makes great sense because it can be programmed to adjust for the changes in light and temperature between the seasons, which maximizes its value.
Smart Panels allow you to instantly and easily adjust different sections of your home environment for the optimum levels of comfort. But it’s important to remember that while the panels themselves aren’t terribly expensive, you do need to install appliances and components that all work within a centralized/single user interface.
The Future of Smart Homes: Adaptive Smart Systems
If you want to go all-in and completely adapt your home for future trends, it’s worth exploring adding an adaptive smart system to your home.
Smart technology has evolved significantly over the past few years. Currently, the majority of smart tech is about you controlling your home.
While not widely available yet the latest adaptive smart systems actually learn your behaviors and your needs, and then automatically adapt to meet and match them without you having to program or push any buttons!
Now, this either sounds exciting or terrifying to you (we admit, it’s the latter for us…), but regardless of whether you like the idea of this level of “smart” in your home, it is certainly a trend we will be keeping an eye on.
If you are ready to get started on your renovation plans to make your current home your dream home – including smart technology, contact us today for a free consultation and quote.
