You love collecting high-tech gadgets, and your home is filled to bursting with IoT tech. Yet, unless you take certain steps to connect your smart home, all your innovative tech tools might not be functioning as optimally as they could.
Here are a few hacks you might use to improve how your smart home operates, so you can relax and enjoy your high-tech personal space.
Make a Smart Home Plan
If you have not started accumulating smart tech — or if you only have one or two smart devices — you should pause to plan before investing in a house-load of smart tools. You might conduct some research to determine what smart home devices are currently available, what benefits they provide and how much they cost.
Many smart devices are less than practical, and many others will be well out of your budget. Once you have a better idea of which smart items you need and want, you can select the best tools for your home and lifestyle and start saving up for the smart home of your dreams.
Invest in a Better Network
Every smart device in your home will draw bandwidth from your network, and if you aren’t careful, this could reduce your internet speeds dramatically. As you add smart devices to your network, you may need to invest in a higher tier of service from your internet provider.
This will prevent service black- and brown-outs that prevent your smart tools from working as they should. Plus, you can get home insurance discounts when your smart security system is functioning properly.
Use a Smart Hub
You can put together a smart home by connecting each individual device to your network and utilizing their discrete apps through your mobile phone or computer — but that is an incredibly inefficient way of interacting with your smart tech.
A better way is to connect your smart devices to a smart hub first, which will reduce the bandwidth drawn from your network and make interacting with your devices incredibly convenient. During the planning stage, you should find a hub that integrates with the smart platforms you prefer, so you don’t have a single smart device that operates independently.
Rename Your Devices
By default, many smart devices will utilize their brand, platform and product names in the names used to connect to your smart hub or network. Unless you have a head for remembering technology branding, you are likely to confuse your smart devices, leading to mistakes in your programming and operation.
For example, you don’t want to mix up the settings for your smart ceiling fans with the settings for your smart vacuum. As soon as you set up a new smart tool, you should rename it with clear language, so you can quickly and easily identify it.
Employ a Geofence
A geofence is a digital perimeter around different parts of your home. You can create a geofence around the outside of your property to tell your smart devices to behave a certain way while you are gone — for example, to change the thermostat temperature, to turn off your ceiling fans or to run the dishwasher.
You can also geofence certain rooms, so when certain people enter certain spaces, the settings of your smart devices shift. Geofencing might sound complex, but it is actually quite easy to enact and can radically improve your smart home experience.
Schedule Routines
Another way to make your smart devices work for you is to utilize the routine functionality. Routines — or automations, depending on your platform — are the patterns your smart devices will follow given certain triggers.
For example, if you tell your speaker “Good morning,” it might start a certain playlist, turn on your smart showerhead and tell your smart coffee machine to start brewing. You should spend a few weeks determining what smart functionalities you need at certain times of day, so you can develop routines that make sense for your lifestyle.
Always, Always, Always Update
IoT gadgets are consistently among the least secure devices in your home. Many smart device developers do not think once about integrating security into their designs, and those that do often assume that homeowners will take appropriate steps to ensure that their smart home network as a whole is adequately protected.
In addition to other security measures you can take — to include equipping your router with a VPN and utilizing strong (and diverse) passwords on all your devices, you should make a schedule for checking and downloading updates to your smart tech. Some devices will do this automatically, but most won’t, so you need to make it a habit to check that your smart tech is fully up to date and secure.
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