People have been wanting to make smart homes for a hundred years. In fact, when people would go to the World Fairs of years ago, it was always popular to see amazing futuristic smart homes that the future will bring. We think that is what started the whole thing. Although smart homes have been more of a novelty over the last few decades, it’s becoming more and more common to have smart home gadgets in your house that bring your house up to the next level. We believe that smart houses have snuck up on us and we are already there, we just have to make the installations. We look forward to the future when we know it’s just going to get better and better.

Light Bulbs

Light bulbs have been around for years, ever since Thomas Edison created one. However, things have changed since that time. These days you can get smart light bulbs. They use very little electricity such as led lights, and they can be controlled by a variety of gadgets and devices. Some of them can even change color on demand setting the mood. While in the old days you need to the dimmer switch, these days it’s built into the light bulb. They can turn on when you are home and automatically turn off when nobody is in the room. For such a simple thing, it’s pretty magic.

Intercom and monitoring

Back in the day, we used to have intercoms wired into the house so you could call somebody from another part of the house to come to eat dinner. They were generally just two boxes that were wired up across the house. Things have changed. These days your intercom can connect directly to the wi-fi in your house. You can use your smartphone from anywhere, such as the office and actually get on the intercom system to talk to people in your house. There are many units that have cameras that do this exact same thing as well so we can monitor what’s going on from a remote location. How cool is that?

Video Doorbell 

You can buy a video doorbell these days that records the video of anybody that walks up to your front door, even if they don’t press the doorbell. If somebody comes to your door and rings your doorbell when you’re not home, you can get an alert on your smartphone and answer them on the intercom as if you were. It makes your house a little bit more secure as people are never sure if anyone’s there or not, and if anybody is there that shouldn’t be? you have a video record of them being there. Add this to a remote door lock and you can even unlock the door remotely and let friends in when you are not home.

Smart Plugs

Smart plugs have been around for a very long time but these days they have become quite sophisticated. This may not seem like a great smart home automation device but it really is. When it’s paired with a good application for control, you can turn things on and off in your house as well as open the curtains or close them, or anything else that you can imagine. It is the epitome of what a robot house is, with your computer or device being the robot’s brain. These devices often connect to Alexa as well so you can just tell Alexa what you want and it will control the devices.

Robotic vacuum and mop

Although we make jokes about the sorcerer’s apprentice, one of our favorite devices is the robotic vacuum. For harder floors, there is also a robotic map which works in the same way but wet mops your floor as well. Although it seems the height of laziness, we have to say this has become one of our favorite devices. There is also a burgeoning community of people that have hacked and modified these devices to make them do other things. Yaay robotics.

There are many more smart home devices out there. More than we can name here, here we just showed a few of our favorites. There are devices that will order products for you at the press of a button, there are devices that will talk to you, and turn on music or give you recipes. There are devices that will keep your house the perfect temperature and save you energy for when you’re not there without even thinking about it. Once you start looking at turning your house into a smart home it becomes quite addicting and you can get lost in it. Sometimes they can almost make your house feel alive.