5 Cool Features of Smart Home Automation

The perfect smart home automation systems do way more than you first imagined and there are dozens of advantages to setting your home up this way.

Remember 10 years ago when people used to ask if your fancy gadgets would make you a cup of tea?

Well, the future is here. Almost. We can’t quite manage a cuppa from a robot, but you could certainly automate your coffee machine! And kettle.

Let’s delve deeper and look at 5 cool benefits of a smart home we know you’ll love.

Why Have a Smart Home?

One of the main benefits of smart home automation is saving time. Chances are you live a busy lifestyle either in your work or personal life… or both! Think of the smart home system as an automated butler.

It’ll make sure each room in your house is just the right temperature as you wake up, open the curtains and get your breakfast ready. Not only that, it’ll keep you updated on the day ahead. As you leave for work, it’ll keep an eye on your home and let the police know if there’s an intruder, making sure nobody is taking advantage of an empty home while you’re hard at work.

Your automated butler told Amazon you’ve got a parcel waiting on the porch, so it lets the driver in through the porch door to pick the parcel up (but not the door to the home, of course!).

It’s incredible how much a smart home can do for your life. Let’s take a deeper look at these awesome features and see what they can do.

1. Smart Home Infrastructure

The smart home automation infrastructure is the central control of your entire smart home, so if you get this right the first time, you’re winning. It’s the most important part of future-proofing your home. Be sure to set up a wired system though; wires are for winners! Wireless systems don’t operate nearly half as well.  

A first-class smart home control system brings everything together without fault, allowing you to control the entire home from one remote.

And if you lose the one remote down the sofa, never fear. You can install an app on all your devices and use that instead. This is particularly handy if you head away for a weekend and forget to update your smart home schedule – tap into your trusty app and ask your devices to look after the house for you while you’re gone.

You can even set up ‘mockupancy‘ which will control your lighting and entertainment systems when you’re away from home to give the impression that you’re there! This is the perfect addition to a smart home security system.

Taking the ultimate experience one step further, you can prompt your voice assistant to trigger your actions for you, like having your own personal butler on hand!

2. Smart Home Lighting

Once your control system is set up, it’s time for smart home lighting. There’s a good reason for this too. LED bulbs are known to use up to 90% less energy than traditional incandescent bulbs. In a large house, that’s enough saved on energy bills to pay for the system in no time.

But smart lighting has moved on beyond its energy-saving benefits. We’re not talking about those age-old huge light switches that need a post-it note next to each button to tell you what to do with it.

Oh no, smart lighting these days is all controlled through one convenient portal, be it a single light switch, one device or voice recognition. Not to mention that light switches in a smart home don’t just do lighting, they’re interfaces that control speakers, shades, heating and much much more, all from the touch of a single button.

Sounds pretty cool, right? We’ve not even mentioned the lamps. We’re talking about bulbs with every colour of the spectrum and the ability to alter colour depending on the time of day, temperature or desired mood!

There are even smart light switches that replace your existing ones. The secret to the best home automation technology is that you don’t know it exists in your home. That’s one of the main reasons to go all-out on a complete setup.

3. Smart Home Security

There’s a very good reason to have complete control over your home using smart tech. Your smart home security system is the final defense between a thief and your valuable items.

As we mentioned earlier, smart lighting has some powerful benefits in terms of convenience and comfort, but what we haven’t mentioned yet is its important role in home security:

• It lets you set up a randomised schedule that can make it look like someone is home, a.k.a ‘mockupancy’
• Lighting schedules can be paired with smart blinds to appear extremely realistic
• If you get an intruder, you can trigger lights and/or sirens
• With some paid services, you can even have your own personal police alarm

Security cameras are also an important part of the smart home setup too – having this smart tech can deter criminals, support an insurance claim, help the police and even bring down insurance premiums.

With today’s technology, you can check out what’s going on in and around your home in real-time from anywhere around the world with wi-fi or data connection.

Access Control Systems

With security can come inconvenience. If you’ve ever tried to get back into your online banking, you’ll understand that high-security is a blessing and a curse. With access control systems, you won’t need to go through the hassle of getting a new set of keys cut when you’ve just got back from work and realise they’re still on your desk – you can use your smartphone, as it has a security key to let you into your own house, worry-free.

Your smartphone’s security validation or facial recognition cameras can allow you into the home. This tech makes use of the high-level security chips you never knew were sitting in your pocket all this time.

4. Smart Home Entertainment

When most people think of smart home entertainment, they think of smart TVs and Sky Q. It’s so much more than that. Smart home entertainment is all about the opportunity to enhance and enrich your viewing, not distract from the film in question.

Remember when we said a good smart home seamlessly integrates, and you forget it’s there? Well, you can set it so when you turn your TV on in the movie room at 7 pm on a Sunday night, it’ll shut the blinds, dim the lights and put all your tech into “movie mode”.

It can also sync the lighting with your TV colours for a truly immersive home cinema experience, with ambient colour-matching.

Personalised Entertainment Racks

Another great feature about the discreet home approach is that you can disguise your entire home system in a purpose-built rack. The system is designed to work through walls and behind doors, so there’s no reason to worry about an infrared signal not reaching it.

We all know how unreliable those Skyboxes are but with our centralised racks we now have the ability to tell them to reboot at 2am each morning to make them more reliable. And on the off-chance you do run into any problems, our industry-leading aftercare gives you that added security of having your system back up and running in no time at all.

5. Smart Home Heating and Cooling

Once upon a time, smart climate control meant your only option was a smart thermostat. Now you can control all areas of your house. You can set temperatures in individual rooms and link it all up to your home automation systems depending on your requirements at different times of the day.

You can also use geo-location to trigger heating when you are away from home or return to the house. If you have solar power, you can even combine smart learning patterns with a smart home tariff.

This automates when your system sells your energy back to the grid at its most expensive (yes, companies pay you to do this!). This alone can cut your energy costs by a huge amount, so it’s well worth the investment.

Suppose you’re a forward-thinker and have an unconventional heating setup such as ground and air source heat pumps. In that case, you can control these with motion sensors around the home to detect which rooms you use and when. The same applies to infra-red floor heating or more traditional underfloor heating, where a self-optimising heating system learns and adapts accordingly.

Create Your Perfect Smart Home Automation Systems

Of course, smart home automation systems come with lots of choices.

In the case of the smart home, deciding which option to go for feels like an impossible decision. That’s why we recommend getting advice from the experts.

Your smart home is there to help your home, not inconvenience it. Get your personalised quote today and let us work our magic on your smart home!