OK, we know it’s early and Santa’s grotto is a little threadbare this year, but it’s never too early to picture your perfect smart home. We’ve put a collection of the best smart home devices for 2021 together, hint – some of these would make excellent Christmas presents!
A smart home isn’t just a plethora of apps on a smart phone, the idea is to bring all of your smart devices together under the control of one secure, safe and convenient system that you can manage remotely or from the house or garden.
So without further preamble, here are the best smart home devices for 2021!
Smart Operating System
Control 4 is the best smart home system without a doubt! It supports over 35,000 existing devices, including some of the smart essentials such as Sonos. What Control 4 does very very well is provide a secure network within your existing wireless network that unifies any smart devices you have in the house, from burglar alarms and CCTV to music, home theatre and even coffeee machines. As more and more devices are network enabled they can easily be added to your Control 4 network. Imagine the fridge e-mailing you when supplies are running low? It’s going to be the new normal.
Smart Music
You may be familiar with Sonos? With this system you can have music in every room of the house, control the sequence, the volume and even when it switches on. We love Sonos, because it’s easy to set up and it just works. Bringing it into Control 4 set up makes perfect sense.
Home Theatre
Extending the principle of smart music towards the TV – you can cue up your favourite movie on your Smart TV, add decent speakers or simply push the sound through your stereo system, dim the lights at a push of the button and its just like the cinema – without the risk of catching Covid! Plus you can time a hot coffee and popcorn between movies. Saturday night has never been this smart!
Smart Cookers
Cooker technology, like fridges has come a long way in the last few years. Smart Cookers from Hoover, Bosch and Samsung allow you to operate the oven remotely and in the case of the Hoover oven, even watch that chicken roasting on your smart phone!
Smart Fridges
Fridges that monitor food expiry dates and search for recipes based on the ingredients you already have? Check out the Samsung range of Smart Fridges – they’ll even send a photo to your smart phone when they’re running low!
Smart Plugs
It’s a small thing, but if your devices aren’t smart, you can control them with a smart plug. Simply install the plug, attach your old fashioned reading light and control it from the remote. There are even wireless connected plugs for the garden so you can control the lighting, water features, even a pool if you’ve got one.
Google Nest
Nest has been quietly smartening houses for a few years now. This year, Google ported the “Works with Nest” initiative to Google Assistant. No problem, Control 4 have compatible drivers to support the change. You can now use all of your Google devices through Control 4.
Alexa
With Alexa you can control your home via voice! Control 4 offer full support for Alexa and other voice operated systems. “Alexa? Play me Strawberry Fields”
Yale Smart Locks
In our opinion, smart locks are the greatest innovation ever. They may lack the glamour of Sonos but they’re just as brilliant! Don’t say you’ve never experienced that sinking feeling when you’re stuck in traffic five miles form home and you realise you’ve left the back door unlocked. What to do? Risk it this once? Turn round and go back? Call a friend? Now, you can simply pick up your smart phone (you need to be stationary to do this, operating a smart phone form a moving vehicle is not smart!) and lock the door. Better still, you can open the door for a visitor, even let them into the house and disarm the burglar alarm if you’re running late.
The Roomba
This is better than smart, it’s genius! The Roomba hoovers the room automatically, using sensors to avoid obstacles, it creates an internal map of your space and can be triggered or scheduled to quietly go about its business when you’re not there. There isn’t a man alive who wouldn’t love the Roomba! Note that its ability to deal with teenagers’ bedrooms is on a par with the teenager herself – computer says no! Note also that there is evidence aplenty on YouTube that cats absolutely love the Roomba!
The Best Smart Home Devices for 2021
It’s a close run thing, but we love the Roomba. Quickly followed by Smart locks and Google Nest. We always loved the thermostat that Nest started off with, but we’re also loving the other things that plug into the Google ecosystem – Chromecast is in a class of its own!
Want to know how all this works? Download our brochure here.
If you enjoyed this article, you may be interested in some of our other posts..
Smart Technology for a Smart Home
