The Evolution of Home Automation
The job of managing a home may sound easy, but it may get excruciating and tiresome when you get around to doing it. Managing different appliances, ensuring everything is functioning properly while maintaining a reasonable energy consumption is a challenging job. Even tasks such as constantly switching appliances on and off can take a toll on your well-being.
However, with the smart home technology that is gaining prominence with every passing day, things are rosier than before. The task of home management is still difficult, but efforts have been taken in the right direction to ensure you do not face much trouble.
The reason why home automation has become so popular in homes can be attributed to the advent of mobile technology. Through smartphones — using an app for a smart hub — we can have motorized roller shades as well as smart lighting operate without any difficulty. These apps can be synchronized through the use of the internet and can be controlled over the web, thus giving a common platform to the user by which they can control their devices. In the coming years, the home automation industry is bound to witness monumental growth and is expected to penetrate wider regions.
How Does Home Automation Work?
It is important to understand the functioning of a home automation setup before you go setting about your home with this technology. Although you may want to seek professional help, it is important to know the basics so you know what to do when things go wrong. Let us take a look at the two major types of control in a smart home setup.
Automation: Home automation depends a great deal on the hub or software used. When you feed certain instructions to your device, it will follow them and can be accordingly scheduled to carry out the tasks at specific times during the day. For instance, you can have your motorized window shades to shut every day when the clock strikes 10 at night, or have your light bulb turn off when it is time for you to hit the bed. Ensure that your smart hub is compatible with your shades and provides the functionality you are looking for.
Remote Control & Voice Instructions: Your smart shades can also be controlled through remote controls or even your voice. When set up with a compatible smart hub, you can use Google Home or Amazon Alexa to control your shades with voice commands.
The Smart Home Setup
It is essential that you aim to have all your devices to be operated through the same home automation setup. Otherwise it can become difficult to organize your devices and establish connections between them. For instance, if you have set up motorized solar shades in your house using Z Wave technology, but you are using the X 10 technology for the LED lights in your home, this would require an additional setup to bridge the gap between them.
Let’s take a look at the two most popular home automation products.
Amazon Echo: Besides providing a comprehensive list of features such as playing music, streaming podcasts, setting alarms, and updating on traffic and weather information, it can be used to operate several devices in the home — from motorized roller shades and LED bulbs to locks and gadgets.
Google Home: From being a mere search engine, the brand of Google has surpassed all expectations and treaded into territories no one expected it to. From acting on voice commands to operating your smart home hub, Google Home is a must-purchase device that is at once functional and convenient.
Despite the multitude of features these smart devices bring to us, we need to constantly ask ourselves whether everything around us needs to be automated. Is technology making us lazy? Is it allowing us to become skeptical of performing even the most basic tasks? While the thought is itself pertinent, we need to realize that technological evolution is allowing us to enter new qualities of life and areas that were once thought impossible. While there are definitely some side effects of automating tasks, automation has become a cornerstone for a better standard of living.