Smart Home Tour 2023: How to SAVE Money!

[Music] have I made any bad purchasing decisions in my smart home yeah I think I have between the two smart houses I set up I've used both affordable and expensive devices I'll take you on a quick tour around our house and go through 15 categories to let you know what's worth spending your money on and what's not [Music] starting off with smart window shades I've tried inexpensive retrofit options inexpensive Ikea roller shades and expensive Lutron Serena shades personally I would get the cheapest option in getting something to retrofit your existing blinds or Shades will make installation way easier also the Ikea roller shades are very inexpensive and have worked perfectly for me for about two years it's not that I don't like our Lutron Shades they have a more luxurious look and are super quiet which is ideal for when they wake me up in the morning but did I need to pay extra and have them here in the theater room probably not I always leave them closed I mean it's a theater room hello so Voice Assistant speakers and displays come in all shapes and sizes I would spend more because you can get a lot more features for usually just a little bit of extra money especially when they're on sale like this Echo 4th gen listening to music on this is going to sound a million times better than the smaller speakers that's not all though it will also be a matter of controller and a thread border router sometime this year it even has occupancy detection using ultrasound to run automations if no one's in the room anymore and now you can adjust the sensitivity of it which is pretty sweet I've tried out all types of video doorbells from Dirt Cheap to high end I don't think this is a good place to cheap out if you can I would spend more on a video doorbell because we use ours all the time and in our previous house we had a cheaper video doorbell that we didn't have the greatest experience with it would miss recordings when it notify us of packages that were on our porch it was slow to load who was at the front door it can be extremely frustrating and you might even have to do the unthinkable physically get up and open the door to see who's there oh hold on one second read a Salesman Lynn wants to talk no yeah get a good one you'll thank me later sensors they're small so they should be cheap right that's what I thought in our previous house take wise sense for an example I mean they're less than ten dollars a sense or what could go wrong everything devices going offline bad battery life slow to run automations I mean I would rather have no sensors in my house than sensors like that that are really frustrating but it doesn't mean you have to spend a lot on sensors for example the acara sensor they're very inexpensive and they work great and the ring sensor works great too and sometimes I forget they're even there because they're that reliable when it comes to Wi-Fi I might have overdone it I went with a more expensive UniFi system because I heard it was the best it is amazing and with fiber to our house we basically never have to wait for anything to load if we do our four-year-old lets us know Mom that is not working no it's just loading ah but I've also tried budget mesh systems and they work great fast speeds and our smart home devices never had issues definitely get something better than what your ISP gave you I'm just using ours as our modem and you can most likely get away with some of those more affordable mesh systems out there robot vacuums on the other hand are more of you get what you pay for I've used the inexpensive vacuums that just bounce around and they can still pick up quite a bit of dirt but they'll get stuck because you can't tell them where they shouldn't go get a robot vacuum that has lidar you know this little spinning thing on top it will map out your house and it'll clean Super efficiently it won't get stuck because you can tell it to avoid certain spots and you can tell it to clean specific rooms it's worth it if you want a vacuum that also mops I would only recommend splurging and getting the robo-rock S7 Max V because anything else doesn't do a good job or is too annoying in my last house I used a lot of cheap smart light bulbs and light strips the fact that I'm still married after using those is nothing short of a miracle lights would be going offline the white colors would be a blue or RGB color it was terrible so I would think about spending more and not getting the cheapest option I'm using Philips Hue bulbs and light strips in this main room and some whiz light strips down below I've never had one issue with them they're Rock Solid but for ceiling fans I go as cheap as possible and these fans are some of the most inexpensive fans you can get at Home Depot they're not smart but you use a little RF remote to control them and then you only need this one Bond controller to control all the fans in your house and I've been using this one for about five years and it's been great what about smart home hubs many people try to avoid hubs and I was one of those people years ago when first starting out so is it a waste of money or time trying to figure out a hub no I think it's worth splurging and getting a hub like home assistant habitat or SmartThings if you want to keep it simple it just unlocks so many more things you can do with your smart home you have way more sensors to choose from you can dial in your automations exactly how you want them and control everything from one app I think it's worth it so don't be afraid to spend money on a hub for security cameras I thought that splurging would be a good idea but now I feel like I wasted some money I bought unified cameras and the G4 Pro is 450 dollars that's right I spent 450 on One camera then I tried real link cameras that are a quarter of the price and the video quality was basically the same as unify I wasn't very happy when I saw that knowing how much I spent even the wise cam V3 does a pretty good job at keeping an eye on things and it has an SD card inside where you can record 24 7 footage yes you can pay more for more expensive cameras but the improvements are very marginal compared to the big price differences smart thermostats are interesting because the cheaper ones seem like they can basically do the same thing turn your HVAC system on and off here's the thing though having a more advanced smart thermostat can save you a lot of money for example you can use these little sensors and they can tell the system if you're not in a certain part of the house and it can turn off that zone so still keeps you comfortable on the other side of your house but it's saving you energy and money so I think it's worth paying more for a good smart thermostat because you'll make back that money in savings pretty quickly smart Outlets are an easy one go as cheap as possible unless it's WeMo those things suck I have some of the cheapest smart Outlets turning on these ceiling LED lights and they've been Flawless they even lasted a full Arizona summer here in the garage they've been great smart buttons are something I've usually spent a little more on recently I thought it would be good to try some cheaper options big mistake the buttons were set up to announce when our toddler needed help in the bathroom Mom I need help in the kids bathroom well the button wasn't working when she pressed it so she kept pressing it and pressing it after she was done getting help the announcement finally played on The Echoes and it kept going and going and going and it didn't stop I think you can guess where that button ended up even the Ikea buttons can have battery issues so spending a little more on something like the acara button is worth it I spent thousands on Lutron smart lights which is all over my house and they weren't great but so do the really inexpensive Casa dimmer switches in my bathroom and with a good Wi-Fi connection these Casa dimmer switches are a great way to save money and as we saw at CES they actually have a matter compatible version that's coming out soon that looks promising in our previous house I installed the MyQ garage door control device that is super inexpensive it was really easy to install but it wasn't a hundred percent reliable sometimes it would say the garage door was open when it was actually closed I mean it was better than not having anything at all but there were so many times that it was frustrating now we have the MyQ garage door controllers installed and it's so much better like 99.9 percent reliable I think it's worth paying some extra money for more reliable garage door controllers to eliminate all that frustration well hopefully this gives you an idea of where you can save and what you might want to spend a little extra on and obviously these are all just my opinions if you disagree with some of them then you'd be wrong but you can let me know down in the comments what you think they should be and if you want to know any specific products in the categories I'll link some of my favorites down in the description thanks for watching uh Reed I think we need to change up our smart lights wait what well I think we should get rid of Philips Hue there's so much corporate grief wait what book are you reading put that down you're drinking the Kool-Aid what no I don't know what you're talking about [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Smart Home Solver

Views: 263,321

Keywords: smart home tour, smart home 2023, smart home solver, smart home, home automation, home automation ideas, smart home ideas, smart home tech, home tour, house tour, smart house tour, reed’s smart home, cheap smart home, luxury smart home

Id: xhsv5yME1PQ

Length: 9min 43sec (583 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 21 2023