Overview of smart home systems
Everyone has already heard the term smart home. But does everyone know what it means? What does it consist of, how does it work, and what features does it provide to users? A smart home is the latest technology embedded in an ordinary home, designed to make everyday life easier and more enjoyable, as well as make it more cost-effective. For people who are not technologically advanced, this can seem quite complicated. We will try to convince you that this is not the case, and show you all the advantages of a smart home.
What is a smart home?
A smart home is a set of systems and devices for home automation. Why “smart”then? Because with these devices, we can somehow communicate with the house, and it can perform various tasks on our command. This is due to the use of a network that connects all devices and to which users can also connect, for example, via a smartphone. The main element of the entire system is the so-called Central controller responsible for monitoring and control. Other devices and our smartphone connect to it, which allows us to communicate with the entire system using the Internet, even if we are far from home. The most important thing about the idea of a smart home is that we can customize it according to our needs – according to our working hours, sleep, habits, and lifestyle.
Smart home devices include:
Surveillance cameras – the best will be cameras with Full HD quality, which provides recording of images with a large number of details. Even better, if the camera can record after dark. If you are going to install the camera outside a building, it is important that it is adapted to high humidity and variable temperatures, which will ensure its long service life. Recordings from a smart home camera are most often saved on a network disk.
Alarm systems are, for example, motion sensors or sensors for opening doors and Windows. When an undesirable event occurs, we will be notified immediately.
Automatic opening of gates, garages, or blinds on Windows and doors.
Sensors that warn us of carbon monoxide emissions, rising temperatures, smoke, or even spilled water to prevent unwanted consequences.
Smart plugs that allow you to turn an electrical device on and off without removing the plug.
Intelligent lighting-allows us to set the intensity and color of the light, as well as to remotely control the lighting.
Intelligent heating – used to control the room temperature. Because of this, we can program what time of day or night we want to have higher temperature and some lower temperature.
What does a smart home give us?
Security. Security is probably the most important reason why many people choose smart home solutions. In addition to cameras, which undoubtedly have an impact on increasing the level of protection of our home, various sensors are currently used that will report a threat immediately after a suspicious event is detected.
Comfort. Smart home solutions also increase the functionality of our home.
Saving. Using apps specifically created for the smart home, we can check which device consumes the most energy and generates the highest costs. So we can plan when to use them less often.