Control

When planning your smart home, the first ideas to focus on would be those that you would like to control. Once the control is figured out, the monitoring and the automation can follow. Start by listing everything you would like to control even if you don’t know if it can be controlled or not. Just to give some ideas off the bat:

• Light switches
• Outlets
• Sprinklers
• Garage Doors
• Door Locks
• Water Valves
• Speakers
• TVs
• RGB Lights
• Heaters
• Air Conditioners
• Spa/Pool Heaters

Just start writing. Once you have an idea of all of the things you want to control, you can make a plan for how to go about doing that. Being able to turn something on or off with an app on your phone, or maybe a voice command, might not be the most exciting thing in the world and it might become more of a novelty once the initial excitement wears off, but it opens up the possibilities for automation down the line.

Monitor: Physical Sensors

Monitoring for a smart home goes a lot deeper than you would expect. There tends to be a split in the thought process on this one because there are the physical sensors in your house that you would like to monitor such as doors and windows, and there are more abstract sensors that you would like to monitor as well such as the weather for tomorrow. If I can give any piece of advice at this stage, it would be to think of every piece of information that you want monitored as a “sensor.” This will become more apparent when we get to the automation section. So just like we did when we wrote down everything we would like to control, now would be the time to write down everything that you would like monitored as well.

Monitoring exterior doors and windows is always a good idea but there are also interior physical sensors that make sense to monitor as well. Maybe you have a litter box and you want to keep track of when the cat uses that; or you have a washing machine on the second floor and you want to know if there is a leak as soon as it happens. Cell phones and gps trackers are also handy when you want to create automations that are based on presence detection. One that gets used often is being able to detect when everybody leaves the house and turns the lights off automatically. There are myriad sensors available on the market so that you can keep track of almost anything you are wanting to keep an eye on.

Monitor: Abstract Sensors

Just like physical sensors, there are non-physical sensors that you can track in your smart home. You can track weather and forecast data so you know to pack an umbrella for instance. The smart home software that I recommend also allows you to pull in sensors from website APIs and other web-based sources so that you can monitor or automate based on those sensors as well. For example, you might have a boat on a lake that requires the lake to be at a certain level so you would monitor the lake level by looking up the data online, and if it is above or below a certain threshold it can turn a light green or red.

In order to get to the automation portion of the smart home journey, sensors and everything that comes with them will be the key that unlocks all of the potential.

Automate

This is where imagination really comes in to play. Once you have your sensors and your controls, coming up with automation ideas is the final step in the process. The automations involved can be simple or complex and once you understand the building blocks to automation, more and more ideas will come up. While there are already a few ideas above, there will be more and more articles on this site to help spark that next automation.