In Depth: These 14 devices will make your dumb home smart

Introduction

Smartwatches do have one potential killer app, and that's putting control of connectables – smart bulbs, smart cameras, smart fridges, smart kettles – on your wrist where you can't lose it.

Because if there's one thing that kills the smart home experience stone cold dead, it's realising that you can't turn on your hallway light in the dark because you left your phone in your other jacket.

To celebrate this fact, here are our favourite internet of things, er, things, from thermostats to coffee makers.

Honeywell Voice Thermostat

Say "hello" to the first thermostat that can actually hear you, because the next time you grumble that you're too hot, or too cold, the Honeywell Voice Control Thermostat will actually listen to your command and adjust the heating accordingly.

Like the brand's other smart thermostats, you can use the brilliant Honeywell Total Connect Comfort app to keep an eye on your energy usage while you're out and about. It can be remotely controlled so that it comes on just before you get home and it'll alert you if the temperature is alarmingly high or low.

The headline feature, however, is its ability to recognise and respond to your dulcet tones. Far-field voice control technology allows the thermostat to 'hear' your commands above the ambient noise and differentiate your voice from those around it.

Netatmo Welcome

The Welcome uses advanced face recognition software to let you know via your smartphone when housemates and family members are home, or alert you if it spots a stranger. And with an SD card storing any movement within its 130-degree field of view, nothing gets past this smart sentinel. Video is not saved in the cloud in respect of the individual's privacy.

An inbuilt mic lends you an ear too, while the infrared LED gives a degree of night vision. You can watch and hear live streams on your phone at any time, while the intuitive timeline shows you who popped in and when. If you miss your family, are security conscious, or just plain nosy, the Welcome camera is very easy to integrate into your home and routine.

Belkin WeMo Insight Switch

Belkin's WeMo products make it easy to turn your house into a smart home because it can begin with the addition of a single Wi-Fi enabled socket adapter called the Insight Switch. Pop this in your power point and anything you plug in, a heater for instance, can be scheduled, or controlled remotely from a smartphone. Simples.

The Insight Switch joins your home network so that the device you plug into it can be managed by the accompanying WeMo app available free for iOS and Android. It means you can activate the device remotely, but also schedule a timer to suit your working hours, or the hours of daylight.

Smarter Coffee Maker

With Wi-Fi connectivity, this handsome bean-to-cup machine joins the ever-growing smart appliances genre, but why would you want your coffee pot to join the world wide web? Firstly, because it means you can now program your favourite brew remotely using a slick smartphone app that stores and learns your preferences.

But this clever coffee maker can also sense when you (or at least your smartphone) arrives home and offer you a cup as you come through the door. You can even activate it from your bed, or program it to fire-up when your morning alarm goes off.

Nest Protect

Like the little boy who cried wolf, smoke detectors that scream the place down every time you make toast usually end up with their batteries confiscated, so Nest has come up with a more affable device that speaks with a human voice if anything's awry. Be it toast, or carbon monoxide, Protect will alert you and any other networked units to the danger.

What began with the Nest Learning Thermostat has become a range of compatible devices that can talk to each other when necessary. For instance, Nest Protect can tell Nest Thermostat to shut off the boiler if there's a carbon monoxide emergency without any intervention from us.

ChargePoint Home

This elegant electric car charging station delivers 25 miles per hour of charge and its accompanying smartphone app and Nest compatibility allow you to automate your off-peak charging and ensure your electric car never runs out of juice.

The charger itself is a slim wall-mount design that takes up minimal space in your garage, but is just as happy outdoors thanks to its rugged weatherproof construction. It comes with a universal J1772 universal adapter that will plug into any electric vehicle.

There's a display on the device and another on your dash but it's the clever companion app that allows you to monitor your car's battery status at any point. It tells you how many miles you can cover and how long you need to have it plugged in and gently remind you if you parked in the garage and forgot to actually plug it in.

Drop Kitchen Scale

When used with the companion iPad app, this little electronic kitchen scale becomes your personal commis chef with recipes, advice and a cooking timer.

It's essentially a regular battery-powered electronic scale with Bluetooth linking it to your iPad (there's no iPhone, or Android support currently) and it's the excellent Drop app that interprets those weights and tells you what to do with the ingredients. The clever part is the way it can recalculate all of the measurements if you are short of one ingredient, or you want to bake a bigger cake.

Don't have the required 8oz of butter? Just weigh what you have and leave it to the app to do the maths and adjust all of the other measures to match. Or if you're missing one ingredient completely the Drop app will suggest an alternative.

Elgato Eve Weather

Eve is a family of sensors and security devices that use Bluetooth and HomeKit to keep tabs on your home and send updates to the informative app on your phone.

HomeKit is Apple's home automation software that allows devices to communicate and be controlled by anything running iOS or Siri. The Eve app works with any HomeKit product including Elgato's own devices: Eve Door & Window, Eve Energy, Eve Room and Eve Weather. While the first three are concerned with security, power usage and air quality inside your house, Weather keeps tabs on the elements outside it.

Eve Weather tracks rainfall, temperature and sunshine and logs the results over time in a neat app that presents the data in an informative way. You can scroll back through the weeks, months and years to see how it affects your heating bill.

Kwikset Kevo E-Lock

This is the Bluetooth lock that you simply touch with a finger to open, provided the Bluetooth key fob is about your person somewhere, only now it works with Nest too. By syncing with Nest's smart thermostat, you can switch your house from warm and bright 'home' mode, to energy saving and secure 'away' mode by simply locking the door.

The lock mechanism is a regular deadbolt designed for a front door and even comes with an ordinary-looking key, but it also has Bluetooth built in and can electronically release the bolt when triggered by the Bluetooth signal from your phone, Kevo key ring, or even a finger.

By handing electronic control to your iPhone, you can do lots of clever things using the Kevo app, like sending electronic keys to friend's, setting up alarms when certain people enter and checking who is in the house at any time.

Leeo Smart Alert Nightlight

If a smoke alarm goes off when there's no one around to hear it, does it make a sound? Yes it does, actually, but we can't act on it if we're out and unaware there's a situation. The Smart Alert Nightlight, however, is always listening and using its Wi-Fi connection, passes on the smoke alert to your smartphone.

The little device can be plugged straight into any mains socket that's within earshot of an existing smoke or carbon monoxide detector. It can't do any smoke detecting itself, but it can certainly recognise the sound of an alarm and relay the message to anyone that has downloaded the companion app.

What it can do is measure both temperature and humidity and these figures are displayed within the Leeo app on your phone. If there's a real fire, this data will reach threshold figures that will trigger an alert message even if your fire alarm fails.

LIFX Smart Lightbulb

By joining your home Wi-Fi network, these smart bulbs can be dimmed, coloured, or programmed using a free iOS/Android app.

Screw in a single bulb and you suddenly have a light that's now dimmable from your smartphone and can change into almost any colour shade you can imagine. You can set up a timer, so that it comes on in the morning or trigger it remotely while you are away, to confuse would be burglars.

Compatible with regular light fittings and wall switches you don't need to use your phone of course, but the additional functionality is all accessed via the free app.

Add more LIFX bulbs and you can control the lighting throughout your house in a single gesture, or program different rooms to light up at different times. The possibilities are endless. At 40,000 hours, the life expectancy of these bulbs isn't endless, but that should last for a good 23 years.

Quirky + GE Aros Smart Air Conditioner

A collaboration between the appliance giant General Electric and the designers at Quirky has given us the first app-controlled air conditioner.

So now it is possible to check your air con is switched off while you are out and activate it when you head home, or schedule it to kick in when you get up. But Aros is smarter than that because it can also detect when you are about to come home by the proximity of the GPS in your smartphone, so it can even have the air chilled for you when you come home unexpectedly.

And to help you keep your energy bills down, Aros will sync your data with the Wink app and tell you exactly how much money you're spending each month on air conditioning.

Belkin WeMo Maker

Belkin's range of WeMo smart devices are ready to offer you a complete home automation package for a modest outlay. WeMo Maker requires a little DIY to retrofit, but offers the potential to bring your whole house under the control of Belkin's WeMo app.

Turn the palm-sized Maker around and you might be alarmed to see bare wire connectors staring at you rather than the usual Ethernet port. This is so that you can attach the power cable of the mechanism you want to trigger and also a sensor, such as a motion detector if you want to get clever and have the device trigger when you wave at it.

The WeMo app will show you this device on your smartphone and let you trigger it via the internet at any time and show you if the thing is open or closed, on or off.

Withings Home HD

With HomeKit compatibility, some additional sensors and a very slick companion app, the Withings Home HD shows just how far the home web-camera has evolved. With a very wide 135-degree field of view it's possible to capture the whole room in Full HD 1080p quality.

Joining to your home network via Ethernet or Wi-Fi, it also has Bluetooth built in for closer connections. Motion, or sound trigger the camera to take a still and a short video and send an alert to your phone. It works at night too thanks to the infrared mode. The footage is stored in the cloud as thumbnails, with a neat timeline that makes it very easy to scroll back to any event that took place, so you feel like you're not missing a thing.

There's a speaker on top and two mics in the front, so you can interact with the person at the other end. You can even activate a soothing ambient nightlight.

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