How Smart Home Technologies Are Developing
Smart light bulbs were one of the first smart products on the market and thus the first step for most of us into a smart home. The number of brands that now offer bulbs is extensive, and your choice of size and style of these bulbs has also expanded from simple A19 bulbs or grow bulbs, stylish retro options, and holiday lights. But the biggest leap over the past year is how many brands are now getting into smart devices and more. This month’s two new products, the Nanoleaf Skylight and the Aqara Ceiling Light T1M, really drive home the message: smart lights are here and they’re here to stay. If anything, they signal a shift toward more essential home functions.
Smart devices are starting to focus on endpoints
Both Nanoleaf and Aqara have LED strips that can be used as an architectural lighting element at home, and they can enhance your smart lighting scheme. But the move to key lighting instead of mood lighting indicates the direction the industry is heading.
It also follows last year’s trend of focusing less on the start points, such as smart plugs and light bulbs, and more on the end points. Why bother with a light bulb when you can make the entire lamp smart and eliminate disposable light bulbs altogether. Now there are smart ceiling fans, smart windows and, as we recently discussed, smart doors .
Smart technology built into home utilities
While we still think of a smart home as a series of neat but unimportant features—smart blinds that go up and down, or a connected washer and dryer—the newest wave of smart technology is more about the basics of the home. A look at the list of winners at the International Builders Show held at the end of February shows that smart technology can integrate and benefit you and your home. For example, the overall winners were smart solar shingles , which integrate with your dumb shingles, and Watercube , a smart water system for homes. The Masonite M-PWR Smart Door was also a winner; Almost all of the IBS interior awards went to smart switches.
Smart home “plug and play”
The International Builders Show also highlighted the growing number of smart homes that are plug-and-play: the home you move into will already be fully equipped with smart technology, and control of it will be transferred to you. It’s not just homeowners: Developers are incorporating smart technology that controls tenant access to buildings, parking and various amenities into their single-family offerings. Of course, the process of transferring control of a smart home from one person to another is productized. Cox Communications had some news at the show highlighting Cox Communities , an offering that will combine Cox Communications’ high-speed network with plug-and-play smart home systems.
A few months ago at CES 2023, Home Depot unveiled its own smart home platform specifically designed for all of Home Depot’s home appliance brands. Then I noted that their platform is also like a “ middleman ” for providing smart home services that you can easily use yourself.