Looking for the best smart home tips and tricks? You’ve certainly come to the right place. So stop mindlessly scrolling on your iPhone, grab a chair, a bucket of Wi-Fi, and let’s dive straight into some practical ways to get all your connected gadgets and smart home tech playing nicely together – all while making your life much easier in the process…
Get ready for bed with one command
If you’ve got, say, several smart lamps dotted around the house, something like a bedtime scene is definitely worth setting up. It saves a set of instructions for your lights, so a single command can, for example, switch off the downstairs lamps and dim the one on the landing. You can also include other products like SwitchBot’s automatic blind-closing motor above, which can, well, automatically close your blinds for you. Neat.
Sound good? Apple Home, tap the plus button, choose Add Scene, then Custom. Give it a name, add the accessories you want to control, and choose what each should do. Once you’ve saved it, you can activate the scene with a tap or ask Siri to run it. You’ll need a home hub to have it run automatically at a set time, but starting it yourself lets you stay up for another episode without the lights going out.
On Android, you can do much the same with a Google Home household routine. Add your compatible lights and blinds, choose what each should do, and give it a voice command such as ‘bedtime’. You can then switch off the lamps and close the blinds with one request.
Let the hallway lights come on as you pass
Want to feel like you’re working late in an office? Who doesn’t! A motion sensor can make sense, though, especially in an entrance hall where you’re often passing through with your hands full of shopping, Lego, and other important things. Once it’s set up, you can leave it to get on with things.
The Philips Hue motion sensor is a fine example. Adjust the daylight sensitivity accordingly, and it’ll automatically switch everything off before handing things over from Mother Nature to your lightbulbs. You can adjust the switch-off delay too. You’ll need a Hue Bridge and compatible lights, of course, while the sensor itself runs on batteries.
Switch the lights off when everyone’s out
There’s another way to deal with lights left on around the house. If you enable location-based automation, your smart home can use your phone to recognise when you’ve gone out and switch them off. Naturally, in a shared home, it’ll still need to account for the people who are still there.
Google Home’s presence sensing can, for example, use household members’ phone locations to work out when everyone has left. Each person needs to opt in on their own phone, and you can then create an automation that switches off selected compatible lights when the home is marked as Away. Other supported devices can contribute to presence sensing too, although the system can still miss someone whose phone isn’t included. If that’s likely in your household, a leaving-home routine you start yourself is more suitable.
Apple Home can also do this too. Under Add Automation, choose People Leave and set it to run when the last person leaves home, then select the lights you want switched off. You’ll need a home hub, such as a HomePod or compatible Apple TV, and everyone included in the automation must share their location from the iPhone or iPad they use for Home. That way, heading out won’t leave someone else sitting in the dark.
Oh crumbs
Elsewhere, your robot vacuum could become even more useful. The kitchen probably needs cleaning more often than the spare bedroom, for example, so there’s no sense sending it around the entire house after breakfast. If yours supports room or zone cleaning, you can save those smaller cleans to run when needed.
On compatible Roombas, for instance, Clean Zones let you mark out areas such as the floor beneath the dining table and add them to cleaning jobs or schedules. Elsewhere, Roborock’s app also lets you save routines with your chosen rooms and suction settings, ready to start with a tap.
The options depend on your model, but the aim is to save yourself from selecting the same rooms and settings each time. If breakfast is at roughly the same time every day, you can schedule the kitchen clean for afterwards. Otherwise, a saved routine is easy to start once everyone’s finished. So if you’ve been rocking a robot vacuum with day-one basic settings, it might be worth tinkering…
Make the heating fit your working week
Heating schedules deserve a look too, especially if you work from home on certain days. Set the heating around your working hours instead, so you don’t have to keep reaching for the thermostat.
Tado’s Smart Schedule, for example, lets you choose different temperatures throughout the day and create a separate schedule for each day of the week. With compatible smart radiator valves, you can control rooms individually too. That lets you keep the office warm while leaving an unused bedroom at a lower temperature.
For chilly afternoons, Tado also lets you choose how long a manual temperature change lasts. Select Until next time block and the normal schedule will resume at the next block. You can warm things up without having to remember to turn them down again later.
Push the button
Who says you even need to use your voice? Aqara’s Wireless Mini Switch, for example, lets you assign different actions to a single press, double press, and long press. One could turn on the living room lights, while another activates your bedtime scene. It requires an Aqara hub, which also lets it work with HomeKit accessories in Apple Home. The button is battery-powered and can sit on a table or stick to a surface, so there’s no wiring to install.
Give your new routines a few days before deciding whether they need adjusting. You might, for example, want the hallway light to stay on a little longer, or the vacuum to start later at weekends. Those small changes are worth making – particularly when they save you from doing the same jobs yourself every day.
