While a smart home certainly isn’t a necessity, a smarter home can make all the difference in convenience, control, and even power savings. As a lifelong tinkerer, I’ve been on the connected home bandwagon for close to a decade. In fact, the idea for an automated household struck me while building a smart city model for a high school project.
The advent of devices like the Amazon Echo and Google Home around 2014 was the push that it took for me to dive in and implement smart lights, water heaters, air conditioners, and even infrared blasters for vintage equipment that couldn’t be made much smarter.