Zzoomm’s Full Fibre gigafast broadband and a smart device – name a more iconic duo to supercharge your home. They are the perfect pairing. Like Thor and his hammer, or Zeus and his thunderbolt.
Investing in smart devices for your home will enable you to create a home which home operates at your command, making your life easier, more efficient, and saving you money, time and energy.
Picture this – you’ve had a long day at work and as you’re getting into your car to leave the office, the heating at home switches on so it’s at the perfect temperature as you open the front door. As the sun goes down, the lights switch on, and you ask your smart speaker to start playing your favourite song while you order a takeaway on your smart tablet. Shortly after, you get a notification from your smart doorbell that someone is at the door. You know it’s the pizza delivery guy because you can see him holding your long awaited pepperoni pizza via the doorbell cam linked to your phone. As you are walking along the hallway you effortlessly click the button on your app to unlock the door. How’s that for superpower?
To mark this National Smart Home Day, we’ve sieved through the noise to bring you six of the best smart devices to automate your home.
1. Best Smart Speaker – Amazon Echo Studio
With voice activated Alexa smart capabilities, 3D audio effects, and ability to connect to Amazon Fire TV devices, the Amazon Echo Studio is one of the best smart speakers on the market at the moment. The Echo Studio also doubles up as a ZigBee hub, so it can connect to 1,000s of smart home products instantly, making it an ideal purchase for a smart home.
2. Best Smart Lights – Philips Hue
Compatible with Amazon Alexa, Apple Homekit and Google Home, the Phillips Hue smart bulbs are great for any smart home newbies. To install, they can just be switched over seamlessly with your existing light bulbs. Suitable for almost any light fixing in your home, there’s colour ambiance settings which can be controlled with the touch of a button on your phone. If you fancy something a little different, invest in some of Hue’s LED lightstrips – suitable for indoors or outside to really personalise your space.
3. Best Smart Thermostat – Nest Learning
In addition to being able to control the heating from your phone, the Nest Learning Thermostat is able to intelligently adjust its heating schedule based on how long it takes your home to heat up and cool down, meaning that you actually don’t really need to think about it at all! This smart thermostat also means that you could save huge amounts of energy and money.
4. Best Smart Doorbell – Eufy Video Doorbell
This battery powered wireless doorbell captures clear and detailed footage of your front door throughout the day and night. The doorbell also comes with a HomeBase, which supports up to 16 devices and acts as a brain for the system, storing all the recorded footage. The HomeBase can also mimic the noise of a traditional doorbell when someone is at the door, but you can also receive a notification on your phone for both iOS and Android.
5. Best Smart Lock – August Smart Lock Pro
For the security conscious, we recommend the August Smart Lock Pro, compatible with Alexa, Google Assistant, and HomeKit. Don’t worry, you won’t need to change your house key in order to use it, as it fits nicely onto your existing deadbolt whilst offering the benefits of a smart lock. Not only can you use the August app to lock and unlock your door, but you can also set your door to lock automatically, or unlock when you arrive home. You can also easily keep track of your doors by receiving alerts to let you know if the door is unlocked or locked.
6. Best Smart Display – Google Nest Hub Max
Last but not least we have the smart display, which is your handheld mission control for your smart home, and the Google Nest Hub Max is a great example of this. A large version of the Google Nest Hub, you can use the display to manage and control hundreds of smart home devices, as well as all the usual features such as surfing the web. The large portable screen also means that you can easily watch your favourite YouTube videos as you move round the house.
Support your smart home with Full Fibre broadband
The growth in the smart home market is accelerating, with more and more companies launching products that enable us to control our homes in ways we never knew we could. As we advance, we sometimes forget to upgrade the technology that enables us to enjoy our smart home to the fullest – our broadband.
To get the best out of all of your devices, you need a fast internet connection that is available throughout your home, all of the time. Zzoomm Full Fibre is gigafast, ultra reliable and future-proof. Full Fibre means that fibre-optic cables reach all the way into your home from our dedicated Zzoomm cabinets, not just to that green cabinet down the street (Fibre to the cabinet, or FTTC). It’s that last bit of fibre cable (rather than old-style copper) that gives you gigafast, stable internet that can bring your smart home to life.
A Zzoomm fibre connection is for your home network and only your home network, saving all of the bandwidth for your devices alone. Spreading usage across just your devices gives you the gigafast speeds you need for a seamless home network. For more information on this visit our home networking guide here.