If you spend months looking forward to summer only to complain about the heat when it finally arrives, you’re not alone. Summer is a wonderful time to be outside, but when you’re home you want to stay cool. Here are five ways that you can leverage smart home technology to help.
Link your HVAC to your phone
Air conditioning is rarely how we’d like it to be. It’s common to come back to a hot, stuffy home and turn the A/C up to full blast, only to quickly find we’ve actually chilled ourselves a little too much. Then, we move to another room and start the process all over again, this time forgetting that the A/C in the first room is still on. A smart thermostat works as part of an automated smart home. Smart thermostats from major brands like Ecobee connect with smart home platforms so you can set up custom automations to control your thermostat. You can preset temperatures based on your schedule or have the settings adjust automatically. You can even link your HVAC to motion sensors so that a room is only cooled when someone’s in it. Another option is to manually adjust things remotely using your phone from wherever you are.
thermostat control on the abode app
Know if your doors or windows are open
Leaving doors and windows open might be a good way to keep cool in spring or early fall, but once the A/C is switched on for summer you’ll want to make sure they remain closed. Accidentally leaving a door or window open is a surefire way to waste energy and make air conditioning less effective. Keeping doors and windows closed might be easier said than done when the kids are in and out between the yard and the house during summer vacation or there’s a cookout in full swing. Door and window sensors can send alerts to your phone if anything is open for too long when it shouldn’t be. You can customize alerts so you only get them when you want to. When the summer heat tails off, you might be using air conditioning during the day but want the windows open to cool down at night. With the abode app, your phone will only alert you about open doors and windows when you want it to.
Pick up some smart plugs
Smart plugs are an inexpensive, easy way to control devices throughout your home. They can make pretty much any device in your home ‘smart,’ meaning you can control them from your phone using your wireless security system. You can use smart plugs with fans, A/C, or portable air purifiers, allowing you to control the devices with the tap of an app or via voice control with Alexa, HomeKit, and Google Assistant. You could even attach a smart plug to the sprinkler system in your garden to make sure there’s a cool morning-dew glisten waiting for you when you step outside.
Get some smart blinds
Like other components of a smart home, smart blinds can be customized to follow a schedule that’s suited to your home and a particular time of year. Motorized shades close at pre-programmed times to keep the sun out at the hottest time of day. But if you’d like to wake up to a light-flooded kitchen on a summer morning, you can program that too. If you think you might have accidentally left the shades open before leaving for work, use your phone to check and close them if needed. In addition to keeping out heat and saving on air conditioning costs.
Keep your home cool in summer by using abode’s all in one security system as a hub by connecting up to 160 smart devices.
