The topic If I had an unlimited budget, here’s what my smart home would look like is currently the subject of lively discussion — readers and analysts are keeping a close eye on developments.
This is taking place in a dynamic environment: companies’ decisions and competitors’ reactions can quickly change the picture.
I don’t like to think about how much I’ve spent on my smart home over the years. Some smart home devices, such as Zigbee sensors, can be incredibly cheap, but a lot of smart home tech comes with a higher price tag. I don’t have the money to do everything I want to my smart home, but if I did, I know where I’d start.
This is something that I could do myself if I had the time and the inclination, but sadly, I have neither. I’m not sure how the rest of my family would feel about me drilling holes in walls and ceilings and dragging cables around the place, but I’m pretty sure that running cable around baseboards in every room is a no-no.
If money were no object, however, I could pay someone to do the job professionally and run Ethernet cable to every room in my home. While wireless communication offers convenience, crowded Wi-Fi and flaky networks can make your smart home unreliable.
Ethernet doesn’t just solve that problem; you can also use it to provide power to Power over Ethernet (PoE) devices, giving you much greater choice about where to place them.
Smart bulbs were the first smart home devices I ever owned. They’re popular because they’re easy to install and simple to use. The problem is that they need power to work.
That power can quickly disappear if someone turns off the light switch. Once the switch is off, you can’t communicate with your smart bulb, so no amount of tapping your smart home dashboard will make the light turn on.
Smart switches can solve this problem. With a smart switch, you control the switch itself rather than the light bulb. If someone turns a smart switch off manually, you can turn it back on again with an automation, voice command, or using a dashboard.
High-quality smart switches from brands such as Lutron don’t come cheap, and replacing all the switches in your home can run to thousands of dollars. I can’t justify spending that much, but when I win the lottery, I’m going all in.
The Matter-enabled Eve Dimmer Switch offers a host of premium features. From compatibility with Apple Home, Alexa, Google Home, and even Samsung SmartThings, to the ability to install in both 1- and 3-way lighting setups, this switch does it all. The wires are color-coded so you know exactly where they go, and the installation instructions are easy to follow. Plus, once it’s installed, setup with your preferred smart home platform takes seconds, not minutes.
Good presence detection is key for automations such as turning lights on and off when you enter or leave a room. Motion sensors can only tell when there’s movement, but can’t tell if you’re in a room sitting still. An mmWave sensor can tell when you’re in the room, but it can be slower to react when you first enter a room.
The ideal option is a presence sensor that includes both a PIR sensor and an mmWave sensor, such as the Everything Presence One. However, these sensors aren’t cheap, and adding them to every room would set me back hundreds of dollars. For now, I’ll stick to using them in a couple of rooms, but once I strike it rich, they’ll be all around my home.
This ultimate smart home sensor supports a 24GHz mmWave Sensor for precise motion tracking as well as a powerful PIR for lightning fast responses. With a Temperature and Humidity sensor for monitoring climate status, Ambient Lighting sensor for smart control of lights, Bluetooth Tracking for wearables and an ESP32 for connectivity.
I have one set of smart blinds in my home, and these are in the kitchen. Having them automatically open and shut whenever I want is awesome, but the kitchen isn’t the most useful place to have them. I’d love to add some to my bedroom, so that I can have them slowly open to wake us in the morning with natural light.
Ideally, I’d have them around the rest of my home, too. In the winter, letting sunlight into your home is a great way to get some free heating, but once the sun goes down, you need to close the blinds to trap the heat inside. Smart blinds can do this automatically, and in summer, they can work the opposite way, blocking out the sun during the day, and opening to let heat escape your home during the evenings.
Smart blinds aren’t cheap, and even options like smart curtain openers can be expensive. Once I make my fortune, it will be smart blinds everywhere.
BlindsMagic smart shades are designed to work seamlessly with popular smart home systems, such as HomeKit, Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and more. No matter where you are, you can always be in control of your home with your smartphone.
I’ve been using smart speakers to listen to music in my home for a long time, and it was only when I got given an old hi-fi system that I realized the sound quality that I’d been missing out on. While smart speakers are a convenient way to play music, the sound quality is rarely great.
When I win the lottery, I’ll be investing in high-quality audio for every room. The beauty is that using Music Assistant and the presence sensors that I’ve filled my home with, I’ll be able to make the music follow me from room to room around the house, carrying on from the same point of the song when I enter a room and turning off in the room I’ve just left.
With a 4 inch woofer and an Airmotiv ribbon tweeter, the XB1 delivers detailed sound that is as well suited to classical music as it is the latest TV show you’ve been binging.
They’re best paired with a subwoofer to reach the deepest notes.
This isn’t something that would have been on my smart home wish list even a year ago, but it’s definitely something I would buy now. Using AI can make your smart home smarter, but the problem is that hooking up Home Assistant to popular AI services such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude means sharing your data with major companies that may not have the best privacy records.
I run a local LLM at home to handle some simple AI tasks, but it’s not powerful enough to handle the fast responses and large context window necessary to act as a conversation agent for the Assist voice assistant or for other complex uses.
If I won the lottery, I could afford to build an AI rig with enough VRAM to handle large local LLMs so that I could get all of the benefits of AI without having to share any of my data.
I’m happy with my current smart home, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t plenty of ways I could improve it. Unfortunately, many of those improvements would cost a significant amount of money. Still, I can always dream.