6 Unique Smart Home Items We Love

The best part of creating your own smart home is that you have such a variety of options. For the most part, compatibility across ecosystems is fairly flexible as well, though it would be unfair to expect perfect. Nonetheless, here are 6 smart home items that we absolutely love.

Google Home

When you think of a smart speaker, it’s easy to think about Amazon’s Echo speakers or Alexa herself, and rightfully so. Amazon has the lead in almost every way in the smart assistant space, but Google, with its many years of voice recognition know-how, came in swinging with the Google Home line.

While it still technically pales in comparison to features and third-party services it can connect to, Google Home is catching but, but more than that, it feels like the smarter option. For the most part, you can speak to the Google Assistant is a more natural way than the Echo and that makes it feel like it’s from the future, despite being less functional.

August Smart Lock

If you have the luxury of being able to change your own door lock system and won’t have an angry landlord on your tail, a smart lock is a, well, smart option to add to your home. August’s line of smart locks are basically unrivaled, not only with features but ease of use and installation.

Easily control keyless access to your lock and since it’s essentially installed on top of your existing lock, you can still use your old keys without a worry.

Ecobee4 Smart Thermostat

While there are a handful of smart thermostats available today, only a few are actually worth your time. The Ecobee4 gets high marks all around with a sexy design, built-in Alexa speaker, and an extra room sensor to get temperature readings from different areas of your house.

The Ecobee4’s only true competition in the high end of the smart thermostat spectrum is the Nest 3rd Generation Learning Thermostat. Either way, you’ll be happy with either one you choose.

Philips Hue Smart Lights

Philips Hue is hands down our favorite smart lighting system, even if it technically isn’t the flashiest (quite literally) of your smart light options. The Hue ecosystem is vast and it plays nice with virtually all smart home systems, so it’s a safe bet through and through.

Wemo Mini Smart Plug

Another must have essential you any smart home is the smart plug so you can easily control more home appliances and devices with your voice (via smart speaker) or app on your smartphone. The Wemo Mini Smart Plug is particularly great due to its shape, as its width is longer, allowing you to easily stack multiple on top of each other.

Nest Hello

The Nest Hello is hardly necessary, full stop. That said, it’s still one of our favorite smart home devices around just.. Well, just because. Not only does the doorbell just look like nice and futuristic, it has quite a few fancy tricks up its sleeve. If doorbells had sleeves..

A 3 megapixel camera with 8x digital zoom adorns the Nest Hello that allows for 24/7 continuous streaming and video recording in HDR. With the optional Nest Aware subscription, you’ll gain access to features like “familiar face” notifications and other smart features. And since Nest is owned by Google, you can be assured that the Nest Hello works exceptionally well with Google Home smart speakers.