New Technology for Your Home

Today, more and more buyers appreciate the features a “Smart” home offers. This encompasses a wide variety of products from the popular “Nest” digital thermostat to the “Ring” doorbell that alerts your phone when someone is at the door. If you’re considering building a home, there’s an abundance of choices that will allow you to customize your home with the technology best suited for your lifestyle. Here are a few products currently available:

Voice-controlled devices:

Alexa from Amazon and Google Home are probably the two names that come immediately to mind. Our society is driven by immediate gratification and these home products are high in demand. According to www.TechRadar.com’s report on the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Artificial intelligence (AI) and voice assistants are being implemented in a wide array of products.
Smart Thermostats: Many new homes offer smart thermostats that can be controlled from your phone, tablet or PC and can improve energy efficiency by allowing remote access to control heating and cooling settings.

Keyless Entry:

This brilliant device allows “ATM-like” access to your home, along with the ability to change the code should you need to give the combination to a contractor or your teenager loses the house key!

Smart Refrigerators:

This would be the best invention if it would answer that cringe-worthy question of “what’s for dinner?” While it won’t solve that problem, the Samsung Family Hub refrigerator and LG’s InstaView ThinQ offer a touchscreen that will help keep inventory of what’s in there and what you’ll need more of. Currently, these refrigerators work with Alexa, Google Home and other voice-controlled products.

Smart Bathroom:

Kohler came out with some interesting products such as a shower with voice-activated preset settings. The technology identifies the settings for each voice in not only the shower, but also will fill a bathtub with the appropriate settings.

Smart Security Light:

At the (CES) in Las Vegas, Maximus unveiled a floodlight that is enabled with a Wi-Fi camera. The light is set off by movement up to 70’ away and then sends notification to your cell phone. Once you see the person or animal that triggered the notification, you can choose to set off a siren, record the visual, call the police or speak to whoever is in range.

Clothing Management System:

This is the most wonderful device I’ve seen, aside from the thought I can yell at my dog from the aforementioned security light! The Laundroid was created as a laundry folding robot that can sort and fold clothes and organize them by family member. All this leaves is nagging the family members to put them away, but who knows – maybe that will come in version 2.0?!