It’s an undeniable fact that one major aspect of home security is how it works alongside home automation. You’ve got a large number of devices that integrate with one another in order to make your home a more convenient and secure place to live in. But with so many devices available, setting up your smart home can be a tedious task.
When you want to up the security, it’s easy to spend hundreds, if not thousands of dollars, on devices that you might not really need or won’t be taking advantage of.
To help you with that, and make the entire process a bit easier, let’s discuss how setting up your smart home should go from a security standpoint. Oh, and we’ll also touch on a very interesting question – do you really need a thermostat in every room?
How Do You Begin?
When you’re looking at what devices, to begin with, we would say that security starts at your front door. Therefore, you might want to look into smart locks and video doorbells first. They might seem like something that’s complicated to set up, and if you think so, you might want to get a professional to set things up for you, but the advantages you get from them are pretty great.
To begin with, a smart lock does away with keys. You no longer have to keep a spare key outside your home, because your smart lock uses a password, or in the case of more advanced options, biometric authentication of some sort.
Oh, and of course, you can unlock most of them with your smartphone. Pair it with a video doorbell, and you’ll have a video feed of whoever is at your front door at pretty much any moment in time. If your video doorbell has a motion sensor, you can see if someone is outside before they even ring the doorbell.
The most important feature of this combination is the fact that you can use both your doorbell and your smart lock as triggers for your smart home. For example, you can set your kids’ entry code to send a notification to your phone, so you know they came back from school. You can set your video doorbell’s motion sensor to trigger the porch cameras so you have a better view of who is outside.
Cameras Do Matter
Once you’ve got the entry points to your home taken care of, it’s time to add a couple of cameras. One major thing to note here, especially if you are going to be using the services of a childcare provider, is that you can’t just have a camera wherever you want to.
In most places around the world, it’s actually illegal to have cameras where people might have a reasonable expectation of privacy, such as bedrooms and bathrooms, so keep this in mind when you’re considering locations.
Aside from this, you can have smart cameras at pretty much any place you want. Make sure to cover entry points, as well as any valuable things such as a gun vault or your home office, and you should be good to go. Oh, and if you’re having someone care for your child, a camera or two in the living room does give you peace of mind.
What About Those Thermostats?
A thermostat, or more precisely a smart thermostat, is a major part of your smart home and one of the best ways to get a bit of convenience out of the home automation industry. Not only will it adjust the temperature of your home to the one you set it to, but the smart functionality means that you can connect those triggers we mentioned, and have it do things automatically.
One major benefit, for example, is that you can have the thermostat set up the temperature when you’re leaving your office – when you get home, things will be at just the right temperature, which is definitely welcome.
However, many smart thermostats will only work in a single room, which might give you cold spots and bad temperatures in some rooms. Therefore, you might be inclined to get a thermostat for every room, but that’s not the way to go.
Instead, get a smart thermostat that has multi-zone control with temperature sensors that you can have in various rooms. This way, the thermostat will adjust things accordingly and set the temperature to be equal in every room. Most of them also come with occupancy sensors, so they won’t waste electricity when you aren’t at home unless you explicitly tell them to.
While yes, a thermostat is a key component of a smart home, having one in every room is a waste of money. Use that money to up your security a bit and get some extra peace of mind – a multi-zone control will solve your temperature needs rather well. You can also see how to protect your PC from malware. Stay safe and stay protected.
