The key advantages of smart home technology center around two things: quality of life and energy use. The first improves the comfort and usability of your home. Home automation ideas can have positive impacts on emotional as well as physical health, from stress control to getting better sleep. Energy smart homes can also have incredible benefits to both the planet and your wallet. By saving energy over time, you spend less and you replace major appliances less often.
These aren’t the only two benefits, but they’re the most direct. Let’s start with them and then move on to advantages that might not be as apparent at first glance.
Quality of Life
Smart homes allow you the ability to fine-tune the entire environment of your home. This can involve everything from a smart thermostat, that only cools or heats areas when they’re in use. Or it can involve smart lighting that mimics the outside light. These quality of life home automation ideas center on making your home more personal and customized to your lifestyle.
- Emotional Health: The best example for how this helps with emotional health is smart lighting. If you’re having trouble getting to sleep, you can program your lighting to slowly dim at the end of the day. This emulates how outside light fades, which encourages our bodies to prepare for sleep. It’s a godsend if you have children who are bedtime-resistant! This isn’t just about light volume; smart lights can change color temperature. This can be used in every way from setting certain moods for certain rooms at specific times of day to simply mirroring the outside light quality, which can help you focus and relax better.
- Physical Health: Improvements to sleep and emotional health directly reflect on your physical health, but smart elements go beyond this. A smart thermostat can keep more even temperatures throughout the day, and puts less strain on cooling and heating elements. You can schedule it to cool or heat a room before you use it, keeping the environment you’re exposed to throughout the day more equal. Also consider a smart air purification system. This can measure and kick in purification depending on the quality of the air.
Energy Efficiency
Energy smart homes make a real difference when it comes to your home’s impact on the environment. More than this, energy efficient homes are less expensive to run. This saves you over the long run, but even if you’re not planning to live there forever, it improves the resale considerably.
Energy efficient homes already make smart use of design and materials to conserve energy and improve the living environment. When you add smart technology to this, you have the ability to seriously decrease your impact on nature. You can live in a greener way that’s less impactful on the earth. Even smart faucets can help you reduce water use.
Smart tech allows you to pre-program many elements of your home, so you can save on cooling and heating when you’re away. Forget to turn something off? An easy-to-use app can tie everything together so that you can turn it off on your phone or tablet from virtually anywhere.
Cost Savings
You can understand the cost savings of smart technology in a number of ways:
- Less Waste: Smarter energy use means not wasting energy you’re not currently using. Since energy smart homes can be very precise about energy use, you waste less – and that means you pay less. In some cases, this can amount to savings in the thousands per year for even average-sized homes.
- Appliance Life: Since energy smart homes allow more precision in when and how appliances are used, everything that’s tied in will last longer. It won’t be worn down as quickly with so much wasted effort. This ensures you can hold off longer before replacing many expensive elements in your home.
- Greater Home Value: Home-buyers are increasingly looking for energy efficient homes. This trend will only continue in the future. A home with smart energy technology will have a significantly higher resale value than a home that doesn’t. Energy efficiency builds value for homes better and helps homes retain value better during downturns.
- Insurance Savings: As we’ll address below, homes with smart technology can be safer and more secure. This can improve insurance rates. If home insurance companies understand you have technology helping guard against accidents and crime, they’re taking less of a risk insuring you and can charge you a bit less.
Safety
Smart homes with the right tools can monitor against fire, gas leaks, and other common household accidents. They can alert local fire, medical, or police emergency personnel even if you can’t. This helps protect you and your family from a range of potential accidents and the pain and stress involved in not being able to get immediate help.
Beyond this, smart homes can also guard against break-ins, monitor the entry and exit of guests, and link into security cameras. You can even access these cameras from your phone with the right set-up.
This kind of alert system can help protect families taking care of children or elderly relatives.
Accessibility
Speaking of elderly relatives, they often need special access or assistance when it comes to accomplishing various tasks. For anyone elderly or disabled, home automation ideas can drastically change their quality of life.
They can operate elements of their home on a phone or tablet or by voice. Voice commands can put many everyday tasks back within reach. Living in a world that doesn’t always provide this accessibility can be frustrating and stressful. Being able to take control of the tools that change the environment around you can be empowering and ease that stress.
There are a number of additional automated systems that can aid them in house maintenance tasks as well, from cleaning to laundry to lawn care. By taking more command over these everyday tasks, the elderly and disabled can feel greater control and ability in their own lives – and that’s a crucial part of being happy.
Energy smart homes deliver a number of benefits. Are you ready to explore them all?
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