Future homes will have an abundance of “smart” technology that adapts to your lifestyle and preferences. Striving toward a perfect personalized comfort, smart homes are becoming more popular and widespread. The future of smart homes offers a variety of exciting features, ranging from smart thermostats and window shading to real-time monitoring of energy consumption and garage door usage.
Some features of smart homes that appear to be here to stay include:
Smart Thermostats
Thermostats do an excellent job of maintaining a set temperature. Still, our bodies rarely prefer one temperature at all times. Sometimes we’re too hot or cold. Anything from an illness to overindulging in food can cause our body temperature to fluctuate.
Imagine if future smart home innovation could use our own body temperature to work with smart thermostats for a home’s optimal temperature. Wearables may have the potential to detect a person’s body temperature and use that information to set the temperature. Smart thermostats like the Ecobee4 can figure out if you’re home with a remote sensor, which can save energy if you leave for the weekend and forget to set the thermostat.
Smart Garage Doors
There are a multitude of options for a garage door. With future smart homes, garage doors will likely be integrated with a smartphone app that can aid in detecting if your garage door has been open for a lengthy period of time, in which case it will send you a notification with the option to close the door.
The combination of a manual opener and smartphone app integration can make the prospect of losing the opener not as worrisome as before.
The great thing about smart garage doors is that, unlike some other products, the overall aesthetic does not have to be impacted. You can still choose from a variety of options, ranging from steel to composite wood garage doors, to maintain the look and reinforced security of traditional doors, and then adapt it to smart technology.
Energy Consumption Monitoring
Energy-conscious homeowners are likely to embrace more analytics for their energy consumption. With smart homes, many or all devices will likely be linked together, so the rise of energy consumption monitoring apps like DTE Insight appears imminent. This particular app provides an “energy-savings coach,” which uses electric usage to help accomplish goals and compare with other homeowners.
The real-time view of energy consumption can provide homeowners comprehensive insight into their usage, helping to save energy and cut down on bills.
Light Control
Smart homes could have an automatic light control that adjusts to the variance of sunlight, as well as give homeowners the option to adjust them via a smartphone app. In addition, shade control will be optimized with the touch of a button to raise and lower the shades when a remote sensor does not detect any movement for a period of time.
The future of smart homes offers a variety of technology that improves the comfort of daily life, from making lighting and heating more appealing to providing homeowners a better understanding of their energy usage. Expect other exciting innovations, like smart ventilation systems, smart irrigation, and keyless entry systems in the not-so-distant future.
