Best Home automation ideas in 2018

Everyone loves home automation and that extra bit of comfort is always pleasing. Looking for some inspiration ? here are few Home automation ideas to get your hands dirty

Automate the Air conditioner / Heater 

• We often open up the door's or slide the windows to enjoy a breeze and forget to turn off the AC / Heating. If any external door or window are left open for 5 minutes, make the heater / AC to go into ECO mode so we are not heating/cooling the whole neighborhood
  

Automate Home Lights

• Basement lights shut off with no motion. Our basement is only occasionally used. We can go days/weeks without ever going down there and lights have been left on for days/weeks without being noticed. this would be a nice hack
  
• My bedroom hue bulbs start a slow wake up for 45 minutes ahead of my alarm going off. And at night my living room ones slowly dim at bedtime. It has greatly increased my sleep habits and quality of my whole day. It works as a sort of extra clock when I am waking but not fully awake. Lights on? might as well get up. Still dark? go back to sleep.
  
• You can improvise the lighting to turn red from 8 pm to 6 am then green at 6-8am. My boy's rooms are upstairs so when they see the red light it means it's sleeping time.
  
• Or throw in few automated blinds and make them open up in the mornings
  
• Automated bathroom lights triggered by a motion sensor.Dimmed lights that won't blind you in the middle of the night if you get up to pee. Bright lights in the morning and daytime for typical activities. No wasted energy from forgetting to turn the lights off either
  

• Or simply use "Ok Google, good night", to turn off all the lights in the house.

• Or Alexa, turn on bedtime... This arms the alarm, closes the garage door, sets the thermostats, turns off the lights. The kids love it!

• Automate your "Off To Work": With busy mornings and less time. It's nice to be able to lock my front door and have my lights go off, thermostat lower, security cameras come on, and the garage door open so I can just leave and not worry about 100 more things. we can have all of this automated.

Washer / Drier automation

• Our washing machine & dryer live in our basement, and we often forget that we had laundry that needed to be moved, etc. so we'd end up with wet laundry sitting in the washer for days on end. You could set a power consumption switch in place. When the power consumption drops under a certain level for x minutes you could send a telegram notification. We did the same for the washer and a vibration sensor for the dryer. Took a bit of tuning to get right, but works pretty slick now

Time to dispose of trash?

• We are not always great about remembering when it's trash/recycling day early in the morning, so I have it set now to flash the lights on and off several times when I open the garage door to remind me to wheel the bin to the curb. So far so good.
  

Automate your dog's cues

• Arlo cameras can be triggered by sound. If my dog barks aggressively at the door, the cameras begin recording and it sends me an alert
  

Package notifications

• Upon receipt of a package notice, flicker lights in the kitchen, living room and hallway. After 30 seconds set the lights to normal color and shut off all lights but the living rooms
  

What is your favorite home automation? tell us in the comments. Read the original thread here

Asran

posted on 27 Nov 18