Millennials are more likely than any other generation to actively seek out smart homes. The reasons are obvious: They are the most tech-savvy generation by far.
Gen X might know how to fix a car, and Gen Z might know how to navigate social media better. But if you can count on Millennials to do anything, it is installed technology that will make their grandmothers look at them like Prometheus carrying fire down from Mount Olympus.
But just because they know how to work the technology does not mean they know what technology to get. That is why we are here to help guide you through which devices to focus on in the burgeoning industry. And, more importantly, how to design your home around them.
The Ideal Smart Home
Let’s start by talking about the smart home that has everything. This “ideal” smart home is a good starting point because you can very easily decide how much of a smart home you want going by this imagined picture of a smart home. But what does an ideal smart home contain?
The ideal smart home has three main functions automated: Home hygiene, home efficiency, and home security. Home hygiene relates to keeping things clean and livable. A Roomba that cleans the floor and an air conditioning unit that manages the temperature fall into this.
Efficiency intermixes with hygiene, as well as parts of the home that are not technically “smart”. In short, it means making sure your devices use less electricity. This can lower your electricity bill, but it also means doing something good for the environment.
Perhaps most importantly, it means solving old problems with new solutions.
And lastly is home security. Security system installation is much easier and more beneficial in a smart home. These systems keep your home safe while also being intuitive to manage.
What is the Most Important Part of a Smart Home?
Smart homes started in the kitchen. What we mean by that is that the first smart home technologies were ovens that could preheat themselves precisely and turn themselves off as soon as the food was ready, alongside refrigerators that automated themselves in the same way.
Automated kitchens also reduce the most labor of all the automated smart home technologies.
Alongside that, however, are smart home security systems. While smart kitchens were the first smart home technologies, smart security systems were the greatest leaps forward in technology. This is because where automated kitchens do everything that a kitchen can do, just on their own, smart security systems employ features that security systems did not always have.
What Does a Smart Kitchen Need?
The core of the smart kitchen is the oven, but it is far from the last thing you can get. Many smart kitchens also feature smart refrigerators. These will display recipes, stream music and podcasts, and even order groceries for you when they see your fridge is empty.
They are no slouches when it comes to working as refrigerators either. They are more efficient, easily programmable, and can even help you organize them to save the most space.
The hidden gem of smart kitchens has to be smart smoke detectors. Don’t let the name fool you: They detect much more than just smoke. These can also detect odorless carbon monoxide, methane, chlorine gas, and other deadly gasses.
They can even integrate with your alarm system to call emergency services should the worst happen.
What Does a Smart Security System Need?
The first thing that a smart security system needs is its least smart component: The alarm.
A highly audible and easy to manage alarm is critical to home security. It needs to be audible because that way, an intruder will hear it and get scared away. Whether it is the kind of alarm that automatically calls the police or not, an intruder will run rather than risk getting caught.
While the alarm itself might not be too smart, it does not take it to make it much smarter. That means using a connected phone app to program the times when it is active. You can set up the alarm to recognize your schedule of coming and going to and from your house.
You can even expand your security system to include cameras that do the same things. These can also be remotely viewed through an app. How most of these security systems work is that once a motion detector is triggered, they send you a notification with the alarm and video feed.
You can resolve the alarm remotely and view the video feed in real-time. This will allow you to turn off the alarm if it is no big deal, as well as call the police if it is a big deal.
How do you Design a Home Around These Technologies?
It might sound like this sort of technology will overload your home with chords and tech. And there is a risk of that if you do not seek out a professional installation.
Once you have an idea of how much smart technology your home will include, the next step is figuring out where it will go and how you will want it to look. No matter your preferences, you can almost always set it up yourself, or get a professional to set it up so that it looks good.
Looking good, of course, is only second to feeling good. And the great thing about smart home technology is that it is usually designed to be aesthetically pleasing and unobtrusive.
That means it is out of the way or can be made to be out of the way. Amusingly, if there was a con to any of this technology, it is that it cannot get much bigger than it looks. That means you cannot really set it up to be the centerpiece of any of your rooms since it is meant to be hidden.
Conclusion
If a Millennial can find a way to own a home, then it will do them a lot of good to go through the trouble of turning it into a smart home. It will increase the value of the home, as well as make it safer in general.
