Your smartphone or tablet can run your household when you’re away. Be it a workday at the office or on vacation in another country, you can monitor and control most every aspect of your home through apps on your gadget.
Here is a quick guide to the technologies that help you run your home with apps, and how to get started:
How To Run Your House Remotely
There are on-line sites that can introduce you to smarthome technologies and apps to run them. If you have a basic understanding of your gadgets, you can implement many of these changes and download the apps yourself.
If you’d like to run your home with apps but don’t have the time to DIY, you can hire audio/video professionals to tailor a system to your needs. In Metro St. Louis, we recommend SOJO for your home automation needs.
Controlling Comfort
From your phone as you’re driving home on a winter evening you can fire up your gas fireplace and increase the temperature on the thermostat so the house is warm and cozy when you walk in the door.
Remote control of your HVAC is a huge benefit in a quick-change weather area like Metro St. Louis, where mornings can start off mild and temperatures quickly drop to frigid. Imagine the utility savings when you can surf those temperature changes wherever you are.
Natural light is also part of climate control, and you can control that from your phone or tablet, as well. Window blinds and skylights can be opened and closed by tapping an app.
Saving Time
You can make a spontaneous dinner choice at the grocery store and fire up the oven while standing in the checkout line so you can pop the pizza in as soon as you get home. This kind of time savings is possible when you can “talk” to your appliances. Ovens, microwaves, refrigerators and even washers and dryers are now available with connective technology. An added benefit: never again wonder if you left the oven on – simply look at your phone and know!
Your phone or tablet can also talk to your TV via apps. So if you learn at a friend’s house that there’s a program on tonight that you’d really like to see, one tap turns your phone into a remote control that lets you add this show to your DVR schedule, and you can get back to socializing.
Monitoring Safety
Imagine how secure you’d feel if no matter where you are you could see your driveway from your iPhone (as shown above). Would it reduce your worry if you could see every room in your house from your iPad while you’re on vacation?
We now have the technology to remotely control every interior and exterior light in the home, open and close garage doors, lock and unlock doors and control audio systems (even change songs!). For instance, you never have to worry if your kids got off to school on time and locked the door behind them because an app will let you know who came and went and if they locked the door.
Technology moves so quickly that it can be hard to keep up. Even the most advanced early adaptor stays busy keeping pace with tech advances. If you would like more information about how to run your household with apps, call the Mosby office at 314.909.1800 or contact us here.