Everything is getting smarter these days, including our homes! When we started the build process, we thought it’d be fun to incorporate some of the new smart devices into our home to make life a little more convenient… and fun too! 

I received several products mentioned in this smart home post in exchange for an honest review. Thank you Hunter and Schlage! This post also contains affiliate links.

MY SMART HOME DEVICES

AMAZON ALEXA

Well, we call her “Echo“. Did you know you could change her name? My sister-in-law’s name is Alexa, so we didn’t want to confuse things. We say “Echo” to activate our smart device. We can control other smart devices, play music, get the weather, order things from Amazon Prime, and even set timers (which is great for timeouts or when we want to set a limit on things like screen time for Evelyn!) Jeremy and the kids just bought it for me for my birthday so we are still testing out all the cool things we can do with her, but the main thing is that we can control our other smart products with our voices through her. She even tells jokes if you want her too! 

HUNTER SMART HOME CEILING FAN

One of the things Alexa (or Echo) can do, is control our Hunter SIMPLEconnect™ smart home ceiling fan. We can tell her to turn the fan on or off and even schedule the fan to turn on when we arrive home. We can also sync the fan with our Nest Thermostat to help keep our home cool and energy efficient. If you have Google Assistant or Apple® HomeKit™ devices in your home rather than Alexa, those work too! 

I absolutely LOVE the industrial design of Hunter’s Apache fan! The twisted blades are so cool and make a statement in our home. It’s not just your everyday ceiling fan. The white washed distressed oak blades go perfectly with our farmhouse elements and the oil rubbed bronze metal matches the rest of our lighting in the space. It’s both beautiful and powerful. We actually have five different Hunter fans in our new home because it’s such a trusted brand and the styles are on trend! (You’ll see the others as I post more room reveals!)

SCHLAGE SENSE SMART DEADBOLT 

Our front door is equipped with the Schlage Sense Smart Deadbolt. We can use an access code to enter instead of having to find keys. We can even set up temporary codes or multiple codes to give our trusted family and friends access when we’re not able to open the door ourselves. No more having to coordinate dropping off a spare key when we leave on vacation! Or if we want someone to be able to enter who doesn’t have a code, we can simply unlock the door from our smartphones. We can also see when our door is locked or unlocked so we know exactly when someone is entering our home. Or if we are already gone and we’re not sure if we locked up, we can just check our app! 

I remember being locked out of our old home when our garage door spring broke and we couldn’t get it open for over an hour. We didn’t bring a front door key that day and we sat there with screaming kids until we finally got the garage door open. Oy! Now our smartphone is a key, or we can simply use the access code on the key pad. Whew! 

NEST LEARNING THERMOSTAT

The Nest Learning Thermostat learns our schedule and adjusts the temperature to match our habits. You basically adjust the temperature for the first week and it learns what you like and automatically adjusts itself after that. We can also control it from our phones and Echo. “Echo, decrease the temperature. I’m burning up because I’m chasing after two kiddos!” The Nest claims that it pays for itself by saving you in energy costs. Now that’s a smart home! Woo hoo! 🙂 

LIFTMASTER WIFI GARAGE DOOR OPENER 

We added the LiftMaster WiFi garage door opener with the MyQ App. I can’t even count the number of times we would turn around and go drive by our old house to make sure the garage door was closed when we were headed out of town. I would roll my eyes every time, but we just HAD to go back and make sure.

So, with our new house, we added a WiFi enabled garage door opener, so that we could check from our smartphones and save ourselves the hassle. Now, we can just check our app to know when our garage door is closed and secure, left open, or opened unexpectedly. We can even open it for someone from the app, or close it if we did indeed leave it open. 

SAMSUNG CONNECT HOME PRO ROUTER

We purchased two of the Samsung Connect Home Pro WiFi routers rather than “renting” the router from our internet provider. So far our WiFi is excellent in our new smart home. We used to have so much trouble with it in our old house and would often gobble up our smartphone data because the WiFi connection in our house just wasn’t reliable. With all the smart devices in our home, we needed to make sure our WiFi was on point! 

Whew! So many smart devices! If you have questions about any of these devices that make our home a smart home please feel free to leave a comment. I’m still learning all the capabilities myself, but I can certainly try to figure out how to help. 🙂 

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