Having a smart home is pointless if you have to intervene and tell your home what to do. But if you take advantage of the automations that run silently in the background without you having to do anything — now that’s smart! Here are three automations you can probably set up today with your existing smart home that will run silently in the background so that your smart home can truly be smart without your intervention.
Sunrise/sunset schedule for smart lights
No need to change on/off times
If you have any smart light system, whether Philips Hue, LIFX, or Kasa, your lights connect to an app that can schedule light on/off times based on a schedule, as well as sunrise/sunset times. Having the schedule change based on sunrise and sunset times is so powerful because these times change every day based on your location and time of year. For example, today my sunset time is 4:49 pm, but tomorrow it’s 4:50 pm. I’m obviously not going to manually adjust the time my lights go on by the minute, but using my Philips Hue app, it can silently and automatically shift the lighting schedule every day based on your location.
This is a huge unlock because you most likely want your lights to turn on at dusk or sunset, and to turn off in the morning when the sun rises.
Smart doorbell motion zones and the “tripwire” approach
Get targeted alerts
By now, most of us have a smart doorbell or front door camera system to alert us of when a package arrives or a guest comes over or just to keep an eye on things. Whether Ring or Nest, all camera apps let you set up custom motion zones so you don’t get alerts for your neighbor putting out the garbage or a bird landing on your bird feeder.
Consider the tripwire approach: a boundary that someone must cross to trigger an alert. When setting up your motion zones, consider the areas of the monitored area that must be “tripped” to indicate that someone is at your door. Try to draw that zone as a tripwire. For example, if you have two front steps, make a tripwire zone at the beginning of the first step so that if someone approaches your front door and goes past that first step, it triggers an alert. That’s versus having the entire scene trigger an alert, which will just cause a lot of false positives.
Automatic volume adjustments for smart speakers
Always have the perfect volume
Have you ever gotten a notification from your smart speaker that was at an inappropriate volume? Like in the morning when everyone is sleeping, and you have a new package waiting, and you get a loud chime on all your speakers that wakes everyone up? Or maybe you get a weather alert in the middle of the day that isn’t loud enough to cut through the volume of a busy household?
You can silently set up routines on your smart speaker that will automatically adjust volume based on time of day, so you don’t have to think about this issue ever again. This varies by smart speaker, but in the case of Amazon Echo devices, you can use the Alexa app to set up a new routine (Alexa App -> More -> Routines) and then add a new routine with a time-based trigger. For example, if your house goes to sleep at 10 pm, create a new routine at 10 pm, then add an Action to it to reduce the volume (Add Action -> Device Settings -> Volume). Then set the volume to like 1 or 2 (it’s out of 10). Then, in the morning, you can bring the volume back up in the same manner at a time when the house is up. Now your smart home will silently and automatically adjust the device volume so it works the way you do.
These 8 Samsung Routines Make My Phone Easier to Use
I’ll never use another phone while these routines are around.
Smart home is only “smart” if it works for you
There are so many other things your smart home can silently do for you if you just spend time in your app settings to see the available triggers. To give a few more examples: you can set your locks to automatically lock after the door is closed or after an unlock event is triggered; you can set up “people only” alerts for your interior cameras (which leverages computer vision AI) so that if your dog walks past the camera or if the wind blows, you don’t get an alert; have your smart plugs automatically turn off devices at night when you won’t be using them anyway; and have your smart-thermostat automatically go into eco-mode when it senses no one is home.
