Our kind-of smart home with ZERO hubs

Smart homes are really popular now and we knew we wanted our home to have some smart features from the get go! However budget constraints meant we had to go down the DIY route. The most important feature we wanted was to be able to control the main lights via our phones. We watched many smart home guides before our own reno but found that many of the DIY options had to have many hubs to control the different zigbee devices or required wiring in many smart switches.

We decided to go down a different route of getting WiFi enabled fittings instead which would mean that we would need NO HUBS. No hubs means less things to hide = better aesthetics!

The key products that have made our ‘semi-smart’ home possible has been the

1. Point One Technologies ceiling fans

which we have in both the Living and Master bedrooms. They have a light and are WiFi connected via the Tuya Smart App which is compatible with the Google Home system.

2. Yeelight Arwen Ceiling Light

We got this installed at our doorway area and hobby room! We also got an additional Yeelight light bulb for the ceiling pendant light in our study. All the Yeelight products are WiFi connected via the Yeelight app which is also compatible with Google Home. I’ve been really pleased with Yeelight’s price point, user friendliness and range of products - they’ve since become #MyGoTo smart lighting brand.

These 4 big items were the only smart products we installed during the renovation period. They cover the bulk of the lights we use most of the time. We don’t have to argue about who has to get out of bed to turn off all the lights for the night, Google does it for us!

For voice control, we are able to use our phones or the Sonos Beam sound bar that’s being used for our TV as it has the Google Assistant built in.

Another consideration we had was if we wanted to upgrade more of our lights in the future. As such we made sure to get ceiling fixtures that use general E27 or GU10 type light bulbs instead of the types with built in LEDs as we can simply purchase smart bulbs in the future and upgrade them if we want to!

We know that this might not be that 100% most optimal smart home set up but it’s working well for us. We really like that even if we don’t have WiFi, our house is still 100% functional via normal switches.

We’ve been living in our house for about 10 months now and so far we haven’t had any major glitches happen.

#Lemon8SG #lemon8home #HomeReno #smarthome #guide #homeandliving