Gadgetory

for the past six months we've been taking a step by step approach to building a connected home experience here in Louisville Kentucky but now we're about to take a giant leap towards making this house into a smart home Alexa turn on the living room Alexa turn on the family room Alexa turn on the kid's room Alexa turn off the whole house here's how we did it now automating an entire homes worth of lights isn't actually as complicated as you might think but you will need to make some decisions about the hardware that you're gonna use smart bulbs will let you dim the lights up and down and they're also pretty easy to install you just swap them in for the old ones and then add into your system they also don't cost that much these non color-changing versions of Philips used lights only costs $15 each on the other hand smart switches are nice because they'll still work with your automations even when things are switched off they do cost a little more though and the installation is a little more tricky once we figured out what we wanted and what we needed here in the scene that smart home we made a shopping list and bought everything we needed and then got to work installing it it actually wasn't that tough took us about a day to get everything hooked up and synced with our system and we had a whole house full of smart lights but then the question is control and our answer was sitting right in our kitchen the Amazon echo smart speaker the echo has native support for philips hue bulbs and for Belkin Wemo switches so we stuck to those and then added them all into the Alexa app from there it's just a question of naming everything you name them in the Philips hue and Belkin Wemo apps and then you can name additional groups of lights in the Alexa app if you're thorough and you add a lot of different names for the same switches in the same groups of lights you can create a system that will respond to you no matter what you're asking for now yes the cost of all this gear definitely adds up but it's important to remember that you don't need to automate everything all at once you can start small the most important lights in your home and build out from there and if your house is smaller than this one and you know doesn't need multiple Amazon echoes to control it you can keep the cost of a whole home lighting solution well below the price of a new TV a new laptop that's not bad for a whole home smart lighting setup with voice controls at the center