Gadgetory

eight months ago this house was big empty and dumb but after a lot of work we've transformed it into the CNET smart home let me show you some of the coolest stuff we've done we made voice control the center of the home because it's so simple and intuitive with Amazon's echo we can control almost every smart device in the house including the lights Alexa turn on the whole house here in a family room we've smarten up the entertainment center by hooking Alexa up to a device called blue moon you don't have to worry about finding the remote when you can turn your TV off with your voice we also installed a smart ceiling fan with motion sensing technology no wasting energy when you're not in the room and these motion sensors talk to our downstairs thermostat the Eco b3 in addition to talking with Alexa this thermostat can sense when we're not home also saving on electricity costs here in the kitchen we've gone with two connected large appliances over here is the samsung family help refrigerator and here's the samsung Wi-Fi range the oven connects to our smart phone and that can send us a notification in case we've left a burner on for the fridge it has cameras inside that can show us the contents when we're at the grocery store and can even track the expiration dates of food we've been skeptical about smart laundry products but the Whirlpool washer and dryer set here actually has some useful features they can send a notice to your phone when your load is done and you can also remotely start and pause loads mid-cycle we also turn this old bedroom into a room for kids complete with color changing lights in this handy remote control we have a camera with night vision so you can keep an eye on your kids when they're sleeping as well as this bed to let you track their sleeping patterns we added that same sleep tracking to the bed in the master bedroom and here it works on both sides of the bed we also have our second floor thermostat in the master and here we went with nest it controls the general heating and cooling up here but in the bedroom it works together with our other haiku ceiling fan and a smart vent to regulate the temp in this room more precisely we even added smarts to the garage door this device lets us open and close the garage doors from a nap but also with the lexan voice commands but not everything works as well as we want it to this countertop from DuPont actually has wireless phone charging built into it but as you can see it's not quite as responsive as we'd like it to be so what do we learn from all this well a few things we learned that voice control really is great but you do have to learn the lingo to make sure you get things working the way you want them to we've also learned that setting up a whole house with smart home tech can get really expensive even the lights and smart switches we've installed here ran up to multiple thousands of dollars finally we found that the best products in the smart home are the ones that don't rely too heavily on a smart home platform things like the Amazon echo nest cam and a Big Ass Fans Haiku ceiling fan stand out by themselves even if the networks they talk to become obsolete the devices themselves still be useful thanks for watching this has been super interesting for us and if you're interested in reading more of our strong home technology please come check us out at cnn.com you