8 smart home gadgets that will make your life easier
From the coffee that brews itself to the lights you control from your phone, Katie Strick spends a day living lazily
I’m writing my shopping list while hoovering the living room. Halfway through composing a text my phone tells me the kettle is boiled. It’s 8am and I’ve already bought washing powder, set tonight’s episode of The Handmaid’s Tale to record and tested the smoke alarm. Not bad considering I haven’t even left bed.
I’m trying a day of letting go by outsourcing my life to technology. The boom in virtual assistants and smart devices has facilitated a (theoretically) easier life. You can control your home using your phone — or even your voice. From lights that you can switch on with just a word to Alexa to robots that do the cleaning, here’s how you can have your very own connected home.
Smell The Coffee
The iKettle (£100, firebox.com) syncs with alarm clocks so you the kettle is boiled when you wake up. It was one less task for the morning but I still had to come out from under the covers to pour the water into my mug, which felt like a chore.
Pressing all the right buttons
When you’re running low on provisions the Amazon Dash Button (£5, amazon.co.uk) lets you re-order them with one click. You need separate buttons for different products — I stuck one for teabags on the kitchen counter, a detergent hotline on the washing machine and an emergency beer button near my desk. So far, so promising. The only downside was when my housemate discovered the booze button after a night out and got trigger-happy.
Sound Investments
Controlling your home from your phone is great — but only if you aren’t using your hands for something else. At these moments, Amazon’s voice-enabled virtual assistant, Alexa, is your new best friend. She’s powered by the Amazon Echo (£150, amazon.co.uk) and Dot (£50, amazon.co.uk) speakers and she’ll tell you the weather forecast, check out how much money is in your bank account or turn on your TV. She paired up nicely with my Philips EverPlay Bluetooth speaker (£65, intl.target.com) but, like most best friends, she didn’t like it when I talked about her behind her back.
She recognised my voice and obeyed me over friends when they asked her to do other things. Long nights can be spent trying to win over Alexa, asking her to turn the music up when your partner wants it turned down.
Naturally, she has rivals — Google Home (£129, currys.co.uk) is the most prominent and is considered to have a better sound quality — but so far Amazon’s version can sync with the widest range of appliances.
Keep It Clean
Hoovering can feel like a workout. Getting under the bed requires squats as arduous as those at Barry’s Bootcamp and that’s before you even get to the stair climb. If you’d rather save yourself for the gym, try Dyson’s 360 Eye (£800, dyson.co.uk). As the name suggests, the bot navigates its way around your home with a 360-degree camera which maps its surroundings and knows where it’s yet to go.
It has twice the suction of other robot vacuums. Though I did get nervous watching it approach my housemate’s guitar, it was novel to watch a robot drive itself around. It did have to be recharged before doing my room, though, so it’s not necessarily ready for a whole flat job.
For dusting, the mocoro robot cleaning ball (£30, firebox.com) roams freely, changing direction whenever it hits an obstacle. The pink, battery-powered fluff ball may not be as high-tech as the Dyson but it’s way cuter, and doubles up as the world’s greatest cat toy. I might even adopt it as a pet.
Meanwhile, the Neato Botvac Connected vacuum (£729.99, neatorobotics.com) can be set to clean the whole house, spot clean or cover an area twice, and you can choose to get instant notifications about its status from wherever you are at the time.
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