With as busy as our lives are these days, everyone is looking for a way to make their lives simpler. These days, any life hack is a way for even the most tedious of tasks to become a whole lot easier. Thankfully, home improvement technology has continued to improve the way we do the most menial of tasks; from setting our coffee makers, to turning our lights on and off, to playing your favorite music in a few seconds flat.
If you’re looking for easy ways to upgrade your life, use these home improvement technology tips to transform your home, and your everyday life. Even if you’re already a frequent user of technology, you may just surprise yourself with how much technology can make your life less hassle-free:
Talk With Your Home
If you’ve ever been to a friend’s house and they have a virtual assistant such as Amazon’s Alexa, you may have marveled at the way they can turn lights on and off, play music, set their thermostats, and do plenty of other amazing things.
The good news is you can do this too. For $100 or less, you can get your own virtual assistant and set it up in your home. It doesn’t take but a few minutes to pair the assistant with your phone and once you do, you can do just about anything. You can tell Alexa to play music, and you can get locks for your residential garage door to pair with your phone, as well as your home doors. You can also set your thermostat with a virtual assistant, and overall, you can make your home feel more secure, not to mention up-to-date.
Replacing Lights
As home improvement technology has improved, so has home lighting. If you do into the lightbulb section of your local home improvement store, you’ll see shelf after shelf of LED lights and smart bulbs. These LED bulbs not only shine brighter and last longer, but smart bulbs also help you save money. With smart bulbs, you can control the color, shade, and brightness of each individual fixture in your home. Once they’re programmed, all you have to do is tell your virtual assistant to adjust whatever bulb you tell it to. For example, you can tell Alexa to program your main kitchen light to shine green at 80% brightness.
Make Use Of Smart Outlets
Every family these days uses all kinds of technology. Whether your family is using phones, or tablets, or TVs among other devices, it’s a lot to keep track of. Another piece of home improvement technology you can make great use of is smart plugs.
Smart plugs are essentially WiFi plugs that fit over the existing electrical outlets in your house, and can turn just about anything that can be plugged in into a smart device. By using smart plugs, you can use apps on phones and tablets to sync your old coffee makers and floor lamps into smart devices.
As an example, if you’ve got an old blender you use to make delicious fruit smoothies with pure cranberry powder for a shot of Vitamin C, you can sync your blender to your phone to get the perfect combination of speeds and pulses for the perfect smoothie.
As an added bonus, smart plugs can calculate how much each device you plug in adds to your energy bill, so you can easily identify which appliances you might need to upgrade.
Maintaining A Good Temperature
If you live with a big family, then chances are good that everyone loves having the thermostat set to a certain temperature. With home improvement technology, you can set your home thermostat, even if you’re not home. This helps make your home more energy-efficient, and save you money on your air conditioning and heating bills.
Odds are good that your home’s HVAC system is your biggest energy user. Thankfully, you can get a major home improvement technology upgrade by getting a smart HVAC system. It runs more efficiently, saves money, and is comparable with WiFi and apps. This way you can better regulate the temperature and avoid costly breakdowns.
It’s estimated that only 42 percent of homeowners call a professional to perform routine air conditioner maintenance. Not only will air conditioners that go through regular HVAC maintenance last 40 percent longer, but smart HVAC systems can let you know the condition of your system. Sensors are built into the system to alert you to leaks or the need for a new filter. With these sensors, you’ll know exactly how your system is running and when to put in a call to AC repair services when you need them.
Master Your Kitchen
Everyone is always looking for the latest innovations to transform their kitchens. Chances are you might even have a cabinet full of appliances that help you make ice cream, or fresh bread, or popcorn, or slow cook food.
All of these appliances are designed to make things easier in the kitchen, and with today’s home improvement technology, smart refrigerators allow you to do just that. With a top-of-the-line smart fridge, you can see what’s in your fridge remotely. You can also send notes that appear on your fridge screen, and you can even receive alerts when the fridge door is left open.
As if that wasn’t enough, smart fridges can do more. Most of them are able to recognize voices, so you can have yours recognize your voice. Once you’ve done that, you can ask your fridge for recipes, make a grocery list, and even ask for help with measurement conversions.
Monitor Your Water System
While having a smart fridge can transform your kitchen, don’t forget about your home’s water system. There are many smart devices you can use for home water treatment services.
Some water treatment companies offer monitoring systems that alert you to low salt levels in your water, blockage, and any bridging. You can even use technology to detect and stop pipe leakage and water system leakage.
Make Use Of Smart Glass
If you’re doing some renovations on your home and you’re looking to have some custom glass and mirror installation done, one home improvement technology upgrade to consider is switching to smart glass.
Smart glass offers privacy and looks stylish just about anywhere you put it. Since it is a glass-based product, it blends well into its environment and offers a few different looks. If it’s switched on, smart glass offers crystal clear clarity. If it’s switched off, it reverts to a frosted look. It’s easy to use and maintain, so if you install smart glass bay windows, you can go from frosted glass to clear glass with the touch of a button. You can even use a virtual assistant to issue a voice command.
Invest In A Solar Panel
As home improvement technology continues to advance, the more reliant our homes are going to become on technology. If you’re looking to make your home more energy-efficient, one piece of technology you can make great use of is a solar panel. You can have a local roofing contractor install it for you to help save money on your energy bills.
Today’s solar panels communicate with one another to give a home as much power as possible, regardless of the conditions outside. So if your home has three panels, all three of them are communicating with one another to provide power. In addition, solar panels have a safe DC feature where the panels will reduce their voltage so that you don’t run into a situation where energy is produced and has nowhere to go.
Get Some Smart Cleaning Tools
Even the most organized folks need some help keeping their environments spic and span. Thankfully, there’s plenty of home improvement technology that can practically clean your living space for you.
- You can buy yourself a Roomba, which will clean several flooring types and easily responds to voice commands with a virtual assistant.
- If you’ve got a cat, you can buy a self-cleaning litter box, which separates clean litter from waste clumps and drops the waste into a carbon-filtered drawer.
- If you’ve got a small dog, you can buy a self-cleaning dog potty, which advances an absorbent pad several times a day.
- You can buy a robot mop, which will clean all kinds of surfaces and all your hard-to-reach spots. You can even attach different pads to it depending on what type of cleaning you’re looking to do.
- You can buy a toilet bowl cleaning system, which drops a cleaning solution into the toilet’s overflow tube of the flush valve.
- You can easily clean your microwave by buying a microwave cleaner, which you fill with water, vinegar, and lemon juice and then microwave it.
- If you’re dealing with allergies, you can get an air purifier.
- Don’t forget older technology. If you’re dealing with flooding, perhaps in your basement, you can use air dryers to help dry your basement old to prevent water damage and mold.
Use Smart Tech In Gardening
If you love gardening and planting, there’s no doubt it’s an important part of your home’s overall landscape design. After all, there’s no better accomplishment than having a beautiful backyard with colorful flowers and plentiful crops.
But if you love gardening, you can use home improvement technology to garden smarter. What does that mean? It means you can use your smartphone and apps to save plenty of energy, time, and money:
- You can install smart sprinklers to have your flowers, plants, and crops on a regular watering schedule. You can monitor your system on your phone and adjust the schedule based on weather, while also monitoring the system’s condition.
- If you’re into having potted plants, you can buy expandable pots, which expand as the plants you plant keep growing.
- You can buy an indoor smart garden, which requires you to drop the plant pods in, fill the included water reservoir and plug the self-watering planter in.
- If you’re not keen on mowing your lawn yourself, you can buy a smart mower that operates very similar to a Roomba.
- If you’re new to gardening, you can download all kinds of gardening apps on your phone to give you the ins-and-outs of everything you need to know.
Monitoring Your Meds
While there are many pieces of home improvement technology that can help make your life easier and your home cleaner, it can also be used for everyday medical treatments.
One helpful piece of technology is an automated pill dispenser, which can be helpful if you’re caring for an elderly relative. It makes managing multiple medications very easy and cuts down on your loved one accidentally taking pills when they’re not supposed to.
An automated dispenser lights up when it’s time to take meds and pushing a button releases the correct amount of pills. You can also link the dispensers to your phone so you can get text messages when it’s time to take meds or if your loved one happens to miss a dose.
Better Pest Control
Believe it or not, smart technology can even be used if you’re having a pest control problem at home. Pest control companies combine traditional methods for residential pest control with smart technology to help rid your home of all types of crawlers and critters. How is this possible? Pest control services use digital reporting and remote site management to monitor smart traps they can set for problems such as rodents.
Take Advantage Of Technology
These days, if you can imagine a piece of technology that betters your life, there’s a good chance it exists out there somewhere. There’s never been a better time to make use of home improvement technology to completely transform the operation of your home, and to make your life easier.
Whether you want to transform your kitchen with smart lights, a smart fridge, and even water treatment tech, or you want to completely overhaul your garden, technology can make things so much simpler. It’s amazing what you can control from your phone or a tablet these days, and if you’re looking to ease the busy feeling of your life, there’s never been a better time to embrace technology.