Currently, one of the main limitations of developing gadgets and sensors for smart home is the fact that they’re hungry for energy and are completely reliant on an external energy source. This explains why all sensors available to the retail market today are so big and clunky. Read more
Rooftop solar panels are a great way to top up your electricity balance, however, you’re unlikely to be able to go off-grid just on the account of photovoltaics. Unless, of course, you have a very big roof that is positioned towards the South. Read more
It’s no secret to any budding smart home enthusiast that a successful home automation system is fully dependant upon good quality sensors. Without being able to detect the amount of light, temperature or motion, it’s impossible to create devices that would provide sufficient response to external factors. Read more
Today, smart home is already an industry of a considerable size and it is on a brink of a major expansion. We’ve tried to incorporate the most important smart home facts in an infographic, and here’s what we came up with. A couple of years ago the cumulative revenue of home automation products and services reached $20 billion per annum. It’s set to hit $59 billion by 2020, however, as it is with everything, we can only judge the true amount of something through comparison. Read more
We’ve been watching LG’s journey within the IoT technology advancements for a while. They have already confirmed they would offer a range of Google Home compatible devices including fridges, ovens, air quality management devices, washing machines and even robotic hoovers. However, it seems they have much more than that up their sleeve. Read more
If you look at the advertising efforts of the big brands of smart thermostats, you will have noticed that the main USP of their smart gadgets is that they help you save energy. Yet the question is, do we really know how average people are using their smart thermostats and does the industry use this data to improve the future editions of thermostats and to model energy use with an aim of reducing the consumption even further? Read more
According to the UK Gas Safe Register (GSR), the British people are losing up to £100 million every year on account of illegal gas work carried out by rogue traders. But wait, the stats get even scarier – 20% of the residential addresses surveyed by GSR were found to be in danger due to illegally fitted gas appliances such as boilers and cookers. Read more
You can hardly surprise people with smart devices and other IoT gadgets, however, this new development is something entirely new – we’re talking about an emerging sub-discipline of IoT which is smart surfaces. It encompass a new generation of materials that are able to change their properties instigated by an external impulse. Read more
Crowdfunding is increasingly establishing itself as an alternative way for inventors to fund their daring ideas. Home automation is an area that sees more and more projects pitched every month. Most of them will be a bit too “out there” to succeed but we’ve just spotted a few that look promising. Read more
At the beginning, Google Home – the smart speaker – was just a gimmicky gadget that could give you (not so) clever answers to questions like “what’s the weather today”. However, it is trying to be much more than that. The device has a potential of becoming a smart home hub – a central gadget that will integrate with other IoT devices and become the heart of your smart home.
As it stands, the things are going the right direction. Google is opening up its system to new partners; and tech startups have begun building their smart devices with cross-system integration in mind. Read more
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