9 NEW SmartHome Tech Upgrades - Fall 2023

I’ve done a bunch of tech upgrades to our smarthome this year, so here are 9 of the new smarthome products I’m using and loving for fall of 2023. If you’re interested in snagging any of these for your own setup, use my links down below. This video isn’t sponsored so buying through my affiliate links helps a ton!

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[MrOmega]

All right, giving the kitty's some love.

[StephenYoung-iqqg]

Always remember to be smarter than your home lol. Great job on the video, hope you have a blessed and wonderful day.😄🤗🤟👍👍

[jhr]

Ted quite a few smart products for the last 6 years or so. It was so refreshing to get rid of every single one of them. Not only did it get rid of the laziness I think cognitively it was refreshing to actually get up and read a book.

[VincentGroenewold]

Oh that's awesome, I JUST decided to step into it after discovering home assistant and local control. :)

[BrianGlaze]

The air quality products are pretty nice especially for a household dealing with allergies and eczema

[jedikv]

Thanks for finding more matter-supported devices!

[robbuckhalter]

I like the Bond Bridge for controlling RF and IR devices.

[bear]

I’m one of those ADHD cases where if I don’t watch the time, I’ll end up gaming until the sun comes through the windows and then realize I have to now work and do dad things on no sleep.

I have a bunch of Govee smart lights and strips in my gaming room and living room and set up an automation that changes every single light to red at 11pm to tell me “HEY, TIME TO CALL IT A NIGHT”, and then after 10min they shut off entirely as a second reminder that 10min have passed… just in case I needed to finish a game or find a save point!

Great video!

[jeffhale]

Thanks for sharing your upgrades. Blessings on your day!

[lqqkout]

Thanks for the ideas! I'm excited to watch the security/segmentation video too :) We're building a new home and facing the difference between retrofit switches and full-blown lighting systems w/ load control in the utility room. I wish the gap between the two approaches wasn't so opaque and inaccessible to consumers (vs. integrators)

[heaththompson]

Shannon, great video, like all that you do! Very helpful, too, as I didn't know the Wemo smart plugs went EOL. Their reliability already had made me end-of-use them in my smart home. But now I'll e-recycle them too as I sometimes had used them as a backup. I'll check out the Tapo switches. Do they work with Apple HomeKit?

[kuro]

The key with smart home stuff is to only buy it if it's reasonably open. For example if your Belkin switches could have run Tasmota after Belkin abandoned them.

At least with Matter you can run everything offline and on an isolated network, so security problems after likely to be a lot less impactful.

[lexabal]

You should give the Nanoleaf 4D a try too! Its features are really impressive for a smart home upgrade.

[fasthowto]

Wow. So many different apps. Lunacy. You really should look into home assistant so you can control ALL that nonsense from a single point, and automate EVERYTHING.

[AReed]

I had Govee in my house for about 3 months before I grew frustrated with their API integration into my Home Assistant deployment. I now use SK6812 RGBW LEDs on WLED whenever I want to add colored lighting to a room as well as Inovelli Red RGBW bulbs in lamps that are not smart. The Govee lights were buggy, they had a limiter on how many API requests you could send to the cloud per account not per device and their LED strips used to be only 30 LED/m when most of BTF's are 60 or 144.

I have also used Z-wave controlled relays to add cool white FCOB leds under my kitchen cabinets and control my garage door (I had a MyQ device but their API stopped working so I took matters into my own hands in HA). I have a first gen Nest thermostat tied in as well for climate control when I'm home and away. The Aqara FP2 is a game changer for presence sensing, no more momentary IR sensors.

It is slightly more expensive but I try to keep most of my devices on Z-wave if not on local only wifi. I try to include the cloud as little as possible so I control if and when it works, I'm not beholden to some developer updating the API and breaking everything.

I have a Netgear switch that I can setup with different VLANs but I have no clue how to set it up or how to isolate all of my smart devices in their own VLAN. I have external cameras that I really should figure out how to put behind a wall.

[donaldhoudek]

Great Video! I have all my IoT things assigned to my "IoT" VLAN on the UDM Pro. I just removed my last Wi-Fi IoT module/switch and have replaced them all with Zigbee switches and modules. I like that they still use the 2.4Ghz band, but not Wi-Fi. Most of the hackers I knew stick with Wi-Fi I0T things, where 95% of the market is. Granted, no one's IoT things are totally safe. As far as cloud dependence, I have only 2 required ones left and I will be eliminating 1 of them soon. Just about totally local.... electric is next.

[beauthompson]

hi what is the lamp you had the smart bulbs?

[doublevision]

Great Ideas!!! Sorry Haven't been around here as much lately I have a new baby and that has destroyed my time!

[mrkmdz]

Just a head's up, Snubs: The AirThings Wave Plus is currently listed at $229 on both Amazon and AirThings, not $169. Even so, I'm getting a couple for my house and sending your link to my daughter and son, each of whom have newborns (yes, egads, I'm now a grandfather!)

Also, I'm kind of surprised your not using Home Assistant. Not only can you totally air gap all your automation devices from the Internet, but you get so much more functionality. This is especially important since manufacturers (*cough* Belkin *cough*) fail to support or patch security flaws after their product's short lifecycle. To be fair, I'm sure that TP-Link would take a similar stance to Belkin if an issue was found with one of their EOL products.

Hugs to Starbug and Luna!

[MosquitoMade]

Good stuff! Secluded network for my home assistant server and I prefer devices that are ZWave and not Wifi after my introduction to it being through TPLink Kasa wifi smart home things. I've been loving my Zooz zwave devices lately, nice switches and a bunch of other sensors like door/window, temp/humidity, motion, etc.