In today’s buying guide, we’re going to take a look at smart home hubs. Specifically, what you need to look for and take note of when searching for the ideal smart home hub that will work best for you and your home.
You’re going to learn all about the important features and attributes of the best smart home hubs, and from that, you’ll be able to choose the right one for yourself!
So, What Is A Smart Home Hub?
In today’s market, there are so many different “Smart” products available to you. Smart locks. Smart thermostats. Smart security cameras. Smart light bulbs. Smart safes. And on and on, it goes.
What a smart home hub does is it serves as a tool that provides a single interface from which you can control all of those individual smart products. Using a good smart home hub, you have complete control and access over your smart light bulbs, your smart locks, your smart thermostats, etc.
One of the reasons why these are so important and so useful is because every smart product has its own application. This creates an overload of different data to pore through and apps to use. It becomes very inconvenient since you don’t really have the option to actually use all of those things, with just one application.
With a smart home hub, you can do just that.
Attributes And Features
There are four different attributes/features that you need to look at and consider when buying a smart home hub.
What Smart Devices The Smart Home Hub Supports
For many, this goes without saying, but for others, it’s easy to forget that not every smart home hub will support your smart devices.
It’s very important that you look at the smart devices you own, and the smart home hub that you are looking at, and you make sure that each device is supported by the hub that you intend to purchase.
Some smart home hubs will support more of your smart devices than others, and some smart home hubs will support one of your devices that the other hub doesn’t support, but none of the other smart devices.
So, sometimes, you just have to go with the hub that supports the majority of your devices, even if it doesn’t support all of them.
The Connectivity That The Smart Home Hub Offers
Ideally, your smart home hub offers both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. These are really useful connectivity technologies to have access to. Mostly because some smart devices rely on only Wi-Fi, and others rely entirely on Bluetooth.
If all of your smart devices rely entirely on Wi-Fi, then you don’t really need a smart home hub that offers Bluetooth or some other kind of connectivity technology. But, having that option does give you some flexibility, which is nice.
If The App Is Easy-To-Use
Every smart home hub has its own app. Most of these apps are pretty good because they have a simple and concise interface that allows you to control all of the devices connected to the hub.
However, some of these apps are really bad, and they have a confusing and difficult to understand interface that easily leads to various annoyances and inconveniences. All of which can be avoided with a good app.
To figure out if the app is good, you can usually read the reviews on the store page, and by finding other line reviews, as well as downloading the app yourself, if it is available, and getting a feel for how it works.
The Customization Options That Are Available
At the core of it all, smart home hubs are designed to enable you to customize your smart home devices the way you want to. That is the crux of it all, and because of this, you want to find a smart home hub that gives you these options.
Make sure the hub is compatible with your devices, and that it gives you the same features you would have using the standard app that each one of those devices comes with.
Conclusion
Smart home hubs are absolutely fantastic devices. They give you so much control over your home and the individual facets of your home. And they do so in a nice and convenient manner, that ensures you can always change the things that need to be changed and keep doing the things that are working for you.
Remember these basic criteria, and you won’t have any problems finding a great smart home hub.
