The main gist of a smart home is Automation. A home that cater to your daily habits.
In our home, we opt for smart lights and devices instead of installing smart switches.
The main reason is that by having smart lights, we can dim or change the tone of the lights via our phone app.
Whereas, smart switches are unable to do that and only on and off function is available. Well, probably there are new and more advance switches in the market which we are not aware of. >.<
Installing both smart lights and smart switches will also cost a bomb. Haha
Most of our lights and devices are "smart", and they are powered via the Samsung SmartThings Hub.
New homeowners thinking of installing smart lights and devices, you need to think through what are the devices that you want them to run automatically. It can be a ceiling fan, a curtain, a blind, TV, aircon or a light.
You have to ensure these essential devices are "smart" so that you can control them.
This is the main Samsung SmartThings button that we use in our house.
We have two of such button:
1) In the living room - one press will on the cove lights, downlights, TV, ceiling fan and close the curtains.
Press two times to off everything in the house and open curtains.
2) On our dining table - mainly to on and off our dining table pendant lights when we are there to eat.
We do not want to go over to the wall switches every time we want to on or off the pendant lights. Hence, we place a SmartThings button on our dining table just to do that.
Whenever the motion sensor sense any motion from us, it will automatically turn on the lights. Hence, no need for us to find our wall switch to on or off the lights.
This is especially useful during the night when we are up making milk for our son.
We also installed a Multipurpose sensor on our main door. Whenever the door is opened, our living room lights and ceiling fan will automatically turn on.
We scheduled a routine to let it vacuum at 9am.
Every Tue and Sat, the robot will vacuum and mop our house.
How nice to come home to a clean house everyday after work.
This is how we set different scenes. E.g. From 6pm till 6.30am, our living room lights will automatically turn on when our main door is opened.
Depending on each individual habits, different scenes can be set.