Smart home technology: How to build the perfect high-tech home

A Wi-Fi kettle. Try that again in your best Peter Kay voice. “Wi-Fi? Kettle?” Yes folks, welcome to 2015, the year in which you can buy a kettle that connects to your home network so you can boil water from any room in your house, rather than having actually to be in the kitchen like some kind of bloody caveman.

While this sounds mildly preposterous – the kettle will, after all, have to have been pre-filled which involves you being physically proximate, and you’ll have to trudge to the kitchen to make the tea like said bloody caveman once the thing has boiled – this is nevertheless the moment when the long yearned-for utopian vision of the smart home is finally sputtering fitfully to life.

But how easy is it to give your home some smarts? What kinds of things can you do? And, ultimately, does any of this stuff bring genuine benefits or are we just drawn to the idea of adding a CPU and IP address to everything because we geeks just like tech? There was only one way to find out: add smart home devices to my flat and live with them for a while.

The landlord barrier

We drew up a list of kit I wanted to try, ensuring that I represented most types of smart home equipment – and this was where I hit my first problem.

My wife and I, like much of the population, rent our flat, so some of the really exciting stuff, stuff that builds into the very fabric of your home, was off limits because our landlord wouldn’t allow it. I wanted, for example, to replace the Yale lock on the front door with the Schlage Sense lock. This, compatible with Apple’s HomeKit system, uses Bluetooth so you can unlock the door with your iPhone, and since I’m much less likely to forget that than my keys, this would vastly decrease my chances of locking myself out of the flat. Indeed, since you can unlock using spoken commands with Siri, even if I manage to lock both my phone and my keys inside the house, I should be able to issue the command via my Apple Watch if it’s within Bluetooth range (or just punched in the lock’s backup PIN).

Similarly, since we are forced to endure the pointless charade of storage heaters rather than proper central heating, there was no way I could test a Nest, Hive, Tado, Ecobee3 or any of the other myriad smart thermostats now on the market. Ditto mains-powered smart smoke detectors. You can’t really blame the landlord – who knows if these devices will even be supported by the time you hand back the keys, never mind remain functional and compatible with the new tenants’ devices.

For many of us, therefore, the promise of the smart home is scuppered before we even begin – not by the limitations of technology or budget or compatibility or anything else, but simply because of the wider socio-economic climate.

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The acceptable smarts

Still, there are still plenty of things I could add. There are dozens of companies selling smart lightbulbs, for example – including the Pulse by Sengled, which also works as a speaker – but Philips is still the daddy with its Hue system. What started as a basic kit consisting of three bulbs and a bridge for connecting them to your LAN – with brightness and colour being controlled from your smartphone – has now grown into a broad range including lamps, light strips and the delightfully geeky Hue Tap, a programmable light switch that is powered by the act of pressing it. I also have the Hue Go, a wonderful little battery-powered bowl of soft light, which hooks into the system (you can read my full review here).

My wife and I love the flexibility and personalisation of the Hue lights, and the fact that it’s now HomeKit-compatible means I can just raise my wrist and say “hey Siri, turn off the lights in the bedroom”. This is both pleasingly Star Trek and useful – as are optional geofences to turn lights off automatically when you leave. There was one occasion, however, when I had failed to link my wife’s iPhone to the system properly, leading to a plaintive text message asking me to switch the lights on in the living room when I was a hundred miles away.

Also terrific are the Wi-Fi-connected devices from Withings. Our baby monitor, for example, connects to our Wi-Fi network, and because it works with an app, we can repurpose old iOS and Android devices to work as monitors. I set up our old iPad in the kitchen so that there’s a permanent station for keeping an eye on our daughter. If we wanted to add additional screens to, say, the most popular standalone baby monitor on Amazon, we’d be looking at £70 a pop, but even if you don’t have a retired iPod touch in a drawer somewhere, you can pick one up on eBay for a fraction of that. Being able to see my daughter sleep when I’m away on business is also a bittersweet joy.

Withings’ smart scales are also fab. I stand on them after my shower and they automatically send my weight and body fat percentage to the cloud. Being able to see your weight creeping up long before you notice your waistband tightening can make a huge difference. What’s more, because Withings has made its app talk to Apple’s system-wide Health framework, I can launch the Heath app and simultaneously check the weight data coming from the scales, my “number of flights climbed” from my iPhone and my number of miles walked from my Watch.

That kind of OS-level, manufacturer-agnostic data collection is key, not only to Health, but to the entire smart home concept. The major source of friction and overhead in this experiment has been that although you can buy a smart “this”, a Wi-Fi-connected “that” and a Bluetooth-enabled “the other”, each one has its own mobile app and interface. This means not just signing up for new accounts – which is increasingly tedious, and carries the risk that I’m just creating more opportunities for my details to leak – but also having to get my iPhone, unlock it, find the app and then navigate a custom UI that, simply by dint of being different from any other, slows me down in tiny, but galling, ways.

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Come together

There is hope, though, and it’s the thing that means I’m more comfortable than ever making hubristic statements about 2015 being the year the smart home finally started to show genuine promise. Google has its Brillo platform and Apple has HomeKit. Apple is often criticised for creating walled gardens, very pretty places which nevertheless lock everyone else out. With HomeKit, however, Apple is striking a welcome balance between an impossibly anarchic free-for-all and a completely locked-down dictatorship. HomeKit is there to be licensed to other companies, and while getting certified is an expensive and drawn-out process, the promised result – everything in your house understanding everything else, easily controllable from your iPhone or Watch – is beguiling.

You can, for example, set up chains of commands so that you just say “good night” and your HomeKit-enabled lights will turn off, bar the light in the hallway which dims down to a soft red for dark-accustomed eyes as you stumble to the toilet at 3am. That same command could also turn off anything connected to two specific HomeKit-enabled power sockets, but not three others.

HomeKit works because Apple has a list of types of accessories that it supports, and it standardises the data they report. That means you can control one manufacturer’s kit from another’s app (if the developer permits it). HomeKit is crying out for an official control app on iOS.

Living the dream

Still, once you’ve gone through the process, there really is something magical about raising your wrist, issuing a command, and having your home respond. Wondering “will this work?” – since it’s not one of the official scene-setting commands Philips lists – I tried “hey Siri, turn the lights down a bit in the living room”, and it was parsed and acted on. It’s not quite Iron Man’s Jarvis, but it’s still exciting. Triggers are coming too, so that you could, say, have the light in your bedroom turn blue when the thermometer outside records a temperature under 5°C, warning you to seek out your thermal undies.

The bad news is that there is very few HomeKit, and fewer still Brillo-compatible devices out there, and that even those pioneering systems have teething problems. I still can’t access them from outside the flat, for example, despite the presence of two signed-in Apple TVs, which should act as gateways, and extensive troubleshooting.

The good news is that, when it works, it’s not only useful, but a little bit wonderful. The more aware and context-sensitive our homes become, the more complex behaviours can be built that start to approximate the experience of having a butler, doing your bidding either on command or automatically. That sounds like a future I want to live in.

We come back to the Wi-Fi kettle. Unless it’s a bad kettle, unless it doesn’t work reliably, or unless you can’t or don’t want to spend a hundred quid on a kettle (all distinctly reasonable objections), why not have one that has Wi-Fi? It will continue to operate as a normal kettle but can also offer to boil itself when you arrive home. You don’t need to do this every time for it to be a welcome feature.

Look, 2015 was no more the year of the smart home than it was the year of Linux on the desktop, but it’s the first time ever, even for someone in a rented property, that I’ve caught a glimpse of its real and achievable promise, rather than it being something forever locked away in a bright, but ultimately fatuous, illustration of “The Home of Tomorrow” in a glossy magazine from the fifties. Hey Siri, deliver on that promise.

Will we have to wait until iOS 10 comes out until Apple HomeKit really comes of age? It’s increasingly looking that way. Click here to find out what we want (and expect) to arrive with iOS 10.