Best Smart Home Hub 2023

This is a good and important question before you jump into buying smart home devices.

In general, your smart home is going to use data bandwidth from two different sources.

The first source and the one that will take the bulk of your smart home demands is your home internet bandwidth plan.

Most of your smart devices rely on WiFi and a good internet connection. Your home internet bandwidth is going to support in part most of the smart devices in your home.

Getting ready to start making upgrades to turn your plain home into a smart home? The first step will be to make sure your internet has enough bandwidth to handle the extra data demands.

Consider calculating the data demands for the smart devices that you want to install. Especially if you have a limited data plan for your home internet to avoid having to pay outrageous overage charges.

Your best bet is to get a high data bandwidth plan or an unlimited data plan to be safe.

Once you’ve determined that you’ve got enough data to cover all your devices, make sure your WiFi router has enough bandwidth to manage your devices without slowing down.

Most WiFi routers can support many devices depending on bandwidth. If it doesn’t have enough to support your smart home, smart lighting devices, plus all the video streaming devices, you’ll experience slow download speeds.

An easy fix is to alter video resolutions on items like video doorbells, and security cameras. This will help, but if it doesn’t, you should consider an upgrade to your home’s router or bandwidth.

The second place that you are going to notice an increase in data usage from your smart home, is on your cell phone plan.

The ease of being able to check in on your home from anywhere is fun and tempting. Imagine being able to tap into your heating and cooling systems or change your sprinkler settings from your phone.

Yet, these activities use data on your cell phone plan. Again, make sure your data plan has some wiggle room and if necessary upgrade to an unlimited data plan to be safe.

You can read our article: Can Too Many Smart Devices Slow Down WiFi? to learn more about how smart home devices and bandwidth requirements.

Smart homes are great!

They can do so many things to make your life easier, but what exactly does that mean.

Well, first let’s look at what a smart home consists of, so you have a better understanding of the potential capabilities of a smart home.

A smart home is a house that has been modified to incorporate a variety of technology devices that make it easier for a home owner to monitor their home, modify home systems remotely, improve home efficiency and increase home security.

All of these features are controlled from a central controller, and most have some sort of smartphone app that can be used to access home systems remotely.

With that said, the things that your smart home can do are becoming nearly endless.

On the serious side of things, smart homes can provide you with added security features like cameras, video doorbells, motion sensors, and motion-sensing lights.

All of these can be tied to your smart hub, and your smartphone, allowing for real-time monitoring of your home.

Smart homes improve the efficiency of basic home functions like lighting, heating, air conditioning and outdoor irrigation.
Smart thermostats can learn your patterns and adjust temperatures automatically.

New irrigation timers know when it’s raining and can shut off automatically or can be controlled from your smartphone.

You can even teach your smart hub to know your morning, daytime and evening routines so that you never have to turn on lights, set a coffee maker or adjust your thermostat again.

You can read our article The 5 Most Important Smart Home Benefits and Cons to learn all you can do with your smart home.

So we have a good basic understanding of what a smart home is.

It’s a living space that utilizes technology to accomplish tasks or makes basic daily activities easier.

These devices that make the frame of your smart home, are all connected together using the Internet and central control hubs that are connected to the Internet.

This connection between devices and your internet and WiFi is what is referred to as the Internet of Things or IoT.

The Internet of things is the premise of the technology that we use, can be connected to each other, communicate with each other, to automatically make our lives easier.

Your Smart home IoT is the network of devices that you install in your home to automate tasks such as adjusting your thermostat or creating a grocery list or dimming the lights for the perfect movie-watching atmosphere.

This is an interesting question and really depends on a couple of factors.

First, what your idea of a smart home is? Do you want just a few items to make your life a little easier, or do you want to go all out, and fully automate your home?

Second, your home size is going to play a large part in the cost of a complete smart home automation system.
Let’s consider that you are just looking for a few handy items to improve convenience in your home.

Maybe you want a new thermostat, a video doorbell, and a couple of smart lights. To connect everything, you’ll also need a smart hub.

A small investment like this, depending on the products you select can range from $300 to $1,000. This is a fairly easy investment for most homeowners to make.

Now, let’s consider that you are going big time, and want to automate everything in your house.

The list of items that you’ll need include:
Smart hub, smart lights, smart plugs, a security system, smart irrigation timer, automatic window shades, video doorbell, security cameras, thermostat, smart locks, a floor cleaning robot and if you really want to go big, don’t forget the smart fridge and lawnmower.

For the average four-bedroom house, fully automated, you are looking at spending around $25,000 for all of the bells and whistles.

Keep in mind, this cost will change depending on the size of the house and which features you decide to skip.