 Even just a few years ago, smart homes were not a thing. Or they were, but you had to be a total nerd or super rich to have one. Now everything's different. If you have an Amazon Echo, you have the beginning of a smart home. If you have any appliance you can turn on or off from your phone, you have part of a smart home. It turns out that smart homes are really easy to start building nowadays and you can do some pretty cool things with them like control your lights, your heating, your TV. You're often more limited by what would be dumb and excessive than what you actually want to do. So how do you get started? We're gonna go to my apartment and I'm gonna show you what you can do for under $200 to make your home a little bit smarter. Alright, so the first place to start is a voice assistant. I'll admit these can be kind of creepy but once you sort of get used to them they actually turn into a fun and pretty convenient way to control your stuff. I chose the Google Home Mini. It's $49 but they're on sale all the time so don't pay that much. Obviously you can use this to look stuff up or play music or podcasts but I mostly use mine to turn my lights and air conditioner on and off. I could just use a button or do it in my phone but it's actually a lot more convenient a lot of times especially if I'm on my way out the door or going to bed. Now we're gonna get into those smart lights and how I turned a dumb air conditioner into a smart one but before I do that I want to talk about how all these devices are talking to each other because there's a lot going on and it can get pretty confusing. You're probably familiar with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. Bluetooth is great for things like fitness trackers, headphones, mice and keyboards and Wi-Fi is great for well bringing internet to your laptop, smartphone, smart TV and so on but they're using different gadgets for a reason. They're designed to do different things. Bluetooth is pretty slow at transferring data and it can't travel very far but it doesn't use a ton of power. Wi-Fi is really fast and can travel farther but it does use a ton of power. There's really only one distinction that you have to remember. Bluetooth gadgets usually aren't connected to the internet so unless you connect them to some kind of hub you can't control them while you're out of the home. Where things get more complicated is when you get deeper into smart home tech. Turns out Bluetooth and Wi-Fi just don't fit the bill for everything. Neither are great for things like light bulbs that need to be reached at the way far end of the house. For that there are other wireless technologies like Zigbee and Z-Wave. These use really tiny amounts of energy so you can have sensors sitting around on battery power for months but that means they're super slow at transmitting data. They're also built to travel much farther because their messages can jump around. So one light bulb can transmit an off-command to the next one and the next one and so on. What this means is that if you're buying something you'll have to make sure it actually works with your stuff. One of the things that you're gonna need a hub for is smart lights. I think the best smart lights are from Philips Hue and you'll want to start with their starter kit because it comes with that hub which is gonna hook up to your router so that everything can talk together. The starter kit costs $64 it comes with a bunch of bulbs and while Philips has a bunch of like color changing stuff too don't worry about that it's just more than you need. Smart lights are great for just a bunch of little conveniences. You can have them automatically turn on when you come home or when the sun goes down. I bet you have at least one speaker in your house that isn't smart or could be smart. For $35 you can plug a Chromecast audio into it and they get able to do a lot more. So I have this two speaker system here it's old it's from like 2004 or something but if I hook the Chromecast audio up by plugging into the aux port I can now control it for my phone or do this I can say hey Google play Childish Gambino on both speakers. All right Donald Glover from Spotify and there we go playing on both speakers. All right so the last thing is a smart plug it's basically just an individual outlet that you can plug something into and then turn on and off. I got TP-Link's Kasa you can get a two pack of them for 45 bucks. So these things are really cool because they're all at once really versatile but also really limited because they literally just turn things on and off. So I connected my two air conditioners to them so that I can control them and turn them on when I'm coming home from work. Now some caveats they are literally just killing power to these things and turning them back on they can't control anything at all so my air conditioner it turns out will automatically resume its prior state when it turns back on. So because of that this works out really well because I can just flip it on and it's gonna start making things cool again. You can use this for things like fans and lamps too that are just gonna automatically resume their same state. So that's it that's just about $200 but there's a lot more you can do with the stuff you already have if you want to get a little bit more complicated. Using apps on your phone you can hook things together to do even more. There's a service called IFTTT if this then that that's really good for this. So for instance I set up a rule saying that if it's over 80 degrees in Brooklyn my air conditioner will automatically turn on and you can do that for all kinds of stuff with your lights with your speakers. Now I really think the best way to get into your smart home is to do it piece by piece like this. Buy one thing see how it works for you and then get whatever else makes sense next. Now I went with the Google Home Mini but it might make more sense for you to go with Alexa or if you use tons of Apple devices to go with the HomeKit system. Just start with whatever works for you and then add on bit by bit and before you know it you're gonna have a much smarter home. Hey thanks for watching if you like what you're doing you might like what our friends at Life Noggin are doing they make a bunch of animations explaining stuff like who is winning the global tech race.