If you want that as you enter your driveway your garage door should automatically unlock and open, the heating inside the house has just the right temperature, the light bulbs are switched on in the appropriate rooms and your favorite music begins to play on its own, you need a home automation hub.
In this post we are going to learn how to choose the best home automation hub for your requirement.
What is a home automation hub?
In a “smart” home, your gadgets should be able to talk to each other. By “talk”, it doesn’t mean they ought to be discussing the latest Netflix show (why not?), but if they need to coordinate with each other (for example, your mobile phone telling your water heater that you are approaching home so keep the bath ready) to create a better living experience for you and your family, they should be able to understand each other’s digital language.
These days, you can control practically every contemporary gadget with a mobile app. A remote control interface automatically ships with almost every mobile phone these days.
In the absence of a home automation hub you may have to use individual apps for different gadgets. This not only makes it difficult to remember which app is for which gadget, it also makes near to impossible for gadgets to interact with each other to automate certain tasks.
There is no common bridge that can act as an interpreter and a connector.
A hub does this job.
It makes it possible for different gadgets to interact with each other even when they use different communication protocols (Lutron ClearConnect, Wi-Fi, Z-Wave, ZigBee or Bluetooth LE, for example).
Suppose your fridge wants to send you a notification on your mobile phone that you have run out of milk. Instead of directly sending the notification to your mobile phone (requiring you to install a dedicated app in the process) the fridge can send the notification to the hub and then the hub, which has the common app on your mobile phone, can send the notification to your mobile.
This way, you can control and customize practically every gadget that is connected to your home automation hub.
Once you have a hub set up inside your home and the associated mobile app installed on your mobile phone or tablet, from a single command center, you can control everything that can be controlled (within your home, we are not talking about world domination).
How to choose the best home automation hub for your need?
Some of the popular home automation hub options these days are Amazon Echo, Google Home, Samsung SmartThings and Wink.
To be able to decide which is the best home automation hub for you, the most obvious thing is to decide what you want to achieve. What is the level of automation you’re looking at? Are you an automation freak or you simply want some basic tasks to be performed automatically without you having to bother with them?
Do you want your smartwatch to tell your air conditioner what the room temperature should be according to your pulse or you simply want to be able to tell the hub what temperature you want? Do you want to use the IFTTT scripts to have a better control over your apps and devices?
How many gadgets do you want to connect to the hub? What level of interactivity you want between the gadgets? How big is your house? Do you have multiple floors? What communication protocols your gadgets use to transmit signals? What is your budget?
There are simple automation hubs to achieve focused tasks, such as a lighting system that controls the lighting of your house according to the ambiance or your presence. Or maybe a heating system that increases or decreases the temperature according to the people present in a particular room.
Then there is multitask automation that allows different gadgets to control your home environment, for example your TV telling the hub to dim the lights, close the window blinds and put your phone on silent, when you start watching a movie.
Aside from the above, you may also like to consider the following factors to be able to select the right home automation hub for yourself:
- Communication protocols: Very simple hubs, for example, a Wi-Fi router to which you can connect your PC/laptop, mobile phones, tablets and printers, can use a common wireless protocol. Similarly, all the devices that are Bluetooth compatible can use the Bluetooth protocol. But there are many appliances that neither use regular wireless nor Bluetooth protocols. You may have different devices using different protocols such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, infrared, ethernet, Zigbee, KNX or Z-Wave. You may need to take this into consideration when choosing your home automation hub.
- Voice control: Would you like to control your devices using your voice commands (the way you can do with Google Home or Amazon Echo) or you simply want the devices to be able to send signals to each other to synchronize their functions?
- Operating system compatibility: Do you have an Android mobile phone or an iPhone? If you plan to use a tablet, do you have an Android tablet or an iOS tablet? Although most of the home automation hubs seamlessly work with these two operating systems, you may have a problem if you have a Windows Mobile phone.
- The complexity of tasks involved: There are simple hubs and there are very smart hubs, and which hub you decide to go with depends on the level of functions you want to perform. If you simply want your door lock to unlock and lock depending on whether you are returning our leaving, then you need a very simple automation hub, probably, even provided by the lock company itself. But if you want to control different devices and appliances like air conditioners, heating systems, curtains, light bulbs, home theatre system, security cameras and mobile phones and computers (just to name a few) you may need an advanced home automation hub.
Listed below are a few contemporary home automation hubs.
- SmartThings from Samsung: This is one of the pioneering home automation hubs. It is known to be able to control more than 200 devices and appliances. It comes with both Zigbee and Z-Wave support. The procedure of setting it up may be a bit complicated for many but considering that practically every device around you can be controlled with SmartThings, it might be worth the effort. Natively it doesn’t come with voice support, but if you have Google Assistant or even Alexa, the voice support can be easily incorporated. You can further automate SmartThings with IFTTT scripts. The batch files or the scripts that you create in SmartThings are called “routines”.
- Wink Hub 2: This home automation hub supports a wide range of communication channels and protocols including IFTTT, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth LE, Google’s Thread interface, Google Assistant, Alexa, and of course, Zigbee and Z-Wave. The great thing about Wink Hub 2 is that it automatically discovers compatible devices as soon as you switch it on. You can create various “robots” – they are like macros in an Excel sheet – that can be configured to perform multiple tasks in a sequence.
- Amazon Echo or Amazon Echo Dot: The former is bigger and the latter a smaller but they basically do the same job. These devices are sold as “speakers” but they are much more than that. You tell them, and they do it. They use the artificial-intelligence-powered Alexa voice interface. With different scripts and add-ons, they can also control your appliances. Compared to the dedicated home automation hubs mentioned above, the Echo range of gadgets have become more popular because of aggressive marketing and greater interactive experience. Not being conventional home automation hubs, they don’t work with other gadgets and appliances out-of-the-box, but they can be easily configured to get the desired results.
- Google Home Hub: Google likes to call it “Smart Home Controller”. The official website says that Google Home Hub seamlessly connects with 5000 smart devices including cameras, lighting systems, heating system, smart cooking systems, software-driven locks, garage doors and even kids and pet toys.
- Harmony: It is basically a “universal remote” built by Logitech. Various configurations are available based on how many devices you want to control and consequently varies the price. Per se, it is not an automation hub in itself, but it can be combined with many gadgets to automate various processes and functions in your residential environment.
- Securify Almond 3 Smart Home Wi-Fi System: As the name goes, it is a Wi-Fi system so it allows you to control everything that works on your Wi-Fi, aside from significantly increasing the range of your connection. Since, it facilitates Wi-Fi communication, all the devices that support the Wi-Fi protocol as well as other protocols that are used to control light bulbs, security systems, home theatres, heating systems, etc., can also be controlled by this Wi-Fi hub.
There are many more home automation hubs available in the market and in various combinations, they can be fine-tuned according to your need. How much fine tuning is needed, depends on the protocols followed by your individual home automation hub, the interface it comes with, and yes, its price. This is why, it always helps to make a list of tasks that you want your home automation hub to perform, in advance before you start researching for the best home automation hub for your house.
