Smart is very much a buzword at the moment. We’ve had smartphones around for ten to 15 years or thereabouts. And smart home technology is one of the fastest growing market sectors in the country. But what is a smart home? What constitutes a smart home? For some people? A smart device.

Let’s take smart lighting, for instance. Now, can you really say that being able to use a voice control like Alexa to turn on a light bulb is smart? Now, I don’t really think you can. That’s just using your voice as a switch instead of your finger on a switch and saves you having to get up from the chair to do it.

It’s clever, it’s modern technology, but I don’t really think it’s smart. You have smart thermostats like nest and Hive. Now they’re starting to get a bit more clever, in my view, because with those, certainly with nest, that measures how long it takes your house to warm up and then uses that information to know or to suggest when to turn the boiler on in the mornings in the winter, so that your home is at the temperature you want it to be at the time that you say it, want it to be at that temperature.

So that, to me, is a lot more smart. It’s not just using your phone to turn on your thermostat and your boiler, it’s actually making that decision for itself. And that’s where I think smart really comes into play. With a smart home system that’s really smart, you’ll find that lots of different kind of home services all interact with each other and control each other.

So if one thing happens, something else is then triggered automatically. So, for instance say, obviously, your system tracks where your phone is. So when it knows that you’ve all left home, it remembers to turn the alarm on, and it turns down the thermostat by three degrees to save energy.

And it makes sure all your lights are off and it makes sure the doors are locked. That, to me, is smart. So, a smart home system encompasses security, with locks and alarms and cameras and video doorbells. And it also includes lighting and it includes your heating.

It can include things like garage doors. It can include small appliances like hair straighteners. So, for instance with the scenario that I just said about when you’ve left home, it makes sure that the hair straighteners are turned off or all the irons turned off. It can measure when you’re coming back home so that it will then start to turn the thermostat up for you.

And when it knows that you’ve actually got home, then it will disarm the alarm and unlock the door for you. Smart is when you open a door, say a door to a cupboard, and the light in the cupboard automatically comes on. And when you close the door, it turns that light off again so that you’re not constantly wasting electricity because someone’s forgotten to turn the light off.

That’s smart to me. I think in another 10-12 years time, I think smart home technology will have been used an awful lot more. And I think we’ll start to think of smart home technology in the same way that we think of smartphones now, and that everybody’s got one. And in ten to twelve years time, I think everybody will have a smart home to a lesser or greater degree.