Optimizing your living space to seamlessly adapt to changing seasons is one of the best uses for a smart home, and also one of the coolest. A summer-tuned smart home will save you a ton of money and keep you more comfortable; plus, it's freaking awesome. Imagine the sci-fi satisfaction of watching your house independently prepare for a heatwave without you ever having to lift a finger.
Install a smart thermostat
Installing a smart thermostat can seem intimidating, but it's often simpler than you'd think. Modern kits are largely designed for standard homes and come with straightforward guides to help you connect the right wires. Follow the directions closely, use your phone to snap a picture of your original setup before you disconnect anything, and you'll probably be fine, but if you have any doubts, hire a professional to knock it out for you.
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The schedule option. Setting the blinds on the western side of the house to close at 2 pm and open at 6 pm is a blunt instrument, but it gets the job done, and it's easy. These Yoolax motorized blinds, for instance, work with major home automation systems from Amazon, Google, and more, and they come with a 15-channel timing remote, so you can schedule them right out of the package without even getting your smart home involved.
True-light sensing: Both of the above options work great, until there's a cloudy day. Illuminance sensors, either built directly into a smart blind's solar panel or stuck to a window sill, measure actual light intensity, then you can set a rule to tell your blinds to open when summer rains fall. Even relatively inexpensive products like these SwitchBot Blind Tilt Motorized Blinds have light sensors, plus, they work with your existing blinds.
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Create a conditional rule in your smart home app, something like "IF the room temperature hits 74, THEN turn on the smart plug connected to your fan."
Cure the open-door AC drain
My mom used to say "what are we, cooling the whole neighborhood?" if anyone left the door open in summer, but I still did, and it sometimes stayed open half the day. You can avoid AC waste and avoid becoming a nag with simple contact sensors. Something like this hooks up to your door and lets you know if it's opened or closed. You can connect them with your smart home software and create a rule that to turn your air conditioner off or to econ mode if a door is left open for three minutes, or just have an alert sent to your phone, so if a door is left open so you can yell about it.
Keep your home safe during summer vacations
Scheduling lights to turn off and on while you're on vacation is burglary-deterrence 101, but a determined thief is going to see through it if they're really casing the place. Instead of a predictable schedule, use built-in algorithms to make your house look convincingly occupied. Philips Hue lights offer a free "Mimic Presence" feature, while Alexa smart speakers have an Away Lighting routine that comes with its Guard Plus service that costs $4.99 a month. When you change your system status to "Away," these programs analyze your historical habits and machine algorithms to randomize your smart bulbs, plugs, and switches. They turn things on and off in unpredictable patterns, periodically shift smart shades, and can even stream audio or ambient TV noise to different rooms until it looks like an invisible family is living in your house while you're partying at Busch Gardens.
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