Welcome

So you want to get started setting up a smart home but you don't know where to begin. The key things to know up front are:

1) Cost - How much are you willing to spend on a system?

2) Function - What do you want it to do?

3) Usability - Do you want a set and forget system or something you can tinker with?

Let's cover these one at a time.

1) Cost - In the Singapore context the price of smart home gadgets varies a lot. It can be from around $30 for a Yeelight blue up to about $300 for a Philips Hue starter kit. You would then need to add on additional hubs, bulbs of smart switches to complete the setup so it can run into the thousands. If you are just dipping your toes into the smart home space then spending that kind of money might not make sense since you may discover that it isn't able to accomplish what you want.

2) Function - What do you really want it to do? Turn on the lights and air conditioning before you come home? or perhaps to set the mood when it's movie night? There are some limitations to what smart homes can do, which we will cover in a later post, but knowing what you want done will help to inform your budget decisions.

3) Usability - Now this comes at a cost. If you want it to be simple, then it's going to cost you. Products in this camp would be the Apple Homekit or the Samsung SmartThings hub, there are also options that run on the Zigbee standard but we'll leave that for another day. However if you're willing to put in a little bit of effort to set it up then it can significantly bring down your costs. This would basically mean buying individual component systems, such as light bulbs from TP-Link, switches from Belkin, air conditioner interfaces from Ambi Climate and using IFTTT as your hub.

Through out our reviews we will cover the pros and cons of each device and how they integrate with these systems.