Smart Home Products
Smarter products for high-tech homes COMMUNICATION MEE TS AUTOMATION Lisa Goulian Twiste
“All these devices are starting to talk to each other through Amazon, Google or Apple Home. It’s starting to work pretty seamlessly, and it doesn’t take a PhD in physics to use them,” Farnsworth said. “Customers want to make life better, easier and more efficient, and a lot of Smart Home products are enabling that. If the oven is on and shouldn’t be, it shuts automatically. If a garage door has been open for three hours straight, it automatically closes. There are doors that lock themselves at 10 p.m. and thermostats that act according to your habits. A homeowner can now install his own alarm system — something unthinkable 10 years ago.”
A growing list of smart products
Smart Home illustration from Homedepot.com
T
he concept of Smart Home technology is nothing new. It can be traced back to the turn of the 20th Century with the introduction of remote controls and the first home appliances. But the Smart Home of today is something much more complex and transformative. It’s a place where systems can communicate with each other and be controlled with a smart device either inside the home or out, making life easier and more convenient. People really started taking notice of modern Smart Home technology about a decade ago with products like speakers, light switches and robotic vacuum cleaners, but it’s only in the last five years we’ve seen mass adoption in appliances, lighting, HVAC, audio/visual, computers, home security and other categories. According to industry statistics, the Smart Home market went from $55 billion in 2016 to nearly $80 billion last year, and a recent report from Fortune Business Insights said this number should reach $622 billion by 2026. According to Grant Farnsworth, president of the Farnsworth Group and a respected analyst of the building/construction and home improvement industries, the market is growing more rapidly because the latest generation of products is easier to use, more intuitive and less intimidating to homeowners. At the same time, contractors are becoming more comfortable with Smart Home technology due to fewer callbacks, simplicity of the products, ease of installation and connectivity of platforms.
28
Januar y 2022 HARDWARE + BUILDING SUPPLY DEALER
The Smart Home market has seen an explosion of new products in the last few years, from Nest Protect, a smoke and carbon monoxide detector that alerts you of potential danger, to the Wyze Cam v2 Wi-Fi-enabled camera, which lets you see everything going on at home without paying a monthly fee, There’s Garagesmart, which includes tools that simplify tasks like storing large items, parking a car safely in your garage and lifting the top off a truck. And we are also seeing a proliferation of wholehouse air-purification systems and smart light bulbs that adjust to your mood as part of a more recent trend emphasizing the connection between a Smart Home and a healthy home. Wayne, a leading maker of water management solutions, recently introduced the Basement Guardian HALO, the first Alexa-compatible device to give homeowners real-time control of and information about the operation of their basement sump pump. According to Adam Justice, CEO of Grid Connect, which worked with Wayne to develop the HALO, Smart Home technology has come a long way — even since the 2018 launch of Gemini, the first-generation Basement Guardian product. “It started with products that would make people say, ‘Ooh, that’s neat. I can turn a light on or off.’ Now, it’s about devices that can solve specific problems,” Justice said. “The Gemini sump pump was a nice monitor type experience, but the new product has much deeper integration and was designed with ‘smart’ in mind from the beginning. The
"It started with products that would make people say, ‘Ooh, that’s neat. I can turn a light on or off.’ Now, it’s about devices that can solve specific problems." —Adam Justice, Grid Connect
HBSDealer.com
