Technology is advancing a t a fast pace and smart home technologies bring a lot of ways to sophisticate your living experience. They bring homeowners and their families a lot of advantages including the convenience of operating the household appliances remotely. Before you might explore the ways of moving your home towards the concept of smart home, here are a few pros and cons of smart home technology explained.
Pros of smart home technology
Remote monitoring capabilities
As smart home technology lets you monitor your home remotely on the move from wherever you are, you can enjoy a greater peace of mind. This capability also lets you countering the dangers of forgotten chores like a coffeemaker left on or the front door left unlocked.
Ability to incorporate user preferences
Smart home technology is highly customizable. You can use these programs to open the garage door, switch on the lights, turn on the fireplace or play favorite music during different timings as per the way you program them.
Monitoring the seniors remotely
Smart home devices help the caregivers in remotely monitoring the seniors staying at home. This allows they to remain in the home safely for longer times rather than having to move to some other assisted residence.
Enhances efficiency of managing the home
Smart home devices let you manage the home efficiently in a way avoiding energy wastage and making the optimum use of resources across several topics of home management.
Saving resources and money
A smart irrigation system for instance waters the lawns only when required. In the process, the system releases only the required amount of water. Once the smart home devices are set up and running, you will find that the water, energy and other resources are managed efficiently.
Smart virtual assistants
Virtual assistants like Amazon Echo or Google Home can use speech recognition or voice commands as prompts to accomplish tasks.
Cons of smart home technology
Smart home technology is no doubt highly alluring and largely advantageous. Nevertheless, there are also some downsides to using this technology you must beware of.
Needs a reliable internet connection
If the internet connection goes down due to some kind of outage, devices connected to the smart home system cannot be operated.
Complex to manage
Often smart home technology is found complex to manage. People who lack patience with technology might find it inconvenient to cope with. However, smart home technologies is growing now and the manufacturers of this technology and smart home devices are taking steps to reduce the complexity and improve the user friendliness of this technology.
Absence of standards
Since smart home technology and smart home devices lack some established standards, interoperability can’t be ensured. There is no gold standard of home automation achieved yet. However, things are rapidly improving.
Privacy and security issues
There are some security challenges in smart home devices as they lack in-built encryption. There is the risk of hackers infiltrating smart devices. Data privacy is one another concern voiced by smart home technology users. However, this area is also improving fast to bring some comforting promises to the users.