Home Automation Mistakes That Could Be Costing You Money

So you’ve taken some steps to turn your home into a “smart” home, huh? That’s not a bad idea at all, especially when you consider how much more convenient it is to automate the humdrum tasks of daily life, such as setting (and re-setting) the thermostat, turning the lights on and off during the day, and locking all the doors at night. While the whole point of home automation is to make life a little easier, unfortunately many homeowners unwittingly make costly mistakes when setting up and maintaining their smart home system. Below are some home automation flubs that can put a drain on your wallet.

1. Failing to Assess Your Needs First

It’s easy to get excited about all of the latest and greatest innovations in smart home technology, but before you spend your hard-earned money on any cool home automation gadgets, you have to take some time to really assess your actual needs. What’s your work schedule like? How often do you travel? Are you big on home entertainment? Do you have children in the home? Factors like these should be taken into consideration before you decide to move forward with installing a home automation system.

2. Inadequate Ventilation for Equipment

Routers, gateway devices, hard drives, streaming devices, gaming consoles, etc., all emit some level of heat, and without adequate ventilation, the performance of your equipment can be hindered. In fact, poor ventilation will often shorten the lifespan of your equipment, which means more money out of your pocket to cover repair or replacement costs. Make sure that your home automation equipment–and all associated devices–have plenty of breathing room for heat to escape.

3. Buying Emerging Technology That Hasn’t Been Tested

It doesn’t take a genius to see that the smart home industry is exploding, which means that there are new smart gadgets popping up all the time. Unfortunately, some of these uber-cool devices have been brought to the market before being thoroughly tested, which means that glitches and bugs are often still being discovered even after these products have hit the shelves. While there’s nothing wrong with being an early adopter, be willing to take your time and do your homework to ensure that the product has been adequately tested before you waste money on a gadget that will conk out on you after only a few weeks of use.

4. Failure to Integrate All of Your Smart Home Devices

So you bought a cool smart thermostat from one company, a smart light switch from another company, and some smart door locks from a third manufacturer. While having several different intelligent devices is ultra-nifty, each device will come with its own app that you’ll have to learn how to use, as well as several nuances that will be specific to that device’s manufacturer. This can be more trouble than it’s worth, to the point where it becomes way too time-consuming to juggle all of the different gadgets you’ve purchased. That doesn’t sound too “smart,” does it?

When you choose a fully integrated home automation system such as BeHome247, you eliminate all of the confusion and hassle of dealing with multiple apps and interfaces. With BeHome247, you can manage all of your smart home devices from one intuitive and super-convenient interface on your smartphone, tablet, or laptop. This enables you to interact with all of your smart home devices as a group, which means that you won’t have to repeat the same actions several times over. This will ultimately save you lots of time and money, which is never a bad thing.

Without a doubt, this new wave of smart home technology brings a lot of benefits, but you have to make sure that you approach your purchases with a level head. Keep the above ideas in mind to maximize every dollar you spend, so that your home automation devices will truly add a new level of convenience and efficiency to your life.