Well, now that we are all moved in, we needed to find something that would work with our Xplornet network and how getting a smart home setup on a 25Mbs connection would be a challenge. During our research, we found a lot of products that can do a lot of things, but we stuck with something simple that matched our needs.

Does it have a phone app? Can multiple people connect to it? Can it integrate with our Google ecosystem? And yes, I said Google ecosystem. Both Elma and I are hooked onto it. 

There are a lot of good systems out there that fulfilled the criteria, however, we went with Smartthings as it allowed me to code for it. Yes, it was an appeal to my geeky side.

Here is our gig, a Smartthings Hub, a few motion sensors and a dozen bulbs:

Initial home automation setup

In the next post we will talk about what was done.