Make Your Home Smart for Under $1000
**Our honesty policy: This post may contain affiliate links and I may be compensated if you make a purchase at no extra cost to you. Some are, some aren't--I do some comparison shopping. The important thing is you will know exactly what we are talking about. Drop a note/comment if you have any questions on the products as these are materials and tools we use on our own projects.
Thinking of making your house smart, automated and conservation friendly without breaking the bank? This post is for you!
As with everything, we all have limited dollars to spend and generally we also have more on our wish list than the budget allows. However, technology in the smart home arena has really advanced at a price point that is actually affordable. If you have a $100K house, it is possible to spend less than 1% of your home worth to protect it and make your home life available on your phone wherever you are!
Vacations?
Hooky day off?
Unexpected extended work trips?
The devices on this list make controlling the temperature, watering your yard, asking your neighbor to grab the delivery on your doorstep, or anything else you forgot instantly accessible!
The List
(click on the links for the actual price per Amazon’s affiliate marketing policy of not posting the actual price–some are significantly less than MSRP–and also because the price does fluctuate)*:
- Wyze Cams @$30 / each (assuming this Kingston 32 Gb micro SD card and shipping)
Moen Flo MSRP $499Phyn Plus MSRP $699 –better suited for a desert environment. There isn’t a more durable water monitor out there and so if Phyn Plus doesn’t survive this summer this experiment is over. Yes, this pushes the price of this article past the $1000 advertised price, but for my particular situation, this is worth it.- Melnor Raincloud MSRP $150
- RCA Wi-Fi Doorbell MSRP $150
- Sensi Wi-Fi Thermostat MSRP $169
We’ve recently upgraded and added these devices our own home. Having shared our excitement prior to installing them with friends, family and neighbors, I’m excited to share our initial results with individual posts on each device soon to come. As with most projects–and this is more than just one–it has been a mixed bag.
A visual outside and inside your house.
First off, when it comes to checking in on and securing your property remotely, both inside and out, there are lots of security systems available. You could argue different ways on relying on battery versus continuous power (more in this Wyze Cam only post) along with setting up cameras outside or facing out of a window.
My coworker was so kind as to mention–and show me–his Wyze Cam where he showed me his son racing around his kitchen island. For about $30 you can have a Wyze Cam and a 32 GB micro SD card.
Not just cute, but also well thought out, Wyze Cams are an amazing value.
Compare a Wyze Cam to Blink, which at the time was coming in at $120 for a single camera without the ability for playback.
Four cameras for the price of one?
Yeah, I’ll take that and put one in every single one of my sixteen windows.
So when given a more economical answer we opted for Wyze Cams. They allowed us spend more on bigger ticket items that do not have cheaper options for the features we desired.
Water monitoring.
Next, I already had a Melnor Raincloud. As you may recall in this past post, I am thrilled to have the ability to water my citrus trees while waking up in a basement 1,500 miles away without having to put in a legitimate underground irrigation system. While an irrigation system is still in the planning phase, this Band-Aid fix is still a mostly good, and more importantly, mostly working option.
<still applicable, but Phyn Plus is now installed in place of Flo by Moen> The Melnor Raincloud and Flo by Moen had some clashes in operation when I started using it again as spring rolled around. Definitely check out my findings in this post so you don’t have similar issues with ANY watering system if you have ANY water monitoring and shutoff system when irrigation starts up: Prevent Water Damage 24/7: A Flo by Moen Review
Here is the Phyn Plus review: Phyn Plus Feature Deep Dive Review
In any case, since the watering system in the backyard needs a little more monitoring at this time, it’s nice to have a visual ensuring the trees are actually getting watered. Likewise, since I’ve had a leaky pipe in the past, if another leak occurs it would be nice to see inside of the house if water is seeping through the rooms.
Two answers I chose to answer these problems are Moen Flo and Wyze Cams.
My very own Flo!
As I shared in this post, Moen Flo is a whole house water monitoring system. So if another supply plumbing leak occurs, Flo will catch it, let me know, and shut off the water if I am unable to answer the phone or access the phone app.
Flo by Moen Phyn Plus tells me if last night’s watering zone went off and, if so, how much.
The Wyze Cams let me see if the water is too high and overflowing the berms. We can also see that all is well on the cameras inside the house.
Temperature control / air conditioner monitoring.
The middle of the summer, the dead of winter or when you are not home is when your air conditioner is most likely to go out. A Wi-Fi thermostat is the answer for constant monitoring rather than a neighbor or friend stopping in from time to time.
As for the Wi-Fi thermostat we chose, we were disappointed to discover this particular model does not have the ability to change the temperature differential. My husband spent four days in the attic improving the ducting, so now the house cools off in minutes rather than a half hour. So with a one degree differential the air conditioner started short cycling, turning on and off every five minutes or so. It was a disappointment.
Despite the fact we wanted to control our house temperature remotely, short cycling and killing the A/C was the worse evil. So the old thermostat went back in place.
So in a pinch one of the Wyze Cams was retasked: it is now pointed at the old thermostat.
You gotta laugh at the image of the white and black Wyze Cam in the reflection.
On the up side, we discovered ANY thermostat can be semi Wi-Fi enabled for $30.
While you can’t control the temperature, if you are on vacation, you can see that your air conditioner is still working. Just remember to set it higher if you so desire before you leave. Or ask your neighbor to stop by if you forget. In any case, you don’t have to ask your neighbors to stop by and see if the air conditioner is still working once a week. You can limit your requests to ask them to let the repairman in if there is a problem…then you can watch, listen and even speak to the repair tech as they do the repair work.
Update 10/21/19: After returning the first Wi-Fi themostat, we tried out Sensi and have been very pleased after using it through the hot summer months since June.
Front door service.
The last thing we upgraded was the doorbell. Since the Wyze Cams are all inside it’s nice to be able to tell the poor delivery guy from M.V.Pita he’s at the wrong house and help him find the right address. In this day and age, onboard storage with remote backup of motion activities on the cloud are commonplace. I opted for the RCA Video Doorbell since it had all the options without a subscription fee for data storage.
Garage door monitoring.
Of other note, we already had a Wi-Fi enabled garage door opener. When the old one died at least five years ago, the new one came with this feature. It is another great home security measure. It is also the easiest answer for closing the door if you accidentally forget to close the garage door after you leave your home on any given morning and your neighbor calls you up (or after this incident we figured out how to set up a notification on the phone app).
Chamberlain garage door phone app history tab.
Yeah, but I’m no tech guru.
I want to be clear that I am not a super technology user. While I may pound on a keyboard as of last month for several years in a row as an engineer, my idea of a good time is a good craft brew and laying some tile. This round of home upgrades pretty much doubled the apps on my phone (that I actually use–the rest were already installed when I got the phone). If I can do it and embrace it, you can do it too!
With the combination above we now have a smart home for under $1000.
Leak prone plumbing, watering plants, monitoring the growing pigeon family in the palm tree, air conditioning and security are all easily controlled from my phone. It’s pretty wild what you can do from anywhere in the world.
The ability to have all of this at your fingertips is phenomenal, but it’s also great to have these systems in place to double check and see what all is going on. As I briefly touched on before, I can check in on the Flo app to see if the orange tree was watered last night. If not, I’ll turn on the Raincloud right now manually and then use the Wyze Cam pointed at it to verify the berm below fills up and does not overflow. Just for entertainment I can go back to Flo to check out how many gallons just got dumped in there. I’ll be sharing a few more situations like this in the upcoming posts on the individual devices.
*If you have a Kroger family store in your area, consider going to get an Amazon gift card when they have 4x gas points on gift cards. That way you can get a dollar off a gallon of gas four times. For instance if you have a diesel with a 35 gallon tank and you fill up 30 gallons a pop then you’ll be getting $120 back. My little Mazda 3 will only give me $40 back, but I could get a couple pizzas and couple packs of local beer for that exchange.
