DIY Home Automation Guide for Beginners

If you wish there was more time in the day, home automation can help. Once it’s set up, simple voice commands or mobile app finger taps keep the ball rolling.

Whether you're looking for your first smart device, expanding your collection, or making your devices cooperate, here are four steps for smart home beginners to leap into home automation. Before you know it, you’ll be living in a twenty-first-century smart home.

There are thousands of ways to automate your home—making it easy to go overboard on smart devices you don’t need. We suggest starting slowly with one or two smart devices before gradually adding more.

• Cost: You can buy smart devices on almost any budget. Decide where your limits lie.
• Setup: Stick to intuitive smart devices that match your skill level—some electrical devices (like smart thermostats and smart outlets) require more technical skills to set up than others.
• Lifestyle: Everyone is different, so the smart gadget your neighbor swears by might not work for you. See our section on a balanced smart home for basic lifestyle categories.
• Research: Before buying, read customer opinions, buyers guides, and independent reviews. You don't need to do as much research as us (that's our job), but different perspectives always help.

Below, we highlight some of our favorite products for smart home beginners that are easy to use, affordable, or too good to pass up.

We also include links to relevant comparisons of the best smart home products and possible combinations of devices to help you choose your next smart product.

The biggest dilemma in the smart home is which platform to use. Using a single platform, your devices can talk to each other and you can control them in a central place.

This allows you to manage everything remotely through an app on your smartphone, computer, or voice control using digital assistants like Alexa, Google Assistant^†, and Siri.

While you want to maximize your devices' compatibility with each other, you won't find a single smart home system that works with everything. For now, your best bet is to use devices that work with multiple smart home platforms.

Take a look at our room-by-room guide for inspiration on how you can create your automated home.

Once you sample what a smart home can offer, it's hard to resist adding more devices. As you do, consider these four categories to achieve balance: control, entertainment, security, and utilities. These categories can help turn your tech daydreams into a smart home that's helpful and uniquely yours.

As you add more goodies to your smart home, you can create more routines and automations with your existing gear.

A smart home's ultimate goal is devices working together to streamline your day. There are two ways to make your devices work for you: routines and automations.

Routines group device functions together under a single command—some companies call them scenes or shortcuts. This allows you to change multiple settings at once to skip the burdensome and slow process of using manual controls one by one on a smartphone app or smart speaker.

Scenes and routines are useful in two ways:

• To control multiple settings on a single device. For example, adjust a smart bulb to the right brightness and color to set the mood as you curl up with a good book.
• To control multiple settings across a group of devices. A good example would be playing music from your smart speaker, increasing the brightness of lights, and turning down the thermostat for an exercise session.

While the process for creating routines, scenes, and shortcuts varies slightly from app to app, the steps are often universally easy:

1. Find out where the app allows you to create routines.
2. Select the device(s) you want to control.
3. Adjust the device settings to your liking.
4. Give the routine a simple or memorable name—especially helpful if you plan to activate it using a smart speaker.
5. Try out your new routine to see if it's working correctly.

Automations use a cause/effect structure that allows devices to react automatically to changing conditions in your home. While they have a longer setup process and require more critical thinking than routines, they're the pinnacle of smart home convenience.

Setting up an automation consists of two parts: choosing what activates the system and specifying how the system reacts. Here are some common triggers and actions you can mix and match in most smart home systems:

• Setting a schedule allows you to control when devices turn on/off during the day. It's handy for predictable events like waking up and going to bed.
• Voice and app commands are the most common ways to activate routines. They're helpful for manually starting devices on demand, like when you want more light in the kitchen.
• Status changes allow the system to react to different stimuli. These are especially great for security since they can tell a sensor to send a notification or sound an alarm when there's activity.
• Geofencing allows the system to change settings based on your location. This is useful for preparing an empty house for your arrival after work or locking up when you go to the store.

• What's the Difference between Zigbee and Z-Wave?
• What Is Home Automation and How Does It Work?
• The Best Smart Home Security Systems
• Room-by-Room Guide to Home Automation