Sam Whitfield
The most frustrating part of setting up a smart home is finally fixed You buy your first smart home device, a Thread-enabled smart lock or sensor. You open the app on your phone, scan the Matter QR code, and nothing happens. Your phone cannot find the device. After 20 minutes of searching, you discover the … Read more
Philips Home Access just expanded its smart deadbolt lineup with new handleset and lever combo options, timed perfectly for Prime Day 2026. If you’ve been eyeing a smart lock but wanted a cohesive front-door look instead of a mismatched deadbolt and handle, this is your moment. The new combos pair Philips’ 4000 and 4200 Series … Read more
When the Internet Goes Down, Your Smart Home Should Not Shut Off Power outage. ISP maintenance. A squirrel chewing through a fiber line. The internet goes down more often than anyone likes to admit, and when it does, most smart homes turn into expensive paperweights. Lights will not turn on. Thermostats forget their schedules. Cameras … Read more
Your pets can’t call 911 when something goes wrong. These 8 smart home devices create a safety net for your animals — plus one popular device to skip. Smart cameras let you check on pets from anywhere Why Your Pets Need a Smart Safety Net Every day, pet owners leave dogs and cats in empty … Read more
Smart showers. Smart toilets. Smart toothbrushes. The bathroom is the new frontier for smart home marketing, and most of it is nonsense. A toothbrush that sends brushing data to your phone. A mirror that shows the weather while you shave. A toilet that tweets. (Yes, that’s real.) But buried under the gimmicks are a few … Read more
Why Smart Blinds Are the Most Underrated Smart Home Upgrade Everyone talks about smart speakers, smart thermostats, and smart locks. But smart blinds and curtains? They’re the upgrade that actually changes how your home feels — not just how it works. Imagine waking up to natural sunlight instead of a blaring alarm. Your blinds open … Read more
Why Your Smart Home Needs a Summer Tune-Up You set up your smart home in the winter. Your thermostat learns your heating schedule, your lights turn on at 4:30 PM because that is when it gets dark, and your automations assume you are inside most of the day. Summer changes everything. Days are longer, you … Read more
Why Your Front Door Is the Smartest Place to Start If you own one smart home device, it should probably be a video doorbell. It tells you who is at your door from anywhere, records package deliveries, deters porch pirates, and costs less than most other smart devices. But with Ring, Nest, Wyze, and Aqara … Read more
What if you could keep your wall switch and make it smart? For years, the smart home lighting dilemma has been simple but frustrating: you either replace your bulbs with smart ones and lose wall-switch control, or you stick with dumb bulbs and miss out on automation. The new LIFX Smart Dimmer Switch, which started … Read more
iRobot went bankrupt, got acquired by a Chinese robotics company, and came back with eight new Roomba models that are smaller, cheaper, and finally competitive again. If you wrote off Roomba after the failed Amazon acquisition and the financial collapse, the 2026 lineup deserves a second look. Here is what changed, what did not, and … Read more
