I’ve got my starter kit, and an extra motion sensor installed, and now if there is any movement, or if my front door is opened when the house is empty, or at night, I get a notification. So far so good. I also want to automate a light turning on and off at intervals when it is between sunset and midnight when no-one is home, and I know pretty much what I need to do to make that happen.
So what next? My first thought was to buy some light switches that toggle a light on and off but also operate on z-wave, but they seem rather hard to come by. They must exist right? I’m amazing ST don’t make one (though all of their things so far have been customer install-able).
What about power sockets? I would love to had a smart power socket so that I could toggle appliances on and off. Paying a fortune for the bulky smartthings adapter seems like bad solution.
I’d love to have a smart socket where the iron is so that if I leave the house or go to sleep and it’s on, it turns off!
Any other ideas for getting started here? I’m in £230 and I seem to have hit a brick wall!
You could do a search on IFTTT for ‘smartthings’ and see if anything there takes your fancy. I like getting a Push notification on my iPhone when my front door opens.
I bought a Sonos Play:1 alongside SmartThings and have set it up as my morning alarm which reads the weather then puts on a nice morning radio station. That’s pretty cool. But also expensive.
Next for me is Philips Hue. I know what you mean though; it feels like you’re at standstill until you drop another £100-200 on things for SmartThings to interact with!
I started out with the starter kit, then added a couple more motion (2) and door/window sensors (4) and a presence sensor for each set of keys. I used it as an alarm system for a while and have started buying one thing a month.
I went with Phillips Hue bulbs where I wanted vibrant colour and nice fade up / down whites when you walk into rooms and low level dim up on a night time at a lower%. And for cheapness I went with osram bulbs for the living room lamps mostly for the white but are great as a drop to red for movie nights. This saved changing out the light switches.
I didn’t want to go with the in wall light switches or sockets because I may move house eventually and didn’t fancy the task of ripping out all of the in wall switches. So far they are the main solution for in wall switches. So far I have only used the ST switch for a lamp.
