Save Time on Chores with These 13 Smart Home Ideas

Looking for smart home ideas that can help you save time on chores? The best part about smart home technology is that it can be tailored to fit your unique needs and lifestyle.

Whether you’re looking for a way to remotely monitor your energy usage with smart light bulbs or you’d like to create a safer environment for your family utilizing home security, there’s a smart home device that can help. And with so many devices on the market, it’s easy to find one that fits both your budget and your needs.

So, if you’re ready to start enjoying your home rather than spending all your time maintaining it, check out these 13 smart home ideas.

Smart thermostats

Looking for ways to make your home more comfortable? What about being more energy-efficient? Are you constantly fighting over your home’s thermostat? We know the pain. You’re hot. Your roommate’s cold. And your thermostat is the referee.

While not a cumbersome chore, it is still a chore to constantly adjust the thermostat throughout the day, determining the right temperature to satisfy everyone in the household.

With a smart thermostat, you can set up different temperature zones within your house – which makes everyone comfortable. Leave the thermostat wrestling to someone else!

Not only that… by connecting to your home’s Wi-Fi^® network, smart thermostats can access weather data and learn your family’s schedule, allowing them to adjust the temperature accordingly.

Did you know you sleep better when it’s cooler in your house? Use a smart thermostat to set a schedule, so the temperature turns down to a cool sixty degrees when you go to sleep, but moves to a nice seventy-three degrees when you’re working in your home office.

They recognize when you’re home via a motion sensor. The smart thermostat then regulates the temperature so you aren’t heating or cooling an empty house to excess. AND you can control them remotely via a smartphone app, giving you the ability to adjust the temperature even when you’re not at home.

This can help you save so much money on your energy bill!

Wi-Fi^® lawn mower

Mowing the lawn brings fond memories of sweating in the muggy summer heat, sunburned shoulders, and earphones constantly falling out of your ears. As pleasant as those summer memories are, what if there was a way to cut down on the time you spend mowing your lawn?

Enter another great smart home idea: the robot lawn mower.

Sensors help these handy devices navigate your yard and can be programmed to mow on a schedule that works for you. Best of all, they do all the work for you – no more pushing around a loud, heavy lawn mower! So if you’re looking for a way to make your life easier, a robot lawn mower might be the solution.

Smart lawn mowers come with a variety of features. Wi-Fi^®, GPS, and Bluetooth technology make it easy to mow your lawn from anywhere.

Are you on vacation? Mow your lawn from an app on your cell phone. Suddenly, home maintenance doesn’t seem so daunting.

Maybe you’re invested in that movie you’re watching, but notice that the grass is getting a little long. Ask your Amazon Alexa* or Amazon Echo* to launch your lawn mower with a voice command.

Cue the relaxing Ahhh.

Mopping floors

How about a smart home idea that addresses muddy dog paws and salty shoes?

They won’t bother you with a Braava jet^®. Pair this robot mop with voice assistants like Alexa*, or Google Assistant*, and it will clean with a simple voice command. Smart technology maps your room, so it mops exactly where you want it to.. Smart technology maps your room, so it mops exactly where you want it to.. Smart technology maps your room, so it mops exactly where you want it to.

This powerful little machine will help tackle your floors’ sticky messes and keep them shiny:

• Puppy training? Precision jet spray technology will clean one specific mess at a time.
• Want special commands? Connect to smart home devices so you can speak to them.
• A little “particular”? It cleans in neat rows.

A robot mop will save you loads of time. It’s perfect for anyone who wants an easy way to clean up any size mess without breaking a sweat (or getting down on their hands and knees). So, save time cleaning by adding a robot mop to your arsenal.

Dusting

Work smarter, not harder. Begin dusting with a handheld vacuum. This will quickly and efficiently pick up nests of dust, dog hair, cat hair, or even Bigfoot hair.

Preventative measures to reduce dust are almost as smart as a smart appliance doing the dusting for you.

Add these preventative measures to your to-do list:

• Groom pets outdoors to keep fur and dander at bay.
• Change sheets weekly to wash off the dead skin cells that become dust.
• Use a Roomba^® robot vacuum (which can also be paired with a voice assistant) to automatically remove dust regularly.
• Use an air purifier, which removes microscopic airborne pollutants like dust, smoke, pollen, and pet dander, reducing dust production.

Grocery shopping

Save time on grocery shopping by preparing ahead of time. Create a list and keep track of what’s inside your refrigerator so you don’t over-purchase and end up playing a game of, “What’s that smell?”

You could make a list the DIY way — pen and paper – OR make it with your smart speaker. But, you can take your chore automation up a notch with a refrigerator that inventories your food for you.

IoT (Internet of Things) refrigerators use artificial intelligence (AI) with cameras to scan your refrigerator and track its inventory. Some smart refrigerators even provide recipe suggestions based on the food you have in your refrigerator.

(The Internet of Things is the interconnection via the internet of computing devices embedded in everyday objects, enabling them to send and receive data.)

How smart is that?

You can eliminate grocery shopping with a grocery home delivery option. Add your list to the home delivery app, and someone will do the shopping for you—no more time-consuming trips to the grocery store.

Cooking

Cooking is much easier when you aren’t doing it! Don’t worry, we have a few smart home ideas for this too.

During the school year, dinners are hard. You get home late from work, your kids have after-school activities, and you can’t afford one more night of take-out.

Consider a smart oven paired with a meal subscription. All you need to do is add the food to the smart oven, and you’re done. No prepping. No difficult clean-up. You don’t even use your pans. Instead, it comes with recyclable containers that you can cook and eat with.

Additionally, you can control the smart oven using a mobile app, so your dinner is ready for you before you get home.

There’s even a smart oven that touts itself as “12 appliances in one.” This smart oven can do everything from an air fryer to a dehydrator. Make the fried pickles and your own jerky with the same appliance. Ummm… Yes, please!

Finally, add a smart coffee maker to get your morning started right. Smart coffee makers connect with your phone via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi^®. Customize your brew settings and brew times with a mobile app, Amazon Alexa*, Google Home*, or whatever smart speaker you use.

Who doesn’t love waking up to the smell of coffee and coming home to the smell of a home-cooked meal?

Smart security

Whether you want to add a security system to your primary home or a vacation home, there are plenty of smart security cameras and security system options that are pretty simple to install.

Add a smart doorbell that triggers a camera when someone rings it.

You can even get notifications on your phone when the sensors trigger, alerting you that someone is at your front door.

If you’re at work, you can see when your kids walk in the door from school, a package gets delivered, or watch the replay video of your partner slipping on the icy front steps (you warned them to salt!).

This video doorbell even uses night vision to give you peace of mind no matter where you are.

While you’re at it, add a smart lock or smart deadbolt to your door. This provides a safe way for you to lock and unlock your door for service providers when you’re away from home. Plus, you won’t lose the keys! You use either a code on a keypad or a fingerprint to open the lock.

Smart security systems can protect your family on multiple fronts. A smart speaker will alert you to intruders, fire, water damage, medical emergencies, and CO2 detection. These innovative systems have home security cameras and connectivity between smart smoke and CO2 detectors to offer a full suite of safety measures and better peace of mind.

Dishes

A dishwasher is nothing new, but it did make our list of smart home ideas. Why? Because the traditional dishwasher has jumped into the digital universe!

Add a smart dishwasher to your smart appliance list. They offer connectivity through Wi-Fi^®, voice control, Bluetooth, and your smartphone app. You can use this app to start and monitor your dishwasher load from your phone. It can even send you notifications when it is low on detergent or finishes a wash.

You can connect your smart dishwasher with your suite of smart home products and your smart home system so all of your appliances work together.

We love smart dishwashers because they reduce water bills with a water recycling feature that stores filtered water from the rinse cycle for the next load’s wash cycle. This feature reduces water consumption by 30%.

When will they add a feature that takes your dishes from the table to the dishwasher? We’ll keep an eye out for that one!

Laundry

Which chore do you dread the most? For many, it’s endless laundry. But, with a system in place and this great smart home idea, you can make this chore a little bit easier.

Instead of having a dedicated laundry day, do one load every morning before work and move it to the dryer after work. You only need to fold and put away one load’s worth of clothes at a time, making laundry a lot less cumbersome. Instead, you have tiny laundry sprints! Perfect for parents of little ones who like to turn their meals into t-shirt art.

Make this even easier with a smart washer and dryer that will help you multitask:

• Add your dirties to the washer as they become dirty.
• Use your smartphone app to schedule your washer to start an hour before you get home.
• Move to the dryer when you get home.

Voila! No more stinky clothes you forgot in the dryer (We’re not here to judge).

Other smart washer features include sending laundry tasks to family members, dryer setting suggestions, and the use of voice commands to operate your appliance.

Folding

No one likes laundry day. It’s time-consuming, and let’s be honest, it’s not the most fun way to spend an afternoon. But what if there was a way to make folding laundry quicker and more enjoyable?

Enter the laundry folder.

This neat gadget can help you achieve that perfect Marie Kondo fold, and it’s so much faster than doing it by hand. You might even find yourself enjoying laundry day a little bit more! Plus, it’s great for preventing wrinkles in your clothes. So, if you’re looking for a way to automate your laundry folding routine, the laundry folder is definitely worth considering.

Vacuuming

A robot vacuum is a no-brainer, especially if you have pets.

At least once a day I ask my robot vacuum, Rosie, to get to work (yes, my robot vacuum has a name!). I have two dogs and set my robot vacuum to work on a schedule so I don’t have to think about Shiba coat blowing season. As adorable as our pups are, we could do without the roaming fur tumbleweeds. Rosie takes care of the fur for me. Take it up a level with a self-emptying robot vacuum. It keeps your floors clean and you don’t even have to empty it!

Feeding your pet

Does your doggo come running when he hears the sound of the dog food bag? Now, instead of about knocking you over (and spilling their food all over the kitchen floor), you can watch them come running to their handy-dandy smart pet feeder.

If you’re leaving for a long weekend, work long hours, or your pet has an over-eating problem, automatic pet feeders could be the answer.

Automating the food and water time for your pet can also keep your pet trim with portion-controlled food dispensed into the dog bowl from your smartphone app.

If you upgrade to a feeder that has an HD camera for voice and video recording, your camera might catch your dog being oh-so-cute (and the world needs to see. *Posts to Instagram*). And the speaker allows you to talk to your pet from anywhere. Cue the “BIG yawn!”

For those pet-obsessed owners, smart feeders go far beyond feeding. They allow you to connect with your pet from anywhere.

Cleaning the litter box

No one enjoys cleaning the litter box. We put it off, but if you wait too long, you end up with cat-sized paw prints all over the house from litter sticking to their tiny toe beans. But thankfully, there is now, wait for it… an automated litter box!

These self-cleaning marvels are a real game-changer for pet parents. Automated litter boxes detect when your pet uses the box and automatically clears the litter box into a receptacle. With many automatic litter boxes, you even get an alert when it’s time to replace the receptacle liner.

So, if you’re tired of all the scooping, an automated self-cleaning litter box just might be the solution for you.

The future of cleaning automation

For many of us, having a clean home is oh-so-satisfying. Cleaning it, though, not so much. And for those who hire people to help, it is so nice to keep a tidier home between house cleaner visits.

With the help of cleaning robots and smart home appliances, full home automation can be a reality.

The average homeowner spends 23 hours and 36 minutes cleaning their home each month. Of that time, 50% of it was spent on sweeping and dusting! But, with these smart home ideas, you can finish chores in a fraction of that time.

Rather than spending hours cleaning our homes every week, we could use that time for other activities (maybe you’ll even start up that yoga habit you’ve been thinking about!).

Additionally, cleaning robots can be programmed to clean on a schedule that works for us, meaning that our homes could get clean even when we’re not there. In our opinion, this makes them some of the best smart home devices.

It’s still early days for cleaning automation in the home, but it’s an exciting area of development that has the potential to change the way we live. As technology improves, we may find ourselves relying on cleaning robots. After all, it started with robot vacuums, smart lighting systems, and smart plugs and has already grown to encompass so much more.

Once you’ve added smart appliances and cleaning robots to your cleaning routine, connect them with IoT to make cleaning a streamlined process.

IoT

The Internet of Things or IoT is when physical objects like your refrigerator, dishwasher, or washer have sensors, Bluetooth, or other technology that connects them to the internet.

Imagine pulling into your driveway, tapping your phone to turn on the house lights, and then walking in to find that your floors are clean, your laundry is done, and your dishes are clean. That’s the power of IoT within your home. It’s like you have a full-time housekeeper ensuring your home is pristine when you walk in the door. Who wouldn’t want that?

IoT devices are often more energy-efficient than their traditional counterparts. They also offer greater convenience and peace of mind, as you can control them remotely no matter where you are thanks to its router connection. As IoT technology continues to advance, even more devices in our homes will likely become connected in the years to come.

The future of IoT in household care is bright. Expect your Alexa* to integrate with your calendar and set an earlier alarm on a hectic day, smart showerheads that heat water to your specifications, laundry dispensers that wash your clothes for you, and kitchen robots that will use facial recognition to cook dinner for specific family members.

(We know what you’re thinking… “Now, can we travel to the future so my kitchen robot can cook dinner for my picky child?”)

Home automation system

Want to put these smart home ideas into action and begin automating your household chores?

Start by syncing and automating your chores using a smart home hub.

Connect all of your smart appliances with a smart home hub. You can do this through a home assistant like Alexa* or Google Assistant*.

When smart home devices were new, a physical touchscreen smart home hub was a necessity, but now you can create your own hub on your smart speaker:

• Look for smart appliances and gadgets that are compatible with the smart speaker of your choice.
• Connect your smart appliances and gadgets to the smart home hub smartphone app.
• Use the voice command feature on your Alexa*, Google Home*, or Apple Homekit* device to control all of your smart appliances or the centralized smartphone app. It’s as simple as saying, “Siri, mop my floors.”

Take your home automation system up a notch with If This Then That (IFTTT), so your devices can work together.

IFTTT is a great way to automate your smart home appliances. It lets you create “recipes” that trigger certain actions based on certain events.

For example, you could create a recipe that turns on your lights when your security system detects movement.

OR you could create a recipe that turns off your TV when your phone connects to your Wi-Fi^® network.

IFTTT not only makes your life easier and your home more efficient… It’s also FREE to use – and easy to set up.

Smart home technology is a great way to make your life easier and more comfortable. Whether you’re looking for ways to automate cleaning, save energy, or keep your family safe, there’s a smart home device that can help.

And with so many devices on the market, it’s easy to find one that fits both your budget and your needs. So, try these smart home ideas if you’re ready to start enjoying your home rather than spending all your time maintaining it.

* Works with Alexa and Google Assistant-enabled devices. Alexa and all related logos are trademarks of Amazon.com or its affiliates. Google, Google Home, and Google Nest Hub are trademarks of Google LLC. Apple Homekit is a trademark of Apple Inc.