How to set-up a smart home: the ultimate guide
If you’ve been wondering what exactly is meant by a ‘smart home’, or how to make your place a bit smarter, but just end up feeling dim, read on. Here’s our beginner’s guide to smart home tech…
How do you go about making your home smarter? And what might doing so even enable you to do? The whole topic of smart homes can leave you feeling not very smart at all.
Perhaps you’ve got the odd smart device, but how do you get them to talk to each other? Do they speak the same “language”? And what would be the advantages of having a fridge that talked to a doorbell anyway?
Worry no more – we’ve got everything you need to know to get you started on your smart-home journey.
But, first, it’s worth reminding ourselves of why this is a journey worth embarking upon…
What is smart home tech?
Smart-home kit can save time, energy and money. Smart tech offers:
- convenience: you can control a whole range of household devices from lights to blinds, with a simple voice command or from an app on your smartphone. You can automate mundane daily tasks and perform them remotely when you’re not at home
- energy efficiency: heating, lights, and appliances can be programmed to operate only when needed, which reduces unnecessary energy consumption. In the long run, this also translates into lower utility bills
- security: smart locks, cameras, and alarm systems provide real-time monitoring and alerts, enhancing the security of your home
- accessibility: smart technology can be a real help for disabled people. Voice-activated systems and automation features can allow easier management of household tasks with less physical effort.

A smart security system will turn on lights when it detects motion and send pictures to your phone. Image credit: Google
Smart homes: where to start
There are different ways to start with smart retrofitting to an ordinary home, depending on how committed to the process you are, how much tech expertise you possess, and how big your budget is.
James Clark, from Wiser smart-heating controls, says, “Most smart tech products can be added to your home at any stage; it doesn’t matter how old your property is, or when you moved in.
“From smart heating systems like Wiser, to smart security and lighting, many products can be retrofitted.”
Start small
Faye de Villiers from AO.com, suggests, “Retrofitting a smart home is easier than many think, but it’s best to start small. Focus on areas where you want more control, like heating or lighting – smart thermostats and bulbs are great first steps.”

Smart lighting can makes that kitchen disco appear at the touch of a button. Image credit: Paulmann
If you’re particularly keen on one type of smart gadget, generally all you need to get started is to buy the kit, set it up, connect it to your Wi-Fi, download the manufacturer’s app onto your phone or tablet and link your device.
Smart thermostats
There’s lots to be gained from even this basic approach. For example, you can save a lot of money – and reduce your carbon footprint – if you install a smart thermostat.
Martyn Bridges, from Worcester Bosch, explains, “A smart thermostat is connected to an app, turning your phone into a remote control allowing you to manage your home heating from anywhere.
You can monitor your heating and hot water use to ensure maximum efficiency – and adjust the temperature on your way home.
“It also lets you control your heating zonally, meaning you only pay to heat the rooms you need to. So, if you’re cosying up for a movie marathon after dinner, you can easily turn the heating up in the living room and down in the kitchen.
“Some smart thermostats, like the Bosch Easy Control, even come with the latest home-detection technology that automatically adjusts the temperature depending on whether anyone is at home.
“Smart thermostats can be installed easily in most homes. The device is mounted to the wall in a room where the temperature is representative of the entire home, such as the living room, and then connected to the boiler through a cable.”

A smart thermostat can help you save on energy bills. Image credit: Worcester Bosch
Smart heating can be really, well, smart.
Jamie from Wiser explains some of the extra features their system includes, “If your home has electric radiators or towel rails, you can connect these to the Wiser system too using our Electrical Heat Switch.
“This is hard-wired and has the added benefit of acting as a range extender for the entire Wiser system, so is ideal for older homes with thick walls, or larger properties, where you need to boost signal.
“If your home has wet underfloor heating, our Underfloor Heating Controller will connect to the Wiser system – and just like the Electrical Heat Switch, it also acts as a signal booster, automatically forming an access point for the Wiser devices network.”
Installing a smart thermostat isn’t a DIY job, though. You will need to get an installer to do it for you. The ideal time is when your boiler is getting its annual service.
Saving money
With the right set up, the potential for saving on fuel bills is significant, as Victor Alonso, from The Real Smart Home, explains. Partnering with Daikin, he has integrated their heat pumps into his bespoke Real Smart Home hub and app.
A smart-home specialist, he has also managed to save some of his customers a significant proportion of their energy bills by using his smart app to help them run their existing heating systems more efficiently.
Victor says, “On average our customers can save between 30% and 50% of their electricity bill.” He helps them achieve this by using the Octopus Agile tariff, which is particularly suited to smart homes. That’s a saving not to be sneezed at.

Different hubs and apps use different interfaces to let you control devices in your home. Image credit: The Real Smart Home
More smart home starters
Here are some other ways you can start out with your smart home:
- smart bulbs let you change the light colour, dim it, and switch it off and on from an app or using voice control
- plugging regular appliances into smart plugs lets you turn them on and off remotely through an app or voice assistant
- a smart security system lets you monitor your property remotely
- a smart lock is a great way to control entry to your house, with no more lost keys. You kids can use a code to enter the house, and the lock can tell you when they get home.

Many different kinds of household appliances come in smart varieties nowadays. Image credit: Adobe Stock
Smart lighting
Guido Nattkemper, from Paulmann lighting, explains the kind of things you can do with smart lighting, “You can create preset or customised light scenes to suit your daily routine.
For example, start the day with soft, warm white light, switch to daylight white for concentrated work, and end the evening with subdued, calming red and orange tones.
You can also automate daily tasks: set your bathroom light to greet you in the morning, set up a night light that fades to morning brightness, or use a timer to automatically switch off your reading light.
With these automations, you can customise your smart-lighting system to suit your lifestyle, increasing convenience and comfort. Homes using smart lamps and luminaires consume significantly less energy compared to those relying on manual lighting, resulting in reduced electricity costs.
Beyond the financial benefits, smart lighting is also eco-friendly, making it a sustainable choice. Smart lighting offers added security advantages as well. Studies show that burglars are less likely to target homes with active lighting.
By programming your smart lighting to mimic occupancy, you can deter potential break-ins and enhance your home’s safety. Additionally, smart lighting supports your body’s natural biorhythm.
With thoughtful programming, you can wake up to soft sunlight and transition to bright work light during the day to improve focus. In the evening, your lights can gradually dim, helping your body unwind and prepare for rest.”

With the right kit you can have almost infinite control over your lighting at home. Image credit: Paulmann
Mesh Wi-Fi?
Once you get going with smart devices, it’s easy to overload your Wi-Fi quite quickly. Before you start hooking up lots of kit, make sure your Wi-Fi network is going to be able to cope.
If you need to upgrade, one option to consider is a mesh Wi-Fi network. This will offer better coverage that a standard router, but will be more involved to set up and maintain.
Smart homes: consider your kit (and the apps)
If you buy smart gear without a plan, you may well end up with lots of bits of kit that are incompatible, don’t use the same protocol (language) or belong to different ecosystems (families of gadgets that work together).
This means you might end up having to use lots of different apps – which can be tricky. For something that’s supposed to make your life easier, that sounds like a potential nightmare.
Language barriers
Smart gadgets need to communicate with each other and with your home hub if you have one. Nowadays this mainly happens via a wireless connection. Because smart tech is still relatively new, no one standard communication protocol has emerged yet and different smart gadgets use different wireless protocols (languages) to send and receive messages.
Some of the protocols you might hear mentioned include Zigbee, Z-wave, Thread, Bluetooth, Matter, as well as good old Wi-Fi. In the future, Matter might well become a universal protocol that all manufacturers adopt. But we’re not there yet. (There are older protocols around too that rely on wired connections. You might come across these as well, eg X10, Universal Powerline Bus (UPB), and Insteon.)
Pick a smart home hub
To avoid having to interact with multiple different apps, and to help you set up more complicated sequences involving more than one gadget, you’ll probably want to get a home hub or home hub app to control everything.
Cloud-based hubs
There are several popular smart home hubs that let you connect multiple devices. These cloud-based hubs include:
- Amazon’s Alexa
- Google’s Home
- Apple Home app
- Samsung SmartThings.
These each have hundreds of different compatible smart devices you can buy and add, to build a smart home set-up. If this is the route you decide to go down, pick one, and make sure every bit of kit you buy is compatible with it.
Voice assistants and controllers
For each of these systems you can get a physical smart hub or controller – such as a Google Nest display, Apple HomePod, Amazon Echo hub, SmartThings hub – to use instead of using the app on your phone or tablet to control all the devices. Alternatively, some people prefer to work the devices through a voice assistant, such as an Echo. The latter are a starting point, but won’t allow you to set up complicated functions.
Local hub
If you’re in the market for getting in deeper, rather than using a cloud-based app to run their smart kit, some people prefer to have a local smart-home hub: a small computer in their home that does the same job of enabling the different devices to communicate and work together.
The Fibaro Home Centre is an example of one of these: it can work with both Apple Home and SmartThings compatible devices.
Another popular model is the Aeotec smart home hub, which is part of the SmartThings ecosystem.
Local hubs suited to techy types who want to really get stuck into some smart tinkering include Hubitat Elevation, and Home Assistant, which runs on open source software.
A local hub is a more expensive option, but there are several reasons why some people prefer it:
- privacy and security – you are not sharing data with anyone else including none of the big tech companies
- reliability – if you use Z-Wave, ZigBee or Matter to connect your devices to your own hub, rather than Wi-Fi, your home network won’t be affected if the internet goes down
- ease the strain on the Wi-Fi – connecting devices to a hub using these protocols also reduces pressure on your Wi-Fi network
- speed – a local set-up is faster and more responsive than a cloud-based set-up
- customisation – for people with really good IT skills, a personal hub offers the chance to make your smart home set-up fully bespoke.
Some of these hubs can facilitate interaction between gear from different ecosystems. Victor explains it like this, “Say you have a Ring doorbell and a TV from LG or Samsung.
“These are different brands, that don’t ‘talk’ to each other. But, with the right hub in the middle, you can make them work together. Then, for example, if you were watching a movie and someone rang the doorbell, you’d want the movie to be paused automatically. You don’t want to have to start looking for the remote control. And then it’s also good if the channel changes automatically so you can see who’s at the door.
“The smart home is about lots of small things like this that compound to simplify and improve your life.”
Routines and automations
As Victor suggests, once you get into smart tech, chances are, you’re going to want to get different gadgets working together.
When different gadgets work together through a single command in an app or voice assistant these are called routines. Automations are when systems or devices, say heating or security systems, are set up to perform tasks automatically.
The potential for smart life hacks once your devices can work together is almost limitless, and the big tech companies are constantly working on their apps to make them easier to use.
Call in the professionals?
As with all things tech, in practice, it will likely take more time and effort to get a full smart home set-up up and running than the ads might have us believe.
If you enjoy tech, then your smart home can become a new hobby, and the potential for tech tinkering to achieve new “smarts” is almost infinite.
But for those short on time, skills or patience – and blessed with a decent budget – the way forward could be to employ a home-automation professional.
Pros have experience of all kinds of kit and can easily and quickly put together packages of devices with tailored automations and routines to suit your individual lifestyle.

Interface for smart blind control. Image credit: The Real Smart Home
Smart homes: new builds
Calling in the smart-home pros early on also makes sense if you’re starting from scratch in a new build.
That way you can be sure that your new home delivers all the convenience and efficiency that the latest tech can offer – and that it’s as smart as it is good looking.
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