How to Prepare Your Smart Home for Summer

Adjust Lighting and Shading for Longer Days

Smart lighting and automated blinds can adjust to extended daylight hours, improving your in-home environment, reducing energy consumption and keeping interiors cool. 

With customised presets, you can personalise and automate window treatment and lighting settings to ensure a comfortable environment at all times. If you want to take things a step further, incorporate lux (light level) sensors so that blinds and lights automatically adapt to the natural light.

Keep Your Home Cool with Smart Climate Control

Smart climate control is one of the most popular aspects of home automation and it’s easy to see why. Whether you enjoy the warmer weather or you long for an arctic breeze, you can rely on home automation and smart tech to maintain the perfect temperature in every part of your home.

Smart thermostats can be preprogrammed to switch air conditioning (AC) systems on and off at specific times or be set to maintain a specific temperature. What’s more, you can use occupancy sensors to activate or deactivate smart systems based on who’s at home and create distinct zones throughout your property so that temperature is controlled on a room-by-room or zone-by-zone basis. 

Optimise Your Outdoor Spaces with Smart Tech

Make the most of summer by extending your smart home system outdoors. From automated outdoor lighting and garden speakers to waterproof audiovisual equipment and Wi-Fi repeaters, there’s an exciting array of outdoor tech that will expand your living environment and increase the functionality of your property. 

Often, the same types of equipment that you enjoy indoors – TVs, speakers, soundbars and more – can be used outside. However, there are differences in construction and performance, so the right equipment must be integrated into your smart home installation.

Set Seasonal Automation Scenes

When you create a home automation ‘scene’, you have the opportunity to create your perfect environment. You can coordinate every aspect of your home automation system, including temperature, lighting and entertainment, based on your mood, routine or day of the week.

Whether it’s brighter lights and upbeat music to get you moving as a ‘morning wake-up’ scene or chill-out music, ambient lighting and cooler temperatures as an ‘evening wind-down’ scene, personalised summer scenes are the ultimate way to enjoy your home automation system.

Once you’ve created each scene, it can be activated via one click, swipe or voice command. Alternatively, program scenes based on astronomic events, such as sunrise or sunset, and your environment will adapt accordingly.

Summer Maintenance Tips for Your Smart System

Summer is a great time to ensure your home automation system is working optimally, so remember…

Update firmware

Check each smart device for available firmware updates and install them as soon as possible. Firmware updates help to optimise performance, but they’re also critical for maximising security and eliminating any vulnerabilities.

Test smart security

If you have smart security solutions installed, be sure to check their functionality at regular intervals. As people spend more time outdoors in the summer, it’s common for homeowners to adjust smart security settings, but it’s important to verify that everything is working properly. 

Check integrations

During the summer, you may use smart devices that aren’t typically used year-round. Outdoor smart devices, such as speakers or screens, may only be used in the warmer months, for example. By checking integrations ahead of time, you can ensure that everything is working perfectly before the sun arrives!

Avoid overheating

It’s worth cleaning and ventilating smart devices to keep them functioning optimally, particularly as temperatures increase. By cleaning devices, you can prevent them from overheating and avoid potential performance issues, too. 

Get Expert Help with Your Smart Home This Summer

If you’re thinking of installing a home automation system, you need to upgrade your smart home, or you simply want an expert team to manage the maintenance of your devices. Contact Element 29 now on 0207 720 7877, email us at info@element29.co.uk or send us a message here.