One of the coolest things to hit homes in the last few years are home automation gadgets. These are things like smart locks, smart lights, smart outlets, etc. I had been looking at these products for a long time, and finally came to a conclusion. In order to get the most out of these home automation products, I needed to the right control to make it work.

We decided to go with a smart home/alarm system so that we go the benefits of a protected home, as well as the ability to control and automated features of our home. We have use a local company called CAPO Security. They installed an entire alarm system which utilizes Alarm.com’s monitoring and automation system. It’s awesome! The panel they installed was a 2GIG touch panel with cellular link.

2Gig Go Control (affiliate link)

Ok, I know I just got a little technical, but bear with me. Any good home automation system will have the ability of using z-wave devices. Z-wave is the technology that interfaces devices together. Part of Alarm.com’s feature set is the ability to build automation rules for your smart devices.

We installed several connected devices at our home. I will be putting up some videos soon that will walk you through what we did. Some of them include a smart keypad front door lock. Several smart switches that allow us to turn on and off lights with our phones or with rules. A garage door open/closer with sensor so we can open and close are garage door remotely, and some outlets that allow us to turn on and off plugged in appliances with our phone or through automaton.

Let me explain what this looks like. If, we come home after sunset and user the keypad on the door, the system will automatically turn off the alarm, and turn on our lights so we can see.

Every night, our outside lights automatically come on, and automatically turn off in the morning… awesome, right?

I have an office outside in one of my sheds (I’ll show you a video on that soon, too). It uses a window A/C unit to cool it. Our automation rules turn off power to the A/C outlet at night when we go to bed and turn the alarm on. In the morning when we turn the alarm off, it automatically turns the A/C back on so it is cool when I get out there.

They best part about these home automation gadgets is that they are incredibly easy to install and incredibly convenient to have. My wife stays at home with our children, but if she didn’t, we even have a smart thermostat that could be set to automatically turn the A/C up when we left the house, and turn it back down when we got within a certain radius of the house.

If you haven’t looked at this technology, you should. It is incredibly convenient. If you’re in central Florida anywhere, check out CAPOSecurity.com and tell them you want the same system Jeremy Shick has. Alright, until next time, get out there and fix something!

*by clicking on product links on this page, I may earn a small commission, but it will not affect your price.