How intelligent is your home? If you haven’t equipped it with any of the latest IoT or green devices, it might not score so high on the smart scale. Lucky for you, the following five local startups provide devices that do everything from monitoring the temperature in your rooms to alerting you if your stove isn’t turned off.
Want your home to be smarter and safer? Home security systems were one of the first real instances of the Internet of Things, but early systems are outdated. Rather than having a bunch of sensors strewn around your house that are monitored by a specialized provider, SimpliSafe ditches the long-term contracts needed to support those central offices in favor of a simple, self-installed system that alerts you directly when something is wrong at home.
If you’re worried about a neighborhood perp, Blink offers a home security camera that automatically records motion, alerting you and letting you sound an alarm to scare off potential burglars. Blink's camera is also kind of cute, ditching ugly wires for two AA batteries, which last for about two years of normal use.
Feel like your apartment is always too hot or too cold? Ecovent helps you keep your home heated and cooled efficiently. By monitoring the temperature in rooms around the house and opening individual vents on demand, the smart system is actually able to save energy. Ecovent also hooks up with other IoT devices to offer tight integration across your pad.
If you’ve always wanted to go solar, but don’t have the space, CloudSolar is here to help. The company constructs its own solar farms where consumers from anywhere can buy individual panels to help offset their own energy use and even generate income from the energy produced — talk about going “green.” The company works with utility companies and local developers to incorporate its solar energy into the grid at large.
Wallflower’s mission is to protect customers from accidental home fires. The Wallflower smart monitor turns your existing stove into a smart appliance that connects to an app on your phone, sounding an alarm on the device and notifying your phone if the stove is turned on or if you forgot to turn it off. Have roomies? The Wallflower system supports multiple users per home, so you don’t have to be the only one in charge of keeping your house or apartment safe.
