Helping you Build your Smart Home
Make your home more efficient with the latest smart home energy solutions. From smart plugs and switches to energy monitoring devices, our guides and reviews show you how to save money, reduce waste, and gain full control over your home’s power usage.
Explore our expert tips, comparisons, and product roundups to find the best smart energy devices for every room and budget.
Do smart thermostats save money? For most homes, yes, but the savings are modest and conditional rather than automatic. A smart thermostat trims your bill by making your heating and cooling system run fewer hours, and independent, field-verified data puts typical savings somewhere around 8 to 15 percent of your heating and cooling costs. For … Read more
Finding a true matter thermostat is harder than it should be in 2026. Matter has been shipping for years, yet most of the big thermostat names still do not support it, which makes the shortlist of genuine options refreshingly short. This guide covers every matter compatible thermostat worth buying for a US home right now, … Read more
The best HomeKit light switch turns an ordinary wired fixture into something you can run from the Home app, ask Siri to control, and fold into automations that fire on time, location, or a tap. Apple Home is the fussiest of the big ecosystems when it comes to switches, so the shortlist of a genuinely … Read more
A good light strip is the easiest way to add color, mood, and a little bit of magic to a room, and the best smart light strips now do it while fitting neatly into whatever smart home you already run. The big shift for 2026 is Matter. Most new strips speak it, which means one … Read more
If your reading lamp keeps shutting off while you are sitting perfectly still at your desk, a desk lamp presence sensor is the fix. The problem is not your lamp or your smart plug. It is the kind of sensor doing the switching. Most cheap “motion switches” use a passive infrared (PIR) sensor that only … Read more
SmartThings compatible light switches can connect in several different ways, and that difference matters before you buy. One switch may pair directly to a Z-Wave hub, another may use Matter over Wi-Fi or Thread, and a third may need its own manufacturer bridge. All can appear in the SmartThings app, but they do not have … Read more
If you want to stop dragging a hose around the yard, the choice usually comes down to a smart sprinkler controller vs hose timer. They both automate watering from your phone, both can skip a cycle when rain is coming, and both save water. But they are built for two completely different yards, and picking … Read more
When people shop for a smart thermostat, the choice almost always comes down to Nest vs ecobee. They are the two brands that dominate the category, they cost about the same, and they both save energy. So the honest question is not which one is “best,” it is which one fits your home and the … Read more
Last updated: September 2026 A smart home EV charger does two jobs at once. It refills your car overnight, and it ties that charging into the rest of your connected home so you can schedule it around cheap off-peak rates, watch the energy it pulls, and in some cases start or stop it with a … Read more
The smart plug vs surge protector question usually starts the same way: one free outlet, two things you could put in it, and a vague sense that both are about “power.” The confusion is fair, because both sit in the same aisle with similar packaging. The short version is that they are not competing products … Read more