Technology is meant to make your life easier. Practical automation of tasks within the home has been a goal attacked from multiple angles for many years.
For decades, science fiction creators envisioned houses that took the strain out of modern living. Walt Disney imagined the ‘house of the future,’ where tasks from cooking to cleaning were all done automatically. The Jetsons had an almost impracticably automated home. Most attempts to create effort-saving home automation have fallen rather flat, but as TechRadar pointed out in September 2020, networked items and the ‘Internet of things’ have made home automation far more practical.
Here are some of the automation innovations that have appeared in our homes over the last century, some of which have made our lives easier, and some of which seem to have only made them more complicated.
Automated Tea
Now considered a fabulously retro (and completely useless) device, the Teasmade was once considered a wonderful innovation in automation technology. Invented in the early 20th century and made popular in the 1960s, the Teasmade was made by the excellently named Goblin corporation. It was essentially an automatic tea maker and alarm clock combination. The idea was that you would keep the Teasmade by your bed and set the alarm. By the time the alarm clock woke you up in the morning, a fresh pot of tea would have been produced to help kickstart your day!
Unfortunately, the tea that the device produced was largely considered almost entirely undrinkable.
Automatic Doors
You’ll be familiar with automatic doors if you have ever entered (or exited) a supermarket. As an addition to the home, a door automation system can help make an abode more accessible to people with impaired mobility. Companies offer kits that allow you to convert existing door systems into automatic ones.
It would be unwise, however, to automate all of your doors on a whim. You should consider how to keep your home secure by employing unique key fobs or codes before installing anything.
Automated Cleaning
Self-empty robot vacuum cleaners have now been well and truly established as a viable form of home automation. There is a huge variety of robot suckers available in the market.
These helpful (and slightly annoying) little dirt-loving beetles potter about the house sucking up dirt gleefully while you get on with other, more important things. Just don’t expect them to climb the stairs.
Alexa, Automate My House
One of the most true-to-fiction innovations in automation, the ‘smart home module’ allows you to control interconnected devices with your voice from anywhere in the house. The Amazon Echo is the best-selling device and utilizes Alexa voice recognition technology to respond to requests.
In order to make the most out of such a hub, you’ll need to be ready to connect all of your home’s technology to the internet so that it can communicate with your central command module. If it all works correctly, you should be able to control your home media, heating, and central locking with your voice.
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