Tech Tuesday: How to make your home smarter

Do you ever wonder what are the best lightbulbs, thermostats or plugs to put into your home to make your life easier, your home more energy efficient and more updated with the times?

Here's a few of the latest and greatest you might want to consider adding to your home to update it, and also make it appealing to buyers if you're getting ready to sell your home.

Thermostats

The Ecobee4 has everything we liked about its predecessor, the Ecobee3, such as a slick touchscreen interface and a remote sensor that helps ensure all the rooms of your house are getting heated or cooled properly. But the newest version also has Alexa built in, so you don't need an Echo or an Echo Dot to control your other smart home devices, ask for the weather, or do anything else you can do with Amazon's voice assistant.

Light Bulbs

The Philips Hue White starter kit includes two bulbs and a hub to connect them to other smart home devices. While you can't change these bulbs' colors, you can adjust their brightness (up to 800 lumens), and add up to 50 to a single hub. Philips' bulbs also work with a wide range of smart home systems, including Alexa, Apple HomeKit, IFTTT, Google Home, and Nest.

Smoke/Carbon Monoxide Detector

Check out the Roost Smart Battery. This $35 gadget plugs into any existing smoke or CO2 detector and makes it a smart device. Now, when your alarm goes of, it will alert you (and others) on your smartphone, from where you can either call 911, or silence the alarm, in case a piece of burnt toast is to blame.

"Smart" Plugs

A simple, and inexpensive way to make any device "smart," you can control the power going to the ISP5 plug from your smartphone, wherever you are. We liked that iHome's app also lets you create a schedule to turn the plug on and off, and it can be linked to other smart home devices, such as Alexa, Wink and the Nest Learning Thermostat.

Just adding a few of these updates to your home can help give it an overall more updated look and feel, and may also save you money if you are staying in your home with their energy savings.

For more tech tips check out our blog every Tuesday!