You might not ever become a homeowner, but that doesn’t mean you can’t make your not-a-house as smart as possible.
Ah, yes, the American dream. A house with a white picket fence, a dog, and as many products as you can pile into a pickup truck that you paid for in cash, which I’m told is a type of green paper you can exchange for goods and services. Sounds nice; sounds normal; sounds totally and completely out of reach.
The classic American dream may be dead, but at least we have the Internet of Things and the never-ending font of smart home products it’s given rise to, right? I say that with my tongue ready to burst through my cheek like a post-gestation alien from Alien, but to be honest, I love my makeshift smart home. It makes me and my multitask-addled brain happy, because who has time for light switches and buttons? Certainly not I—I barely have time for paying my rent. Sorry, landlord, I simply don’t have enough bandwidth today!
If you’re like me, which is to say a debt-drowning millennial who will probably never own walls and a roof outright, and you still want to have a smart home that feels functional, I’m (at the very least) pleased to inform you that this particular feat is actually doable. In fact, I know it’s doable because I’ve done it, and as one disillusioned American adult to another, I’m going to tell you how to build your own, too.Communication Is Key
The first thing you’ll need before you start smartening up your rented dwelling is a way to scream at all your gadgets. That means, if you don’t already have one, you’ll need a smart speaker. I personally use a 2nd-gen Google Nest Mini, and for a couple of reasons. I’m not going to lie, the number one reason is that I got one for free through Spotify, which ran a promotion back in 2019 for subscribers to its premium plan. The promotion has since ended, but the good news is that if you want to grab one yourself, you can scoop one up for as little as $30. Here’s the deal with these speakers: they suck for playing music because they’re frankly not built for that, but they do exactly what they need to in a smart home, which is to say, they understand commands poorly (all voice assistants suck, sorry).
One advantage that I think Google has over an Amazon Echo speaker with Alexa, for example, is its Google Home app, which feels a lot more streamlined for quick smart home control compared to Amazon’s Alexa app. I also think that Google Assistant is slightly better at understanding commands, but to be honest, that’s like trying to decide which apple you’d rather pull from the compost and take a bite of.
Either way, you’ll need to make a choice here, because if you should want to expand the number of speakers in your apartment ever, you’re not going to want to buy another speaker to replace the one you already have or, God forbid, live in a mixed Alexa and Google Assistant household. And once you make that choice, it’s time to move on to the next most important facet of any smart apartment.Let There Be (Smart) Light
I have absolutely no chill when it comes to lighting. I mean that both figuratively, in that I am authoritarian about the type of lights I use in my apartment, and also in a more literal sense, in that I hate cool lighting—warm only for me. As a result of that quirk, I have a lot of lamps in my 500-square-foot apartment. I have five, to be exact, but two of those contain three bulbs, and one of them contains two, so that’s a grand total of 10 light bulbs in one small apartment, just from lamps.
As you might imagine, the smart lighting situation gets tricky pretty fast, but there are a few things you can do to make things less expensive and a little more manageable from a setup perspective. First, you can start by buying cheaper smart bulbs for the lamps that need them. Smart bulbs aren’t necessary all of the time (I’ll get into that in a moment), but they do offer some advantages, particularly the ability to dim or brighten them as needed.
