Smart home for newborns

My husband and I are techies so we had invested in smart home tech but had no idea how useful it would be until our newborn came along! Heres some tips on what we have found useful.

We have been investing in Philips Hue bulbs slowly for years. Initially we bought a starter kit (it includes a hub that connects to your Wifi router and two colour bulbs). Over the years we have added bulbs to the living room, including a light strip, each bedroom and our hallways. We even have two motion sensors so our hallway lights only come on when needed 🤓

So how does this help with a newborn? Firstly, we use a lamp with a hue bulb set to nightlight in the bedroom. It allows me to see our little one clear enough to feed him at night without being too bright to sleep. We keep the lamp on the floor so its not as bight as on the nightstand.

The Hue Motion sensor can be configured for a low light late at night and a slighter brighter light for early evenings. This is great for sneaking to the next room to change a nappy without waking up too much.

You can also configure the lights so that when turned on initially, they turn on to a low light — we do this in the babies room where we change nappies. In case of Poonami emergency, you can turn the light on and off twice to get full brightness without using the app to change the level. Luckily it’s unusual for babies to let it all out during the night.

In the living room we combine our lights with a Google Home Mini. Initially we thought, “how lazy? Why wouldn’t we just use our phones to adjust the lights”.. but after our little one was born we realised just how useful it is to say ‘Hey Google, set brightness to 20%” …or in case of an epic explosion from either end “Hey Google, set brightness to 100%”.

We invested in a Nest for managing our heating. We have gas central heating and set it up in our living room. It gave us peace of mind that we could guarantee one room was the right temperature on a cold winter afternoon. It allows you to specify a schedule of temperatures e.g. at 10am I want the living room to be 20 degrees. It also means when you can’t get up due to little one sleeping on you, you can turn the heating up if you get a bit chilly. It does get cold sitting around with a baby! We can also use the Google home to give a voice command to turn the temperature up or down.

This was another gadget that we used as a speaker mainly before our LO came along. Once you have a newborn asleep on top of you, you realise how useful it is to play the radio or turn on the lights when you can’t reach for your phone. I found it best to avoid watching daytime tv (my for mental health) and preferred to listen to the radio or podcasts on my Google Home while feeding and settling him.

We got a gift of an Arlo baby camera. It is a real all singing and dancing baby camera. It provides video via a mobile app, can play music, tells you the room temperature and air quality. It also has configurable alerts such as if movement or sound is detected or temperature is too high or low. I didn’t think we would use this until our LO was bigger.. but I found if he was napping in the living room I couldn’t hear him crying from the kitchen if the washing machine was on. I use the Arlo app on an old tablet I leave on the kitchen counter. It also works on battery for a few hours. If I can get the LO napping in another room I can move the camera to him easily. Its also really cute and shaped like a bunny!

The best investment was probably the Nest. We bought ours direct from Google. The ability the turn on the heating from your phone, even if you are not in the house is great. Google Home really brings everything together as it connects to the Hue lights, Nest heating and Arlo baby camera.

Hope you found this article useful! Please post a comment if you would like more detail.

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