What does the Retrotouch IOTTY Smart Switch do?

The switch replaces your existing switch and makes it smart by connecting to your home WiFi. It connects directly to your WiFi without the need for a hub or controller.

Note: To install it you need a neutral wire in your switch.

Once installed you can control the switch via the app (Androdi and iOS). The app is packed with features:

• Energy monitoring – to keep an eye on consumption
• Geolocation – turn on or off the device when you leave or arrive home
• Sunrise and sunset – control the device based on the sunset and sunrise
• Rooms – controlling multiple switches in one room
• Scenes – set scenes with one button press
• Weather – control the device according to the local weather
• Notifications – receive alerts when used
• Sharing – share with members of your household
• Away mode – fake your presence but turning on and off randomly

How easy is it to setup?

Installation was easy, the only thing to be aware of is this is quite a deep switch due to the tech inside it. This means if you have a lot of wires in your switch or a shallow back box it can be tight!

It is also worth noting you require a neutral wire for the switch to work. If unsure check before you buy.

What’s the connectivity?

The Retrotouch IOTTY smart switch connects to Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and Apple Siri allowing voice control:

“Alexa turn on living room light”

As well as IFTTT with 6 pre-made applets as well as being able to make you own and connect iotty to your smart home.

How much does it cost?

The switches start from £69.99 for a single gang switch.  It is also available in white or black finish.

What is it like living with it?

Simple and stylish! It’s great to be able to control the actual light switch not just the bulb like standard smart lighting. This means you can always control it, unlike smart bulbs where one flick of the switch and the bulb is dumb.

The other great main selling point is it works with all bulbs, even if not dimmable. This is why you need the neutral wire.

The switch itself really stands out due to the back lit glass, the only thing we found frustrating was the size of the switch as this prevented us putting it in a few rooms without changing the back box.  

Being able to control the brightness of the backlight is a nice touch especially if installed in the bedroom.

What are our final thoughts?

This is a stylish, feature packed switch!

A different approach to making your home lighting smart. The only one big consideration is the required wiring, neutral at switch, although we appreciate this is a limitation of the tech not this actual switch.

For more information and to buy the switch, visit their website:
https://www.retrotouch.co.uk/smart-wifi-light-switch.html

Tado, the smart climate control company, has come along way in a short space of time. In this review, we are going to be looking at the latest model of their Smart Radiator thermostat and starter kit – v3+.

What does the Tado’s Smart Radiator Thermostat do?

Tado’s Smart radiator thermostats are different to most smart home
thermostats, they do not work on a house level but individual rooms. This means you can control each room as you wish, for example if you want the nursery to be warm but your bedroom room cool this can easily be achieved. Assuming you have Tado installed in those rooms.

It is also a lot smarter than competitors, offering simple yet effective features – for example open window detection. As who wants to heat a room when the window is open?!

At the heart of Tado is the principle of energy and money saving. This is because Tado offers such detailed control of heating your home they claim you save energy and money. In the app there is a dashboard to track approximately how much energy you have saved and how each feature has helped towards the saving.

Other features include:

Weather Detection – Tado checks local weather reports to adapt to how it heats your home.

Geofencing – Both when you are leaving and returning home, interestingly this is not only done via your phone location. It also detects when your phone connects to your home Wifi to signal you are home – smart!

Comfort Control – Each thermostat detects humidity as well as temperature. Creating a simple visualisation of humidity and temperature to show air comfort.

Smart Schedule – Allowing scheduling temperatures for when you are home and away.

Stats & Analytics – Giving insight into what’s been going on in each room, plotted on a graph. Sadly there is no way to export the data though.

Repair Service – Through a national partnership with Help-link, as well aa thousands of local installers you can even find a local plumber.

How easy is Tado to set up?

We know what you are thinking, surely this requires professional installation as its plumbing?! Wrong, install is DIY and easy.

First, you install the app and create a home, once created you add the thermostat and bridge.

To add the bridge you plug it into your router or network switch with an ethernet cable. You then scan the QR code on the thermostat and pair it with the bridge.

Next comes the fun part – you need to remove your existing radiator head. This is much easier than we expected, on our radiator, we basically twisted the metal ring on the existing thermostat. If unsure they have a helpful how to guide on their website.

Top tip – if water starts coming out you are twisting the wrong part. Removing the head does not make any water leak and just exposes the pin on the radiator valve.

Once the head is removed, you can use the supplied adapters to fit the Tado thermostat. We didn’t need any and it fitted directly to the radiator.

The install guide has obviously been written for horizontal installs. If like us you install vertically the label saying top should face the front.

Once installed the thermostat calibrates and it’s done!

What is the connectivity?

Where this smart home tech is different is it does not connect to your home WiFi, as it does not need to. The hub or bridge as they call it connects to your house via ethernet to the bridge. The smart radiator thermostats connect to the bridge using radio (868 Mhz to be precise).

This means you do not have any of the issues surrounding WiFi bands – for example if you only have 5GHz and it only works on 2.4GHz. It also means there is no issue with connectivity or poor signal. We tested in a large house with the bridge downstairs and the radiator upstairs and had a full strength connection.

In terms of third-party connectivity Tado packs a punch offering the most popular voice assistants:

• Siri / Apple HomeKit
• Amazon Alexa
• Google Assistant

As well as IFTTT, allowing you to connect it to any other supported tech on IFTTT. For example, if the bedroom temperature is too hot turn on the Wemo plug connected to a fan. If the bedroom is x temperature turn my Philips Hue lights red, and many more possibilities.

The Tado app is available on iOS 10 or above and Android 5 or above.

Tado Smart Radiator Thermostat

How much do Tado Smart Radiator Thermostats cost?

To get started with Tado you need the starter kit as this contains the bridge. This cost: £119.99 and comes with all you need as well as one radiator valve.

However, once you have the bridge you can buy additional smart valves at £69.99.

This is slightly expensive but if bought directly from Tado they offer a ‘12 month, Save money or your money back’ guarantee!

In addition, there is an optional subscription feature called ‘Auto-Assist’ for £2.99 a month or £24.99 a year. Auto-assist ‘joins up’ the features and automatically controls them, so for example rather than alerting you the window is open and the heating is on, it turns it off for you.

What is it like living with it?

Impressive! However, there are a lot of features and notifications but this is where the optional subscription can take the strain.

We did find we needed to adjust the temperature reported by the thermostat. As it was giving a very high temperature when compared with two other thermometers in the room. This will be due to the design, as with our install the thermostat was very near the radiator, where as if fitted horizontally it will be less near so picking up a lower temperature. Not an issue as this was easily changed in the app, by adding an offset value.

It is brilliant being able to control the exact temperature of a room. Comfort plotting is a great feature and clearly allows you to see how ‘comfortable’ each room is.

Alexa integration is seamless once you have set up the skill allowing you to ask;

“Alexa what’s the temperature in the bedroom”

What are our final thoughts?

This is a very well thought out bit of kit!

The only thing stopping us giving this 5 stars is the price is on the high side. We have over 10 radiators in our Smart test home if each had a smart thermostat it would quickly add up. However, this is offset by the 12-month energy saving guarantee, although you would need to save a lot of energy to fully offset the full cost.

That said the same could be said about any smart home tech, it’s not the cheapest solution you often want but the smartest. In terms of smart thermostats, we think we have found the smartest – meet Tado!

Introducing Lightwave’s latest Lighting Starter Kit. Their smart kit comes with everything required to mimic occupancy and control lights via their app.

Thanks to an integration with IFTTT the system can also be connected to a vast range of smart home tech with automation rules.

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“Coming later this year [2018]”

When pushed for an exact date about Christmas he commented;

“We’re working as hard as we can and so is Google to get it ready for that time”

This is welcome news to Sonos One owners who from day one have been promised a Google Assistant integration ’coming soon’.

It would also mean a big boost for Sonos just in time for Christmas 2018 where there is a lot of competition in the smart speaker gift market.

This would also mean Sonos is the first smart speaker to be ‘assistant independent’ and allow the user to ask either Alexa or Google when it wanted. Maybe one day even Microsoft Cortana or Apple Siri will join the party.

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Sometimes we are even surprised what can be voice controlled. Today we are looking at an Voice controlled and internet connected…Oil diffuser! Yes you read that correctly you can now talk to your oil diffuser, thanks to Oitmm.

What does the Oitmm oil diffuser do?

It is a 200ml oil diffuser, with two misting modes – continuous mist and intermittent mist. It uses ultra sonic technology to diffuse the oil into the air. This is much safer than traditional candles or heat sources. To use it you add 200ml water and a few drops of your chosen essential oil into the reservoir.
If the diffuser runs out of water it turns off and no heat or flame remains.  It also has seven different colour modes to add a relaxing glow, these can be controlled in the app or on the diffuser itself.
Where this diffuser is different is it connects to Alexa, Google Home and your smart home via IFTTT.

How easy is it to setup?

Easy, the unit itself comes pre-assembled, you just need to add water, oil and plug it in. Adding it to the app was easy, just install the app, give the app your WiFi password and discover the device.
To connect to Alexa you need to install the Smart Life skill in the Alexa app.

You then ask Alexa to discover devices and the diffuser is found.

The discovered name is a bit of a mouthful ‘essential oil diffuser’. We renamed it ‘diffuser’ in the Alexa app as its easier to remember and quicker to say. Once setup and renamed the command is ‘Alexa turn on diffuser’.

What’s the connectivity?

Oitmm has a lot of Smart home tech, it all connects to their Oitmm Smart App. The app is intuitive to use and has added benefit of scenes for controlling multiple devices or if an event occurs.

The diffuser only supports 2.4 GHz WiFi but that’s pretty standard. It supports Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa. However where the diffuser gets very smart is it connects to IFTTT allowing you to connect it to your smart home and automate. For example after a few clicks we created a schedule to make it come on and off automatically daily. We also created a an Applet that turns on the diffuser if Footbot (our smart air quality monitor – read the review here)  detects the bedroom humidity level is below optimal. Although as this is not a humidifier the impact is not huge but it helps.

How much does the smart diffuser Cost?

£34.99 on Amazon.co.uk – a very good price considering everything it connects too!

Oittm Smart Oil Diffuser

What’s it like living with it?

Great! The diffuser is very effective yet quiet enough to sleep through. We used lavender oil, great for bedroom relaxation.  The Alexa integration is seamless and works perfectly, as does the IFTTT integration.

What are our final thoughts?

This is the future of oil diffuser – safe simple yet smart, also very effective at spreading amazing smells.

For more information have a look at there website: oittm.com

Even Google Assistant has now been affected by the upcoming nuptials of Prince Harry and Megan Markle.

From today you can now ask the smart speaker’s assistant a range of questions about the upcoming Royal wedding. This is baked into both Google Home and Google Home Mini.

These Easter Eggs* include:

• What do you think about the Royal Wedding?
• Teach me Royal etiquette
• I don’t care about the Royal Wedding.
• How can I be a princess?
• Is Meghan a good match for Harry?
• I wanna marry Harry.
• How do I get an invite to Harry’s wedding?
• Give me a fact about royal weddings.
• What do you think Harry will do on his stag?
• What do you think Meghan will do on her hen?

Each has a great response, we won’t spoil the fun by telling you what they are but our favourite is ‘How do I get an invite to Harry’s wedding’.

All that is missing is where can I find my own prince or princess!

*If you’re wondering what on Earth does Easter have to do with it? An Easter egg is a name for a secret or joke hidden inside a computer program.

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Google Assistant will be able to call numbers saved in your contacts as well as numbers dictated.

This is not new technology as various VOIP providers have offered similar services via their website or software. What however is new is how accessible this new feature will be.

“Hey Google call….”

Followed by a name or number, without the need for any additional hardware or software.

Users can even set the caller ID of their Google Assistant to their mobile resulting in the receiver seeing its you calling.

Google announced the calling feature at their I/O developer conference in mid 2017, launching it in the US in August followed by the UK today.

This is yet another nail in the UK landline market, watch out BT who still charge a heavy premium for ‘line rental’ for a phone line to make calls that often you are charged a lot for.

The update is being rolled out from today with all users expected to have the feature within 7 days.

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Google has announced its virtual Assistant, no they didn’t give it a name like Alexa, Siri or Cortana, will be integrated into lots of new tech.

At the moment, you can only access Google Assistant via Google Home, Android Phones, iPhone App and Android Wear.

The technology supporting this integration initially includes speakers:

Anker – Zolo Mojo
Samsung Harman – Link 10, 20 & 300
Mobvoi – TicHome Mini
Onyko – Smart Speaker G3
Panasonic – GA10
Sony – LF-S50G

As well as some appliances manufactures, models to be confirmed:

Honeywell,
Netatmo,
TP-Link
Wemo

We are not at all surprised with the speaker integration. However this is turning into a battle with Amazon Alexa already dominating and Sonos announcing a virtual assistant integrated speaker very soon.
What is your favourite Virtual Assistant? Let us know in the comments.

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This week Google has advertised a job at its London office for a writer to help give this Google Assistant a human touch and personality.

In the advert they state:

“Google Assistant Personality team is dedicated to bringing a bit of fun and human touch to people interacting with the Google Assistant through chat, phones, TVs, watches, Google Home and other devices we haven’t even thought of yet”

This highlights how seriously Google are taking it’s virtual assistant and in turn Home. The advert also gives insight into how they want people to interact with Google Home by asking for a specific type of person to write it’s Assistant:

“You might have previously written for a character for film, TV, video game, or comic book who can deliver a joke that can make anyone smile or you’re the person at the party who wins the trivia contest because you can finish the fun film quote or recite obscure music lyrics.”

This indicates they plan on making Google Assistant fun and engaging, much like how Apple have tried with Siri. After all everyone loves asking voice assistants silly questions – just to see the reply!

Here is a link to the full job advert if this sounds like it could be for you.

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