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I have been putting off investing in smart home devices for a long time. One day my power company offered me a deal where I could get a free smart thermostat and I never looked back. Smart home devices are a great way to save money. Setting your home up with smart home devices is a great way to lower your power, heating, and cooling bills. You can easily reduce usage and set up systems in place to help reduce your family's power usage. Start with a Hub There are several options for a hub for your smart home and smart devices. This can be something as simple as your cell phone though you may learn that this can take over your phone storage really fast. If you do this try putting an old phone to use on your home wifi to connect apps and use a hub app on your main phone. You can buy a hub device but this can be inconvenient because the cost can quickly add up when you cannot connect multiple brands of products to one hub. This is why hub apps like google home and Amazon Alexa are a great base for your smart home. Save on your heating and cooling with a smart thermostat We got a great deal saving us a lot of money by signing up with our local power company with a money-saving plan and getting our Eco Bee thermostat for free. Our eco-bee thermostat was a great addition to our home because I can adjust the temperature of the house without ever getting out of bed. Being able to control the temperature from anywhere means we can turn the heat down when we are away from home and remember it was up or kick it up a notch in the middle of the night without having to let it run higher all night long just to cope with a night that is expected to be very cold. Amazon Alexa While this is not a must to start transitioning your home to a smart home the Amazon Echo Dot deal with got set our family off on the journey to a new fully functioning smart home. We love that we can set up groups and turn everything off in one go simply by saying "Alexa, turn everything off" as we walk out the door. My husband fell in love with being able to simply tell the dots around the house to play music or turn off a light. Alexa has become a hub for our homeschooled children. They no longer feel the need to come to ask me small questions over and over though out the day. They simply ask the dot in the dining room "Alexa, What is the most deadly spider" and save me the time of googling while I am working or cooking. A game-changer for kids that want to know everything. Smart bulbs The biggest money saver for our family was installing Sengled smart bulbs. These bulbs can be dimmed and you can control each individual bulb to have just the amount of light you want or need rather than having 4 bulbs at once going into the living room to read a book on the couch. The kids are terrible about turning lights off behind them so I have them set to turn off without any of our interaction in the morning after the sun rises, and several times during the night so when they get left on they don't stay on all night long. Upgrading the kids to color-changing bulbs made it easy for them to customize the look and feel of their room. The house can sometimes look like a rave from the outside but the kids love it and we wouldn't change it for the world. I can set the scene in the house and lower the brightness of every bulb in the house before bedtime to help everyone calm down and prepare for bed reducing how much the kids argue about bedtime. Ring doorbell From knowing when packages arrive to keeping an eye on our generator Ring Doorbell makes it easy to check in on our front porch and feel secure. After my sister was held at gunpoint in front of the house a couple of years ago we knew that cameras and devices like this are essential to help protect our family. This may not seem like a money saver but when you can prove that a package was never delivered to your home it can be a lot easier to deal with issues like package claims and it can make it easier to prevent your packages from being stolen my porch pirates so you do lose money.