Smart Home & Safety Archives - Blue i Style

Home Security Cameras That Perfectly Balance Style and Function

blueistyle — Mon, 05 Aug 2019 17:31:00 +0000

This is a sponsored conversation written by me on behalf of Panasonic, but all opinions, as always, are my own,

You know that I’m all about finding the perfect balance of style and function! I’ve always said that decor should be functional and organizing can be beautiful. But now I’m taking my theory a step further… It turns out that home security can also be both functional and stylish as well.

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Scott and I have been wanting to add a couple of home security cameras for an added level of protection in our home. I like the idea of being able to keep an eye on things – whether it’s checking on the main floor while we’re upstairs late at night, or ensuring that all is well when we’re away from home. It was also important to me that our security cameras blend in with our decor so that they don’t make our home feel uninviting.

As with all of the smart home technology we’ve added to our home over the years, I want to ensure anything we invest in can easily go with us if we ever move in the future. Fortunately, we found security cameras that perfectly fit our needs and strike a balance of style and function with some great added features! This post is sponsored by Panasonic, and Panasonic is also generously offering my readers a 10% discount, so be sure to grab the code at the end of this post!

When I first heard about the new HomeHawk FLOOR, I knew it would be perfect for our living room because it’s a combination of a security camera and lamp. In our kitchen, on the other hand, where a floor lamp would look out of place, the small and discreet HomeHawk SHELF blends in perfectly.

If you’re a child of the 90’s like me, chances are pretty good that you had a combo floor lamp CD rack in your bedroom at some point in time. That may have been the original dual-purpose lamp, but technology has come a long way and the HomeHawk FLOOR takes the dual-purpose lamp concept to a whole new level!

First, let’s start with the obvious – this security camera lamp is much more sleek and stylish than my 90’s CD rack lamp with it’s halogen buzz. It comes in black satin or the gray fabric finish that I chose. And the security camera is so discrete that from anywhere but a close-up view, you wouldn’t even notice it’s there.

Out of the box, it only took me a couple of minutes to assemble the HomeHawk FLOOR. As you put the segments of the lamp together, you can choose from three height options – 2 feet, 4 feet, or 6 feet. I chose the tallest option, and it looks perfect next to the piano in our living room. After assembly, it was as easy as plugging in the lamp. I love that the security camera also has battery backup, so even if the power were to go out, we would still be able to monitor our home.

Not only does the security camera lamp blend in perfectly with the decor, positioning it next to the piano also gives us a clear view of our front door, our side door, and the living room windows. The camera has a 140 degree (diagonal) wide view and 1080p full HD quality, and because the camera is right at eye-level, it’s ideal for monitoring our home.

The HomeHawk FLOOR connects with the HomeHawk app, allowing us to receive notifications when motion is detected, and features two-second pre-recording before an incident occurs. The app provides rapid playback so we can quickly view footage of the motion activity, and the footage is conveniently stored on an SD card, so there is no monthly service fees {which is a huge bonus, because we certainly don’t need another bill each month!}.

When we first set up the security camera, we noticed that through the solar shade on our front window, the camera was able to pick up the motion of people walking by on the sidewalk in front of our house. We were able to use the “customizable activity zone” feature in the app to tell it to ignore any motion detected outside this window.

The HomeHawk app also provides lots of options to determine how you want to monitor your home. You can choose to enable geofencing, which automatically turns on sound and motion detection when you leave the house. In the app, you can also enable Home Mode and Privacy Mode, so that you are in complete control of when the camera detects and records motion.

The lamp can be set to turn on automatically when motion is detected, but when the camera is set to Home Mode, turning the light on and off is as simple as a tap. Via the app, we can also set the lamp to a schedule or turn it on and off remotely. Vacation mode can randomize the lighting schedule for additional security when you’re away from home.

Our living room has poor overhead lighting, so in addition to keeping our family safe, the HomeHawk FLOOR’s three lighting levels provide just the right amount of ambient light for reading and piano practice. The FLOOR also includes a built-in speaker and microphone for two-way talk so I can chat with the kids when I’m not in the room.

I also wanted to have “eyes” on the back door in our kitchen, but a stand up lamp wouldn’t really blend in with our dining area. For this space, we instead opted for the sleek little HomeHawk SHELF security camera. It’s so discreet, in fact, that I bet you’ll have a hard time spotting it in the photo below.

This camera blends right in on our kitchen shelves, but it can also be easily mounted to a wall or ceiling if you prefer. Unlike the FLOOR, the SHELF does not have a battery backup.

From its camouflaged perch on our kitchen shelf, the SHELF security camera keeps watch over the door to our backyard, which gives peace of mind at night and when we’re away from home. The color night vision on both the FLOOR and SHELF security cameras provide protection day and night.

If you’re looking for a stylish and unobtrusive way to protect your home, these Panasonic HomeHawk security cameras are great options for owners and renters alike. The SHELF is slim and sleek, and the FLOOR camera lamp combo provides so many added benefits! Panasonic is offering a special 10% discount for my readers with coupon code 10PANASONIC.

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How to Make a Family Fire Safety Plan + Free Printable

blueistyle — Fri, 19 Oct 2018 15:12:00 +0000

Thank you First Alert for sponsoring this post. October is Fire Prevention Month – practice safety in numbers to ensure your family’s super prepared too!

I’m pretty sure I never slept as a kid. Instead, I laid in bed at night worrying. I worried about a lot of things, but what to do if there was a fire was a frequent source of my insomnia. When I would finally fall asleep, I’d often have dreams about fire. I don’t know why this was so often on my mind because at the time I’d never even known anyone who had experienced a house fire. But nonetheless, it kept me up at night.

And now I’m raising two little worriers of my own. We decided that the best way to combat their fear is to make sure we are all prepared and know what to do if something were to happen. Since October is Fire Prevention Month, it seems like a great time to share some tips that we’ve learned, along with a free printable fire safety plan that you can use with your own kids.

If there are two things most little boys can agree on, it’s fire fighters and superheros. I’m so grateful to First Alert’s “Super Prepared Family” – a family of superheros that gave us a fun and engaging way to start the conversation about fire and carbon monoxide safety with our kids. They were so excited when they opened our Fire Safety Kit and saw a coloring activity book and toy fire truck right on top… it was the perfect first impression for them and made them less nervous about the new smoke and CO alarms that were also in the kit.

HOUSE FIRE PREVENTION TIPS

My boys start to get nervous any time we talk about fire, so rather than starting the conversation with what to do in case of a house fire, we first focused their attention on the things we can do to prevent a fire from starting. Both boys have just hit the age where they are asking for chores, so they were eager to talk about ways they could help.

We learned that the number one cause of home fires is unattended cooking. I’ve definitely been guilty of walking away to multitask when dinner is on the stove, but the boys are on the case and they’ll remind me to stay in the kitchen while I’m cooking.

Here are a few simple tips that can reduce the risk of a house fire:

Never leave cooking unattended
- Never store cooking oil near the stove where it could overheat and ignite
- When cooking with oil, keep a pan lid and a container of baking soda near by to suffocate the flames if a fire were to start; never put water on a grease fire
- Make sure that combustible items, like dishtowels and pot holders, are a safe distance away from the cooking surfaces
- Ensure that the stove, oven, and all other heating elements are completely off before leaving the room
Clean the dryer lint trap after each load, and clean out of the dryer vent twice a year
Clean the chimney flue at the beginning of each fall
Don’t store flammable liquids, like gasoline, cleaning agents, and paints, near a heating source; keep them in cool, ventilated areas
- Read my post on how and where to safely store different kinds of paint
Keep candles at least a foot away from anything that could ignite and never leave candles unattended
Don’t let anything rest against a light bulb where it can overheat and ignite
- Keep stacks of clothes and linens on upper shelves should be kept away from closet light fixtures
- Don’t use lampshades that are too big for your lamp and could cause it to tip over, leaving the bulb resting against something flammable
Keep lighters, candles and matches out of reach of children
Use caution with real Christmas trees and make sure they get plenty of water, and if you opt for a fake tree, make sure it’s flame retardant
- Check your strings of Christmas lights to make sure there are no frays or broken bulbs that could have an exposed elements
- Don’t leave Christmas lights unattended
Store piles of firewood well away from the house – if a fire starts nearby, these could easily become kindling

FAMILY FIRE SAFETY TIPS

Over 100 million homes in the US are not protected with smoke alarms, and 3 out of 5 home fire deaths occur in homes with no working smoke alarms. Additionally, carbon monoxide is the number one cause of accidental death, yet 40% of homes do not have a single CO alarm.

You might be thinking that you don’t need to worry because your house has smoke and CO alarms, but pause for a moment and ask yourself:

Do you have enough smoke and carbon monoxide alarms and are they in the right places?
When was the last time you replaced the batteries in your alarms?
Do you have fire extinguishers, and do you know how to use them?

Taking inventory of your smoke alarms, CO alarms, and fire extinguishers is a great way to get the kid involved.

My kids used to be terrified of our smoke alarms and cried anytime we said we needed to test them. It makes sense – that sound is pretty loud and scary, and it forces you to imagine the possibility of a real fire. With our boys, we’ve tried to emphasize that smoke and CO alarms are our friends and work hard to keep us safe!

We recently installed a First Alert’s Onelink Safe & Sound smart smoke detector and carbon monoxide alarm in the boys’ room. The Onelink has an Alexa enabled speaker and a nightlight built in, so it immediately won the kids over. The kids really just love that they can ask it to play the music they want for their dance parties, but I rest easier knowing it keeps the kids safe. In the event of a fire or CO emergency, the Onelink sends push notifications directly mom and dad’s phones, and provides the kids with verbal directions to leave the house. This has been a game changer for us in terms of alleviate the kids’ fear. {Read all about our Onelink fire and CO alarm in this post.}

Now that the kids aren’t so scared of our alarms anymore, we wanted involve them in making sure our whole house is properly equipped. Our First Alert Fire Safety Kit came with a coloring and activity book full of information presented in a way the kids were drawn to {pardon the pun}. You can download the same printable fire safety activity pages for your kids.

After they colored the superheros and warmed up to the idea of talking more about fire safety, we turned to the page that showed all the places in the house that you should have smoke alarms, carbon monoxide alarms, and fire extinguishers. Then we walked around the house and the looked for alarms in all the right places.

Do the same with your family. Take a tour of your house and make sure that you have:

At least one fire alarm on each floor, one in each bedroom, and one outside each sleeping area
At least one carbon monoxide alarm on each floor of the home
Always have at least one fire extinguisher in the kitchen, in the laundry room, and at least one on each floor of the home

Keep in mind that smoke and carbon monoxide alarms don’t last forever. Alarms need to be replaced every 5 to 10 years, depending on the model. And the batteries in your alarms need to be replaced twice a year. Replacing batteries each spring and fall with the time change is an easy way to remember. Or, better yet, eliminate the need to replace batteries by upgrading to First Alert’s 10-year sealed battery alarms.

Read more in this post: How to Protect Your Family From Carbon Monoxide

FAMILY FIRE SAFETY PLANNING

After talking with our boys about the steps we can take to prevent a house fire, and ensuring that our house is properly equipped with alarms, we were ready to make our family emergency plan.

Before we had kids, a lot of our parent friends warned us that having the master bedroom on a different floor than the kids rooms would be problematic someday. Thanks to video monitors that allow us to hear the kids if they need us, and our home security system that gives me peace of mind, having the master bedroom a floor above the kids has really never been an issue for our family.

However, there is one aspect of the distance between our bedrooms that does give me a bit of anxiety. If we were to have an emergency at night, will the kids remember what to do? What if I’m not able to get down the stairs to their room?

For years we’ve been talking about our family safety plan. We’ve told the kids that if they hear the security alarm at night, they should come directly upstairs to our bedroom, but if they hear the fire alarm or carbon monoxide alarm, they should leave the house and go straight to our designated family meeting place across the street.

We’ve made sure the kids know the different sounds of each alarm, and the OneLink in their room helps a lot since it verbally states if smoke or carbon monoxide are detected. We’ve even had a few drills. But I still worry that if there were a fire at night, the boys would be scared or confused and try to come upstairs to look for us rather than just getting out of the house to safety.

Now that Beckett is a strong reader, and Cooper is learning to read, we decided we should put our family emergency plan in writing and place it on the back of the boys’ bedroom door.

I created a simple but cute emergency plan template that you can download and fill out with your own kids. There are two versions – one with “I” statements, and one with “we” statements for single or multiple kids.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THESE PRINTABLE EMERGENCY PLAN TEMPLATES FOR KIDS.

I sat down with the kids and we talked through our plan together, including what they should do if they hear the smoke alarm, the carbon monoxide alarm, or our house alarm. Then we wrote the plan down in simple terms that are easy for the boys to read and understand.

I also wrote some emergency numbers on the back of the paper, including 911 and the phone numbers for our family members and close friends. If they boys were to make it outside before mom and dad, I want to make sure they have the numbers they, or emergency responders, might need to get them into safe hands. We taped the plan to the door with washi tape, so it will be easy for them to remove and take with them on their way out of the house.

It can be scary to think about these scenarios – for kids and parents alike. But we all rest a little easier at night knowing that we are prepared!

Fire safety should be a family affair, so be sure to get the kids involved. First Alert’s “Super Prepared Family” of superheros helped us start the conversation with our boys, and they have a ton of great online resources for kids. This video is a great introduction to the importance of fire safety:

I’d love to hear your tips, too! What else have you done to prevent fires and make sure your family is safe in the event of a fire or carbon monoxide emergency? Please share your tips in the comments.

I was selected for this opportunity as a member of CLEVER and the content and opinions expressed here are all my own.

The post How to Make a Family Fire Safety Plan + Free Printable appeared first on Blue i Style.

How to Protect Your Family From Carbon Monoxide

blueistyle — Fri, 10 Aug 2018 14:50:00 +0000

Thank you First Alert for sponsoring this post. Don’t let the beep steal your sleep.

We do so many things to keep our families safe, but sometimes the simplest precautions are the most likely to get overlooked. Take carbon monoxide detectors for example. Do you have them throughout your home and are you certain they are in good working order?

I’m ashamed to say that, until recently, this was a NO for us! Our home was a built a year before a law in Colorado began requiring carbon monoxide detectors went into effect, so none were installed when we bought the home. When our first baby was born three years after we moved in to our house, we finally bought a CO detector for the nursery and for our bedroom. But six years later, these were still the only rooms in our home that were protected.

I won’t even pretend to make excuses for this… it’s just a flat out bad decision! Even if you are a step ahead of us and already have carbon monoxide detectors throughout your home, there’s a good chance they could be expired or expiring soon. I’ve committed to take the simple step necessary to keep my family safe, and I’m proud to be partnering with First Alert to make sure that your family is protected as well!

Let’s start with some of the basics that you need to understand to appreciate the danger that carbon monoxide poses, and then I’ll tell you what you need to know to keep your family safe!

WHAT IS CARBON MONOXIDE?

Carbon monoxide is an invisible, odorless and deadly gas. It is the second most common cause of non-medicinal poisonings death, and according to the CDC, more than 400 Americans annually from unintentional CO poisoning not linked to fires, more than 20,000 visit the emergency room, and more than 4,000 are hospitalized.

WHAT CAUSES CARBON MONOXIDE IN HOMES?

Carbon monoxide can be produced by any fuel-burning device, including furnaces, boilers, stoves, and even cars. Some of the most likely sources of carbon monoxide in your home are your gas burning stove, furnace, dryer vent, chimney, or attached garage.

This means that every home is at risk of a carbon monoxide. Fortunately though, CO alarms detect this poisonous gas and provide an early warning. Of course, to properly protect your family, you need to have carbon monoxide detectors installed throughout the house, you need to ensure that they are in good working order, and you need to have a plan for what to do if a carbon monoxide is detected in your home.

WHERE SHOULD CARBON MONOXIDE DETECTORS BE INSTALLED?

First Alert sent me a CO Safety Kit to get our family started on the right track. When we started unpacking the box, my kids were thrilled to find a coloring book. As we flipped through the pages of activities, an illustration of a house caught my eye and quickly answered one of by biggest questions.

It is recommended that you should have a carbon monoxide detector on each level of your home, including the basement, and in each bedroom; a smoke detector on each level of your home, in each bedroom, and each hallway; and a fire extinguisher on each level, including in the living room, kitchen, hallway, basement, and garage.

HOW TO INSTALL A CARBON MONOXIDE DETECTOR

The safety kit I received from First Alert included several different types of carbon monoxide detectors, including ones that can be hard wired, battery operated detectors with wall and ceiling mounts, plug in detectors with battery backups, and a tabletop version.

First Alert’s wide variety of CO alarms made it easy for us to choose the best installation type for each room in our home. Here’s an overview of the CO detectors we’ve installed:

Carbon Monoxide Plug-In Alarm with Battery Backup

The ceilings are high in our living room, making it difficult for my short self to reach with a standard ladder. Rather than trying to install a CO detector on the living room ceiling, I was able to simply plug in a CO detector with a battery backup that allows for continuous monitoring, even during power outages.

Carbon Monoxide Alarm with 10-Year Battery and Digital Temperature Display

For our guest room, I chose the tabletop carbon monoxide detector with a stylish design that can sit right on a nightstand or dresser.

I love that it blends in so seamlessly with our decor, while still providing all the protection we need! This CO detector alert has an easy-to-read backlit digital display that shows the temperature and CO concentration. It alerts you to elevated carbon monoxide levels, and has a loud, 85-decible alarm when CO levels become unsafe. The built-in, 10-year battery offers continuous protection for the life of the carbon monoxide detector.

Combination Photoelectric Smoke and Carbon Monoxide Alarm with 10-Year Battery and Voice and Location

In our master bedroom, we replaced our original smoke detector with an easy to install, slim design combination smoke and carbon monoxide alarm. This programmable talking alarm speaks to indicate the type and location of the detected threat. It has a photoelectric sensor that detects smoke while minimizing false alarms and an electrochemical sensor alerts you to carbon monoxide danger from multiple sources. The built-in 10-year battery provides continuous power for the entire life of the detector.

For those of your who love smart home technology, you might also be interested in the First Alert Onelink Safe & Sound smart smoke detector and carbon monoxide alarm that we installed in the boys’ room last month. In addition to it’s safety features, it is also an Alexa-enabled premium speaker and nightlight. The boys are crazy about it (and so are mom and dad)! You can read all about it in this post.

WHEN SHOULD CARBON MONOXIDE DETECTORS BE REPLACED?

The useful life of many carbon monoxide detectors is only seven years, so it’s important that you know when it’s time to replace them in order to keep your family safe. Carbon monoxide alarms have an end of life warning beep to let you know that it’s time to replace the devise.

Many states adopted new building codes that took effect in 2011 requiring CO alarms. This means that one-and-two-family homes built around this time have carbon monoxide alarms whose useful life of seven years is expiring, or will expire, soon. The states affected are California, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin. Be sure to check the legislation in your state.

You should test your CO alarms regularly to ensure that they are working properly. If your carbon monoxide alarms have replaceable batteries (unlike my new CO detectors that have sealed, 10-year life batteries), the batteries should be changed every 6 months. An easy way to remember is to the change the batteries concurrent with the time change in the spring and fall.

WHAT TO DO IF YOUR CARBON MONOXIDE ALARM SOUNDS

If your CO alarm sounds, you should leave your home immediately for fresh air and then call 911. Create a family plan, including discussing escape routes and establishing a meeting location outside your home, and practice it to make sure your kids know what to do in an emergency.

LEARN MORE ABOUT CARBON MONOXIDE SAFETY

I’m embarrassed to admit how remiss we’d been about carbon monoxide safety in the past! Installing CO detectors all throughout our home was quick and easy, and something we should have done a long time ago. I encourage you to watch this informative safety video from First Alert, check the expiration date on your CO detectors, and add CO alarms in the appropriate locations if your home is not already fully protected.

I was selected for this opportunity as a member of CLEVER and the content and opinions expressed here are all my own.

The post How to Protect Your Family From Carbon Monoxide appeared first on Blue i Style.

Making the Kids’ Room Safer and More Fun With Onelink Safe & Sound

blueistyle — Tue, 26 Jun 2018 20:55:00 +0000

Thank you First Alert Onelink for sponsoring this post. Onelink Safe & Sound – Meet Your Family’s New Best Friend. #ONELINKSTORY

Last summer, we started adding some smart home features to our house, including keyless locks, light bulbs we can control with our phones, and even a smart garage door opener. I love the convenience each of these adds to our lives, but more than that, I love the ways in which they make our home a safer place for our family.

Recently we added one more smart home addition that has quickly jumped straight to the top of my favorites list. We installed the First Alert Onelink Safe & Sound smart smoke detector and carbon monoxide alarm in the boys’ room to help keep them safe, which mom and dad love! But it’s more than just that… it’s also an Alexa enabled premium speaker and nightlight, which the boys are just crazy about!

SAFETY FIRST

When we bought our house before having kids, many of our parent friends warned us that having the master bedroom on a different floor than the kids rooms would someday be a problem. But thanks to a home security system that gives me peace of mind, and video monitors that allow us to hear the kids if they need us, having the master bedroom a floor above the kids has really never been an issue for our family.

However, there is one aspect of the distance between our bedrooms that does give me a bit of anxiety. I worry that if there is an emergency at night, the kids won’t know what to do. We have a family safety plan, and we’ve told the kids that if they hear the security alarm at night, they should come directly upstairs to our bedroom, but if they hear the fire alarm, they should leave the house and go straight to our designated meeting place across the street. We’ve made sure the know the different sounds of each alarm, and we’ve had a few drills, but I still worry that if there were a fire at night, they would try to come upstairs to look for us rather than just getting out of the house to safety.

That’s why I was so excited when I learned that the new Onelink Safe & Sound not only provides both smoke and carbon monoxide detection, and push notifications directly to our phones via the Onelink Home app, but it also provides the kids with verbal direction to leave the house in the event of an emergency.

SIMPLE INSTALLATION

The boys were both eager to help dad install the new alarm. Cooper put on his yellow hard hat, and studied the “constructions” as he calls them. We gathered the few tools the instructions said we might need: a Philips head screwdriver, needle nose pliers, and wire strippers.

Scott started by removing our old smoke alarm and its mounting bracket.

The Onelink Safe & Sound comes with adapter plugs to save you the hassle of rewiring and make installation easy. It turned out that our old hardwired smoke alarm already used the same adapter plug, so we didn’t have to do anything other than install the new mounting plate, and plug the new alarm into the existing adapter.

The kids were on the ready as daddy’s helpers, but the whole installation process only took about five minutes and ended up only requiring a nothing more than a screwdriver.

HAPPY PARENTS! HAPPY KIDS!

One of my earliest memories is of my dad testing the smoke alarms in our house when I was four or five, and it terrified me. Now my boys also have a fear of our alarms. When I first told them we were going to install a new smoke and carbon monoxide alarm in their room, they were pretty skeptical and nervous. But once I explained to them that their new alarm also has a speaker and Alexa right on the ceiling of their bedroom, they were totally sold (hence their eagerness to help with the installation)! As my husband always says… it’s all about the messaging!

As a mom, I feel so much better knowing that the Onelink Safe & Sound will keep my boys safer and help them know what to do in an emergency by not only sounding an alarm, but also having a voice that directs them to leave the house in the event that smoke or carbon monoxide is detected. Our new smart alarm will also send a notification directly to my phone and Scott’s, allowing us to stay informed if an emergency were to happen while we were away from home.

Of course, the boys are most excited that they can ask Alexa to pump up the jams any time they want to dance (and let’s be honest – they ALWAYS want to dance!).

We can even turn out the bedroom lights and use the Onelink Home app to choose different colors on the built in nightlight to really bring the party to life!

Then when it’s time for bed, we use the Alexa-enable speaker to ask for the weather forecast to choose clothes for the next day, and set an alarm to wake the boys in the morning. We use the app to dim the nighlight for sleeping, and turn off the microphone so that the boys aren’t tempted to play with Alexa when they should be sleeping.

As an unexpected side benefit, I’m enjoying doing the boys’ laundry just a little bit more these days since Alexa to read me my audio book while I hang up all the clean clothes in the boys’ closet.

I had been wanting to add more Alexa-enabled speakers throughout our house, but now what I really want is a Onelink Safe & Sound for every room. Here’s a quick rundown of everything this smart alarm can do:

What more could you want than a smart device that provides entertainment, adds convenience, and keeps your family safe?

I was selected for this opportunity as a member of CLEVER and the content and opinions expressed here are all my own.

The post Making the Kids’ Room Safer and More Fun With Onelink Safe & Sound appeared first on Blue i Style.

How to Make the Daylight Savings Time Change Easier on Kids

blueistyle — Thu, 08 Mar 2018 18:40:00 +0000

I’ve always loved daylight savings, despite losing an hour of sleep. Maybe it’s the night owl in me talking, but I’m a fan of the extra light in the evenings to enjoy time as a family and to get my DIY projects done. But as a parent, the transition can be a bit rough! How do you convince young kids that it’s bedtime when it’s still light outside? And how do you get them up and moving for school in the morning when it’s still dark in their room?

With the time change coming this weekend, I thought it was the perfect time to share some tips on how to make the daylight savings time change easier on kids {and mom and dad!}. Thanks to my partners at Hive, I’ve found some ways to make the transition even easier by taking advantage of some simple smart home automation tools.

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CONTROL THE LIGHTS

Melatonin is the hormone that helps to regulate your body’s internal clock. As it gets dark in the evenings, melatonin increases and helps to induce sleep, and then it decreases when it becomes light outside again to incease wakefulness and alertness. Of course, when daylight savings kicks in each spring, and we start asking kids to go to bed when it’s still light out and often wake up before the sun, we are fighting against that natural cycle.

Make it Darker at Night. Closing the curtains or adding blackout shades helps to darken a child’s bedroom, but experts also recommend dimming the lights in a child’s room about 30-45 minutes before bedtime to help simulate the transition to nighttime and increase melatonin production.

If you’re a regular blog reader, then you know that we’ve been using Hive Active Light bulbs to set schedules and control lights all throughout our home for about a year now.

In the fall, when it was getting dark early, I set a schedule for the lamp in the boys’ bedroom to come on at the time they normally start getting ready for bed, so that they’d never have to go upstairs to a dark room. And, because our Hive smart home products integrate with Amazon Echo, I loved being able to ask Alexa to turn on the lights upstairs if the kids wanted to head up early to read or play before bedtime.

Now that we’ll be dealing with the opposite problem – getting the kids ready for bed when it’s still light outside – I’m setting a new schedule for the Hive Active Light bulb in the boys’ bedroom. I’m scheduling the lamp to come on 45 minutes before their 8 pm bedtime, and to gradually dim by 30% every 15 minutes. That way, it will gradually get darker in their room as we read books and go through the regular bedtime routine.

We typically leave their lamp on with the bulb dimmed to 30% all night as a nightlight, but I’m dropping that down to 20% for the coming weeks to make it just a little darker in their room, and hopefully help them to fall asleep a bit easier during the daylight savings transition period.

Using the Hive app on my phone, it’s so quick and easy to set exactly the schedule we want, and to make adjustments to it as needed. And I love that I can set a different schedule for the weekends when we typically let the boys stay up a little later.

Here’s the schedule I’ve created to automatically dim the Hive Active Light bulb in the boys’ bedroom for daylight savings:

Make it Lighter in the Morning. Dimming the lights as bedtime approaches is a great way to ease the transition at night, but we need a little help in the mornings as well.

My kids need to get up around 7 am to get ready for school, but after the time change this weekend, the sun won’t be rising until closer to 7:30 for the first week or so. Especially after losing an hour, mornings can be pretty rough until the kids get adjusted to the new schedule.

One of my sons is a morning person, but the other… not so much! He’s a pretty happy kid if he wakes up naturally on his own, but if I have to wake him up, there’s a lot of crankiness and complaining to deal with. To make our mornings a little easier, I’ve also set the Hive Active Light bulb in their room to brighten from 20% to 60% at 7 am each morning. By gradually brightening the light in the room at the time he’s used to waking up, it will help keep the morning schedule the same and let him wake up naturally.

Adjust the Color Temperature of the Light to Match the Time of Day. While both sunset and sunrise naturally produce light in the warm color temperature range, which is shown to help us relax, research shows that cool light increases alertness and makes us feel more energetic. In addition to dimmable lights, Hive also offers Hive Active Lights that color change from cool to warm white.

These light bulbs allow you to set schedules to control the brightness as well as adjust the warmth of the light automatically, so you could set a schedule with warmer light at night to help the kids relax and get ready for bed, and then adjust it to a cooler light temperature in the morning to help kids feel more alert as they get ready for school.

ADD OTHER NATURAL CUES

Light is obviously one of the best natural cues for our kids to know when it’s time to sleep and when to wake up, but there are other cues that can help as well. Our boys used to fall asleep to white noise, but now prefer quiet music at night. Since they’ll need to start waking up when it’s still dark out, I’m going to also use music to help gently wake them in the mornings {because no kid wakes up happy to an alarm clock!}.

At night, we plug the boys iPad in to charge and turn on Pandora with a sleep timer set for 30 minutes. I’m also going to start setting an alarm for 7 am – but rather than an obnoxious sound, music will begin playing at the same soft volume they fell asleep to. The music, combined with the lamp in the room getting brighter, should help them wake up naturally.

Of course, it only takes a few hours for the iPad to fully charge, and then it’s plugged in the rest of the night for no reason. Since we are always looking for ways to save energy, I decided to add a Hive Active Plug and I’ve set a schedule so the plug is only on from 8 pm, when the boys go to bed, until 1 am, when the iPad will be fully charged.

In addition to saving money on the electric bill, setting Hive Active Plugs on a schedule is also a great way to prevent overcharging the battery on older devices with batteries that aren’t designed to stop taking charge once they are full.

A FEW MORE HELPFUL TIPS

Here are a few more tips to help ease the transition for your kids:

MAKE GRADUAL CHANGES IN ADVANCE: Doctors suggest that in the days leading up to the time change, you should gradually adjust bedtime. In the spring, when we lose an hour of sleep, you can start putting kids to bed about 15 minutes earlier each night, so that when the time change rolls around, you’ve adjusted them to going to bed an hour earlier to make up for the hour we lose. Then, on Sunday, when we move forward an hour, bedtime can return to its normal time.
DON’T SKIP NAPS: If your kids still nap, don’t skip naptime in an effort to make them extra tired. Rather than making bedtime easier, this will likely make bedtime harder because overly tired kids get grumpy, and can then be harder to settle down to sleep.
STICK TO YOUR ROUTINE: Kids get confused when the daily order of things changes, and the time change will likely make their naturally rhythms feel “off.” Help counteract this by keeping your bedtime routine consistent and doing everything in exactly the same order that you normally would. The fewer things that change, the easier the transition will be on your kids.

MORE WAYS TO MAKE PARENTING EASIER

Throughout the past year, we’ve found so many ways to make parenting, and adulting in general, easier using our Hive smart home ecosystem. You can read about all the ways we’re using other Hive smart products – like our Hive Active Thermostats, Hive Door Sensors, and Hive Motion Sensors – in these posts. You can get all the details on the current plans and pricing on the Hive website, and you’ll save 10% off any pack with the code ANGELA10.

This is a sponsored conversation written by me on behalf of Hive. The opinions and text are all mine. Comments submitted may be displayed on other websites owned by the sponsoring brand.

The post How to Make the Daylight Savings Time Change Easier on Kids appeared first on Blue i Style.

The Stylish, Smart Device That’s Keeping My Kids Safer

blueistyle — Thu, 18 Jan 2018 12:00:00 +0000

Out of the blue, my six year old came up to me a couple of weeks ago and started running his hands through my hair. His little fingers were clearly searching for something. I asked him what he was doing, and he turned to his four year old brother and said, “I can’t find them, but I know mom REALLY does have eyes in the back of her head.”

I couldn’t stop laughing! I don’t even remember telling them this, but I must have said it at some point in time, and they’d been having a debate about whether it was really true. Of course, I wasn’t going to break it to him that I usually just know what they are up to because they are still pretty predictable at this age, and because aren’t good at being sneaky yet {they whisper “don’t tell mom” loudly enough that I can usually hear them from the next room}.

But the truth is that every parent could use an extra set of eyes and ears around the house to keep things running smoothly, and now, thanks to my partnership with Hive, I have just that. I can keep tabs on the kids no matter where I am in the house!

I just received their new indoor camera, the Hive View, to add to our existing smart home ecosystem. We already have Hive Active Thermostats, Hive Active Light bulbs, Hive Active Plugs, Hive Window and Door sensors, and Hive Motion Sensors, which you can read all about in these posts.

One of my favorite things about our Hive Active Thermostats is the sleek, modern design that fits so well with style of our home {as you can see here}, so I was excited when I found out that Hive had partnered with renowned industrial designer Yves Béhar to design the new camera.

As soon as I opened the box, I could see how much attention had been paid to the detail of the design.

The Hive View comes in two color combos – white and champagne gold, and black and brushed copper. The camera itself, a sleek cube, attaches to the curved base arm with a magnet, so you can grab that cube and carry it with you to another room anytime you want {off the base, the battery lasts more than one hour}. The magnetic mount also means that the cube can be attached the arm at any angle to capture the best view of the room. The base also comes with a mounting bracket, if you prefer to attach is to a surface or wall.

I’ve seen a lot of indoor smart security cameras before, but never one stylish enough I’d really want to see it sitting in my living room. But the Hive View blends right in in our living room!

The white camera will be really versatile, since I plan to move it around our house, but just think how gorgeous the black and copper version of this camera would look on the piano!

It only took me a couple of minutes to set up the Hive View, connect it with my Hive app via Bluetooth, and have it fully up and running. After admiring the style in the living room, I took it down to the basement family room/playroom where I wanted to test out my plan to let the Hive View be my extra set of eyes and ears while the kids play.

The boys are old enough now that they can play independently, and fortunately they get along really well and love spending time together. But they tend to get loud, as little boys do, and sometimes, from a distance, it’s hard to distinguish if they are fighting or laughing. When I’m up in the kitchen cooking dinner, for example, I’m constantly running to the other side of the house to the top of the stairs to hear what’s going on and determine if I need to intervene.

With the Hive View set up in the basement family room, it’s like I really do have eyes in the back of my head. Now I have the peace of mind to know exactly what’s happening in the basement while I’m in the kitchen cooking dinner. And, best of all, I’ll no longer have to worry about letting the kids play in the basement while I go up to the second or third floor of our house, where I previously would have been nervous because they were too far away for me to overhear what was going on.

All I have to do is open the Hive app, choose the camera from my list of devices, and then tap “go live.”

I can watch a 1080p livestream of the boys playing, and with a 130-degree field of view, I’ll be able to keep my eyes on them even as the move around the basement. I was really impressed by the color and crispness of the video, and the sound is really clear.

While I’m currently using our new Hive View camera to make mom-life easier, I do love the idea that it can also provide us an added layer of security. Sitting on the piano, the camera could provide us a clear view of the front door when we are away from home. And once again, look how well it blends in to the design of the room! Can you even spot it? I love making our home smarter and safer without having the technology interfere with the look of our home!

Hive View starts recording when it detects motion or sound, and sends a notification directly to my smartphone. I really appreciate that the notifications tell you specifically what was detected – sound or movement. And the analytics chip is even sophisticated enough to distinguish between people and pets, so that your furry friend won’t trigger an alert each time he or she wanders through the room. Within the Hive app, I can review the last 24-hours of video, or with Hive Video Playback I can watch a 30-day camera history for just $5.99 per month.

As with all the Hive devices, I love how much control of the camera I have via the app, including scheduling features and even privacy mode. Hive also plans to add a number of new features in the future, so stay tuned for more.

But for now, I’m just thrilled to finally have that extra set of eyes and ears that every mom NEEDS! I’ll be able to be more productive around the house and have the peace of mind I need without having to constantly run down two or three flights of stairs to check on them!

Hive is offering a 10% discount to all of my readers when you use code: ANGELA10, so choose your favorite color combo and let the stylish Hive View camera be the extra set of eyes and ears you need to keep your home and family safe!

This is a sponsored conversation written by me on behalf of Hive. The opinions and text are all mine. Comments submitted may be displayed on other websites owned by the sponsoring brand.

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Stylish Guest WiFi Password Signs

blueistyle — Fri, 15 Dec 2017 16:00:00 +0000

My number one priority for our guest room was creating a comfortable and relaxing space for our friends and family. But the reality is that our guests often need to get some work done and stay connected while they are visiting. In order to balance style and function and give our guests a work space, I chose a small, Parsons-style desk for one side of the bed instead of a traditional nightstand.

Of course, providing guests a comfortable and convenient place to work is only half of the challenge. A good WiFi connection is also a must! And to get online, guests will need the password.

Today I’ve got five quick and stylish WiFi password sign ideas, as well as a tip for getting good WiFi coverage, even in those far corners of your house.

My friend Melissa came to visit last month, and when she asked me for our WiFi password, she was met with a blank stare. Since it’s saved on both my computer and phone, I never have to type it in and honestly had no clue what it was. I assured her that when Scott got home, he’d be able to tell her. Well, Scott came home from work, and about 10 guesses later he had to go and reset the password. About an hour later we were finally able to get her online so she could finish some work, and I realized that we need to make it easier on us and our guests.

This post contains affiliate links. If you buy something I recommend, you’ll pay the same price, but I may receive a small commission. You can read my full disclosure here.

I’ve seen a lot of really cute printable WiFi password signs on Pinterest, but I wanted to come up with some other quick and stylish ways that we could display our WiFi password in the guest room. First up, my cordless lightbox. Of course, that’s not our real password, but you get the idea!

I love the look of the lightbox, but my mini one is a bit limited on space, and might not be idea if {like us} you have one of those long WiFi passwords that is a random string of letters and numbers. Next, I tried out a trendy letterboard {an idea I actually got from Melissa}.

This pretty gray and wood letterboard provides a lot more space to work with. I could easily put the rows closer together and fit a lot more text.

Everyone loves a chalkboard, right? A little chalkboard easel is a perfect place to jot down the WiFi password. And if you guest room is like mine, and all the outlets are hidden by furniture, it’s a really nice touch to provide a charging station {or “juice bar”} so guests don’t have to struggle to find a place to plug in their charging cords.

Since I already have a lot of framed photos from our Greek island honeymoon in the guest room, I came up with a simple way to use one of the photos to display the WiFi Password.

Dry erase markers and chalk markers work really well on glass, and can be easily wiped away. I used my Cricut electronic cutting machine to create a little vinyl decal with a WiFi symbol and a space to jot down our WiFi password.

This one really blends in to the decor in such a subtle way that it might need to be pointed out to your guests, but it’s definitely a stylish option!

Last, but certainly not least… welcome your guests with both WiFi and wine!

Earlier in the year, I used one of our honeymoon photos to make this acrylic photo-transfer tray {grab the DIY tutorial here}. Dry erase markers work on acrylic, just like on glass, so I simply sat out a bottle of Greek wine a couple of wine glasses on the tray, and then wrote the WiFi password right on the tray.

Because our house is long and thin, and spread over four levels, getting good wireless coverage has always been a challenge. My office is in the basement in one corner of the house, but I also do a lot of work in the bedroom, on the third floor in the opposite corner. My husband is our resident tech guru, and over the years he’s tried a ton of different solutions for getting good WiFi coverage throughout the house. For a while, we had a range extender to help stretch our coverage from the basement office {where the router is} all the way up to the top floor, and it was serviceable, but it also really slowed down our connection.

After years of me complaining about our slow internet and dead spots throughout the house – including the guest room – Scott went in search of a whole home system that would give us consistent coverage and better speeds. We were initially leaning toward Google Wifi, but Scott isn’t the typical impulse purchaser type of guy. So he did some research and found that both c|net {our go to for tech reviews} and PC Mag both recommended the Netgear Orbi system, which offers up to 100% faster speeds than Google WiFi, and can cover a 5,000 square foot house/yard. After we’d already settled on Orbi as our best option, Orbi offered to send us their Whole Home Wifi System to test out. As always, all opinions are 100% my own.

Like I said, Scott is the tech guru of the family, so he could probably tell you a lot more about how and why the Netgear Orbi system is so great, but my review is a lot more simple – it works REALLY well! We now have fast WiFi throughout the entire house with no dead spots. I no longer complain and curse at my computer on a daily basis, and I no longer have to apologize to our guests that there’s no WiFi in the guest room!

Oh, and most importantly {ok, so it’s not really the MOST important, but it is really important to me} the Orbi is super stylish and blends really easily with our decor. There are two matching pieces, the router {which we keep in the basement office} and the satellite {which lives in our guest room}. Both look like a sleek white vases rather than a bulky piece of hardware.

If you want a high tech solution to providing guests with your WiFi password, Orbi and Alexa have you covered! The Orbi system works in conjunction with Alexa voice-enabled products, like the Amazon Echo. You can ask Alexa to enable your guest WiFi network, or even ask Alexa to securely remind you of your WiFi password via a card to the Alexa app.

So if, like me, when it comes time to write give guests the WiFi password, you can’t remember what it is… you can simply ask Alexa and she’ll send it to you! Here’s a helpful YouTube video I found that shows you how to set it up and what voice commands to use.

This is just one of the many ways that we are using Alexa and other simple smart home tools to make our guest room more comfortable. You can read more about our smart guest room in this post.

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How to Create a Comfortable Guest Room with Simple Smart Home Tools

blueistyle — Mon, 20 Nov 2017 17:39:00 +0000

Whether you travel for the holidays, or host friends and family at your home, I think we can all agree on the importance of a comfortable guest room! I’m constantly updating our space to make it more welcoming to our guests, and I’ve come up with some really fun and easy ideas to add smart home automation tools to our guest suite with the help of my friends at Hive, who are generously sponsoring this post.

The design of our guest room was inspired by the hotels we stayed at during our honeymoon on the Greek islands of Satorini and Mykonos. We wanted to recreate that same uber relaxing vibe for our guests, so we started with dark walls for a cozy feeling, and layered in the colors of the islands with white furniture, blue accessories, and lots of photos.

Over the years, we’ve continually made small updates to the guest room to make it more comfortable and inviting for our guests, like the addition of the rocking chair in the corner and the soft rug over our not-so-soft builder’s grade carpet.

This fall, I’ve made a few more updates to get us holiday-guest ready, but this time, I’ve been focusing on how we can use some Hive smart products. I’ve talked a lot about Hive in past posts, including this one that covers the set up and installation process, as well as some of the awesome ways it’s making our lives easier. I won’t rehash all those details here – instead I want to get straight to showing you how some of the awesome Hive products are making our guest room smarter and more comfortable for our guests!

When we first set up our Hive family of smart products, Scott placed the Hive Hub – the heart and brain of the system – in the guest room, and connected it to our broadband router. At the time, I gave Scott major props for how well he made the Hub blend in with my decor {that taller white thing behind the flowers is our router, and the shorter one the left is the Hive Hub}.

Ironically, despite having the Hub located right in the guest room, it didn’t occur to me at the time to put any other Hive smart products in this room – probably because we weren’t expecting any guests around that time. But as I was thinking through ways to make our guest room more inviting for the holidays, Hive suddenly seemed like a very obvious answer. Here’s how we’ve updated the guest room to make it smarter and more comfortable…

I started by replacing the light bulbs in both lamps with Hive Active Light bulbs.

We also have a large, back-lit framed photo that hangs above the guest room bed. It creates an awesome effect when it’s on, and provides really nice ambient lighting, but it’s not very convenient since it plugs in behind the bed. The simple solution was to plug the back-lit frame into a Hive Active Plug.

Using the Hive app, I set the frame above the bed to a schedule so that it now comes on at dusk and goes off around midnight, but I can easily adjust that schedule to make it go off later if we have guests that prefer an earlier bed time.

I also set the lamps on a schedule, which works great for adding a bit more light in the house even when we aren’t home. But when guests are staying in this room, they will, of course, want to control the lamps themselves. Since our guests won’t all have the Hive app on their phones, nor do we want to set every guest up with access to our Hive account, we can let Alexa do the job!

The Hive eco-system integrates with our Amazon Echo, so by simply placing the Echo on the nightstand, we can give our guests total control of all of the lights in the room, as well as the back-lit frame above the bed via voice commands.

Not only can our guests tell Alexa to turn the lights on and off, or dim them down to a more comfortable level in the evenings, they can also use Alexa to control the Hive Active Thermostat to get the guest room to the perfect temperature.

Our house has two furnaces – one for the basement, main floor, and second floor {where the guest room is located}, and a separate one for our third floor master suite. Since we have our own furnace in our master bedroom, our guests don’t have to sleep at the same temperature that we choose for our room. But in the past, guests would have to go down stairs to the thermostat if they wanted to adjust the heat or air conditioning – not exactly ideal if you’re too hot or cold in the middle of the night.

Now, from the comfort of bed, our guests can just tell Alexa if they want to change the temperature at any time of the day or night!

I also added one more Hive smart product in the guest bathroom to make those middle-of-the-night potty trips a bit easier. Our bathroom has a bunch of light switches right by the door, but they are in a totally illogical order. Even after living here nine years, I still flip the wrong switch most of the time and end up turning on the loud bathroom fan when I’m trying to turn on the lights. To avoid this problem for our guests, I added a super slim and discreet Hive Motion Sensor to the half wall between the bathroom counter and tub {with a clear view of the bathroom door}.

I programmed this motion sensor to turn on some of the bathroom lights, dimmed down to a soft level, when motion is detected. Now when someone enters the bathroom in the middle of the night, they’ll get just enough light to see where they are going without having risking turning on that loud fan and waking anyone else sleeping in the guest room. I love that that Hive Motion Sensor is so small that it just blends right in with the decor. I bet you wouldn’t even notice it here if I didn’t point it out!

I have a feeling that we will continue coming up with more ways to make our guest room even smarter and more comfortable for our guests as time goes on. The integration with the Amazon Echo makes it so convenient to put control of our Hive eco-system in the hands of our guests without them needing the app, so the possibilities are really endless. If you were a guest, what other home automation perks would make your stay more comfortable? Share your ideas with me in the comments below!

If you’re ready to make your house into a smart home ecosystem with Hive smart products, read more tips and ideas in this post, and then use this link and code HIVEANGELA10 to save 10% on your Hive plan at checkout.

This is a sponsored conversation written by me on behalf of Hive. The opinions and text are all mine. Comments submitted may be displayed on other websites owned by the sponsoring brand.

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Our Home Just Keeps Getting Smarter

blueistyle — Thu, 19 Oct 2017 23:11:00 +0000

Who says you can’t teach an old home new tricks?! A few months ago, I told you all about our new Hive Home System, and how it allowed us to bring our decade old house into the smart home generation without any overly complicated updates or high upfront device costs.

After living with our Hive smart home ecosystem throughout the summer and into the fall, we’ve continued to discover new ways that it can make our home a smarter, safer, and an even more fun place to live. I told you I’d keep you updated as I came up with additional solutions to make our home work harder for us, rather than the other way around, so today I’m back to chat about four more reasons that I’ve fallen in love with our Hive Home System this fall! Thank you to Hive for sponsoring this post. As always, all opinions are 100% my own.

WHAT IS HIVE, AGAIN?

Let me back up and give you a quick reminder of what Hive is all about. Back in June, the UK’s most popular smart home brand launched in the US and Canada with their Hive Welcome Home Plan that allowed us an easy way to make our home tech savvy – including the ability to adjust heating and air conditioning, lighting, and appliances from anywhere, and to have each of these components work together to create one cohesive smart home ecosystem, all for one affordable monthly subscription rate!

In the early summer, we installed:

Hive Active Thermostats to control the temperature from anywhere and cut our energy bill
a Hive Door Sensor and Hive Motion Sensor, which integrate to automatically turn on the lights when we enter our detached garage, and to alert us of any uninvited guests in the garage
Hive Active Light bulbs to set schedules and control lights throughout our home
Hive Active Plugs to control additional lights in our house that don’t use standard size light bulbs
the Hive Hub, which is the brains of the operation that allows us to control all the other devices through our smart phones, tablets and laptops.

I was initially intimated by the idea of setting this system up on my own while Scott was out of town, but I was shocked by how simple and intuitive it was. You can learn more about the setup process, and details on how we integrated each component in my Smart Home 101 post.

Since each family and each home has unique needs, Hive has recently introduced three additional subscription plans, including the Hive Starter Plan {$9.99/month}, the Hive Heating & Cooling Plan {$12.99/month}, and the Hive Home Check Plan {$19.99/month}, each of which includes a smart thermostat and a mix of other products, all of which are controlled by the Hive mobile app. You can read more about these plans on the Hive website.

Ok, now let’s talk about the new ways that we are using Hive to make the school year run a little smoother, to free up time for the things we love, and even to make our home more fun!

GETTING OUT THE DOOR

IN THE MORNING WITH LESS STRESS

With school back in session, things get pretty hectic. Between driving carpool in the mornings, heading to client meetings, soccer practice, PTA meetings, and a million other commitments, I’m always on my way out the door to somewhere.

Getting ready to go usually looks something like this… start to get dressed, run down the stairs to help the kids locate a missing shirt or sock, run back up the stairs to brush teeth, run down the stairs to put breakfast on the table, run back up the stairs to do my hair and throw on makeup, run down the stairs to pack school lunches and run out the door.

Then, as I’m driving away, I too often have a moment of panic where I can’t remember if I unplugged the curling iron.

What to do?! If I pull back up to the house, I’m going to have to unstrap two kids from their car seats and drag them back inside because I can’t leave them in the car alone while I run up two flights of stairs to the master bathroom. Ugh! Mama ain’t got time for that!

After going through this same routine one too many times in recent weeks, Scott pointed out to me the most obvious of solutions that I’d somehow been overlooking.

Hive to the rescue! I plugged a Hive Active Plug into the outlet by my bathroom sink that I now use for my curling iron.

Now if I leave the house and question whether I remembered to turn off or unplug the curling iron, all I have to do is open the Hive app and tap on the orange circle to switch the Hive Active Plug off.

If I leave the curling iron plugged in, I can even use the Hive app to turn the Hive Active Plug on in the morning when I’m ready to heat up my curling iron, even if I’m busy downstairs getting the kids prepped for the day. Sometimes just saving those few minutes makes a huge difference on a busy morning.

HIVE IS LIKE AN EXTRA
PAIR OF HANDS IN THE EVENING

Once we’re back home for the evening, the juggling act continues. I’m sure any parent can relate to the feeling that you need to clone yourself so you can be in two place as once {or three, or four…}. There’s always dinner to be cooked and laundry to put away when I’d rather be playing with the kids, reading library books with them, or enjoying a family dance party.

The boys are old enough now that they will play pretty independently when I have chores around the house that have to be done, but as the days get shorter and the sun continues to set earlier each evening, they boys don’t want to go up or downstairs alone if the lights aren’t on.

When we first set up our Hive Home System, we added a Hive Active Light bulb in the boys’ bedroom, and set a schedule for it to come on at the time they normally start getting into their pajamas. We then have the light automatically set to dim to a softer night-light setting as bedtime approaches.

This automatic schedule is perfect for our nightly bedtime routine, but if the boys want to go upstairs to play or read earlier in the evening, I can easily use the Hive app to turn on their bedroom lamp right from my phone rather than having to run up the stairs.

Better yet, we recently purchased an Amazon Echo, which integrates with our Hive eco-system. So now, if I’m in the middle of cooking dinner and my hands are wet or messy, I simply ask Alexa to turn on the light in the boys’ room.

Hive is that extra pair of hands that I need to make life easier during the day-to-day routine of the school year. It makes my mom-heart so full to be able to encourage their independence and love of books rather than always having to say “I’ll be there in a minute”!

CONTROL THE TEMPERATURE FROM ANYWHERE

The Colorado weather is always pretty unpredictable, and especially in the fall, the temperatures tend to swing from one extreme to the other, often within days. The volatile temperatures used to make it hard to know what temperature to set the thermostat to when we go out of town.

But now, thanks to our Hive Active Thermostat, we are always in control, even when we’re away from home. Last weekend, we were up the mountains enjoy a little mini-vacation. I checked the weather back in Denver and saw that it was going to get a lot colder than I expected, so I was able use the Hive app to adjust the temperature back home.

It gave me such peace of mind to not have to worry about the house getting too cold and the pipes freezing. And then when the weather warmed right back up the next day, I was able to adjust the thermostat again to not pay to heat the house more than necessary.

MAKING HOLIDAY DREAMS COME TRUE

My boys absolutely love helping me decorate for each holiday, and this year, they asked if we could add some Halloween decoration to the front porch.

They were so excited to see all of our cute Jack o’Lanterns on the porch, but when the sun went down, I had a big surprise for them!

Hive recently introduced some exciting new products that you can “add on” to your Hive home smart plan, including color-changing Hive Active Lights that can be set to 16 million colors on a spectrum!

I swapped out the regular bulbs in the light fixture on our covered porch for two Hive Active Light Color-Changing bulbs. I took the boys out to the porch to capture their reaction:

When they saw the colored light, they were so excited… when the saw they could use the Hive app to pick any color they wanted, they were in heaven!

These are just four of the new ways that we’ve been using our Hive Home System to make our lives a little easier this fall, not to mention a heck of a lot more fun! If you missed my original post about Hive, be sure to head over there now to get more background info and to read about some of the additional ways that Hive has made our home not only smarter, but also safer.

Are you ready to turn your house into a smart home ecosystem with Hive? Then you’re in luck, because you can save 10% of your Hive plan when you use this link and enter discount code HIVEANGELA10 at checkout.

I’m happy to answer any questions you might have, so don’t hesitate to leave a comment below!

This is a sponsored conversation written by me on behalf of Hive. The opinions and text are all mine. Comments submitted may be displayed on other websites owned by the sponsoring brand.

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The post Our Home Just Keeps Getting Smarter appeared first on Blue i Style.

Home Made Smarter

blueistyle — Mon, 12 Jun 2017 19:56:00 +0000

As I get older, I’m determined to keep up with the newest technology. Sure I haven’t heard of the latest dating app, and there’s always some new social media aimed at the generation a decade younger than I am, but I do pretty well {mostly thanks to my husband, who sometimes has to drag me along when I complain about why the TV needs three different remotes}.

Our house is the same way. Built just about 10 years ago, it came before smart home technology really became mainstream. And I’ve seen the way that Scott looks at those younger homes with their fancy thermostats and lights you can control from your phone. So I was thrilled when I learned that Hive, the UK’s most popular smart home brand, has just launched in the US and Canada and is offering easy ways to make any home tech savvy – including the ability to adjust heating and air conditioning, lighting, and appliances from anywhere, and to have each of these components work together to create one cohesive smart home ecosystem! Thank you to Hive for sponsoring this post. As always, all opinions are 100% my own.

I used to envision that having a smart home meant a complicated system that would take me a long time to learn to operate, and that I’d have to constantly ask Scott to remind me how to make it work right {like the dang TV}. But after setting up our Hive Home ecosystem last week, I realized that having a totally integrated smart home is actually way easier than navigating all of our digital entertainment options, or keeping up with the latest social media apps!

When our Hive Welcome Home kit arrived last week, I was so excited to open the box to check out what was included!

The Hive Welcome Home kit gives you everything you need to get started with home automation, including the Hive Hub, a Hive Active Thermostat, Hive Active Light bulbs, Hive Active Plugs, Hive Window or Door Sensors, and a Hive Motion Sensor. You can then add on additional lights, plugs, and sensors to fit your needs. Using the Hive app, each of these components work together to create a smart home ecosystem – for example, the motion sensor can turn the lights on, or the door sensor can tell your thermostat to adjust the temperature when you arrive home.

After admiring the pretty packaging, I did what I typically do with anything tech related… I asked Scott to set it up.

He started by putting the Hive Hub – the heart and brain of the system – in the guest room, and connecting it to our broadband router.

Fortunately the Hive Hub is a small sleek white box that doesn’t take up much space. But I have to give Scott major props for how well he always makes our equipment blend in with my decor {that taller white thing behind the flowers is our router}. Clearly my decor blogger ways have rubbed off on him!

The Hive Hub set up was a quick process, and Scott also downloaded the Hive app, but then he had to get packed for an out of town work trip, so I had to set up the rest of the components myself. And I’m glad I did, because now I realize just how simple and easy Hive is to self-install!

Scott has been wanting to make our home “smarter” for quite a while, but I always thought of it more as a techy-toy – something fun to have, but not something we needed. I can admit when I’m wrong though… and I was definitely wrong on this one! It turns out that Hive is already making our lives easier and our home safer in some very real ways.

Let me give you a quick tour of our new and improved, smart home ecosystem…

GARAGE SECURITY & SAFETY

About a year after we moved into our house, our neighbors home was robbed and the thieves broke into our garage as well, but were scared away by another neighbor before making it into our home. We immediately installed a home security system, but, ironically, the one area of our home that is not covered by the alarm monitoring is the one area that was broken in to – the detached garage. This was a matter of cost and logistics, but it’s always bothered me that our garage was not protected like the rest of the house… Enter Hive!

Through a combination of a Hive Door Sensor, and a Hive Motion Sensor, and a Hive Active Light bulb, I can now monitor our garage from anywhere, and I feel safer going out there to get things from the fridge and freezer or take the the trash out at night. {Can you spot the fridge and freezer? They are covered in a patchwork of paint swatches!}

Here’s how I set it up… first I used the included adhesive strips to install the Hive Door Sensor along the inside, top edge of the door that leads from our backyard into the garage. This clever wireless sensor now sends an alert to my phone anytime this door is opened or closed!

Next, I used another adhesive strip to affix a Hive Motion Sensor on the wall of the garage, positioned to where the sensor will pick up motion in the garage if someone were to enter through the backyard door or either of the garage lift doors. This sensor also sends alerts directly to my phone. While the door and motion sensors are not tied to an alarm system, receiving the immediate notifications on my phone puts me in control and I can call a neighbor to check on things if I’m not home, or call the police if need be.

Taking it one step further, I was also able to install a Hive Active Light bulb in the ceiling fixture, and with just a few swipes of the Hive app, I set it up so that the when the door sensor recognizes that the door has been opened, it turns the light on in the garage.

I go between the house and the garage a lot in the evenings to get food from the extra fridge and freezer when I’m cooking dinner, and taking out the trash and recycling after meals. My hands are often full, and I’ve never liked walking into the dark, detached garage at night. With just about a few minutes of set up, Hive has totally solved this problem!

LIGHTING THE HOUSE FOR SECURITY

After setting up the Hive Active Light bulb in our garage, I wanted to be able to control some of the lights inside the house as well. For a while now, we’ve had the lights in our living room plugged into an old-school mechanical timer so that they are always on at night whether we are home or not. But the location of the outlet is hard to access when we want to reset the timer, and I’ve never really liked that the lights come on and off at the exact same time every day since I know that as a home security measure, a varied schedule is much better.

The living room lamps don’t use a standard sized light bulb, though, so we couldn’t simply swap out the bulbs for Hive Active Light bulbs. Instead, I plugged the lamps into a Hive Active Plug .

Using the Hive App to control the Hive Active Plug, I can set a different set the lamps to come on and off on a unique schedule for each day of the week, and I can also turn the lamps on and off anytime right from my phone.

MAKING MOM’ING EASIER

I also added a Hive Active Light bulb to the lamp in the boys’ new shared bedroom.

The boys want to sleep with this lamp on at night, but this lamp is not set up for a three-way bulb since it has a single on/off switch on the cord, and any bulb that is bright enough to give them good light for reading and playing during the day is too bright for sleeping at night. The Hive Active Light bulb solved this problem, because it’s dimmable. Not only can I control the brightness of the bulb with just a tap of my finger, I can also set a schedule so that the lamp provides full light during evening play and story-time, and then automatically dims to lower light at bedtime. Talk about making mom’ing easier!

In the photos below, you can see the comparison between the full 100% lamp light, and the dimmer 30% light that we’ve set for bedtime. The boys are happy because the lamp is still on a night, but the dimmer light is already helping them to fall asleep faster, making mom happy too!

SLEEPING COMFORTABLY WHILE SAVING ENERGY

This last Hive smart home update is definitely my husband’s favorite because it’s going to help us save a lot of money on our energy bill. And it’s also big on style, which you know I love!

Our house has two furnaces – one for the basement, first and second floor, and a separate one just for our master bedroom/bathroom up on the third floor. Fortunately, Hive offers a plan that comes with two Hive Active Thermostats.

We don’t want to pay to heat or cool the master suite all day when no one is upstairs, but we aren’t always good at remembering to adjust the temperature before leaving the bedroom for the day. Our old thermostats were programmable {I think}, but they weren’t intuitive and in 9 years of living here we never figured it out.

Let’s talk about the Hive Active Thermostats that we installed up on the third floor. I’m so excited about the convenience of being able to control the heat and air conditioning in our bedroom without having to climb two flights of stairs each time!

There’s a simple compatibility checker tool on the Hive website that asks a few simple questions to determine if your existing wiring is set up correctly for the installation of the Hive Active Thermostat. In the case of my wiring, the compatibility tool was inconclusive, and it directed me to send an email to Hive Customer Service for further guidance. I couldn’t believe how quickly they responded to my inquiry, and I was even more impressed by how thorough and helpful they were! They asked me to snap a photo of the wiring for my existing thermostat so they could look at it.

They noticed that we had one unused wire in our current set up, and they believed that wire was the one needed to power the Hive Active Thermostats, but they advised that I should have an HVAC electrician do the quick install just in case any wiring needed to be adjusted.

As much as I would have preferred to DIY the thermostat installation, I was so grateful for the guidance of the customer service team since safety always comes first! We scheduled an HVAC electrician to come out {a regular electrician won’t do this job for you}, and he confirmed the wiring was compatible and showed me what I need to know to do the job myself when we are ready to add a second Hive Active Thermostat on our main floor.

I love the sleek design of the Hive Active Thermostat, but you might have noticed that it’s square rather than rectangular like our old thermostat. I was worried about how big of a hole we would find in the drywall when we removed the old thermostat, and whether the Hive unit would cover it, but it turns out that Hive was already one step ahead of me. In the box, they provide a rectangular backplate that can be used for just this situation!

I planned to paint this backplate to match our dark wall color, but once the old thermostat was removed, I realized that the hole for the wires was actually very small and I could instead just fill a small screw holes and touch up the wall paint. So I didn’t end up needing the backplate after all, but I was so glad to have it as a back up plan just in case!

How great does the new Hive Active Thermostat look in our bedroom?! So sleek and modern compared to that old, clunky white box!

Yes, I know, I should be talking about the function rather than the style – and I will, but seriously… it’s so pretty!

Ok, now let’s talk function! The Hive Active Thermostat has a digital screen that appears when you touch it, so you can adjust the temperature right here without needing to use the app {perfect for the middle of the night when we just want it a little warmer or cooler}…

… but the app also allows us to easily program the thermostat and control it from anywhere! The Hive app is so simple and intuitive – the “control” screen allows you to drag up or down to adjust the current temperature in the room, and the “schedule” screen makes it quick and easy to set a schedule that fits our lifestyle.

The weather in Denver can be really fickle! It’s just as likely to be 60 in January as it is to be snowing in May. Being able to adjust the temperature and change the schedule of our thermostat from anywhere is going to provide us so much peace of mind! No longer will we have to worry about the house getting too cold and the pipes freezing if Denver gets hit by an unexpected storm while we are traveling, and we also won’t be wasting money to heat the house when it suddenly feels like summer in the middle of winter!

The Hive smart home ecosystem products just hit the market in the US last week, and I can already tell they are going to be a big success here! The easy self-install approach makes it so convenient, and the app interface is incredibly intuitive and user-friendly! The Hive Welcome Home Plan is available for a low monthly subscription fee that eliminates upfront device costs, and then you can add on additional components to fit your needs. {The hardware costs investment is precisely what had stopped us from going the smart home route before now!}

And, as I mentioned above, I was beyond impressed with my first experience with the Hive customer service team {and they had no idea who I was when I reached out to them, so I wasn’t getting any sort of special blogger treatment, if such a thing even exists. LOL}.

Hive is going to be launching more products and plan options in the US market throughout the next year, and will be based on use-case customer needs and feedback, so if you try out Hive or don’t see what you’re looking for, be sure to reach out and let them know what you think!

Our Hive Home system has already made our home smarter, safer, and overall a better place to live – plus it’s going to save us money on our energy bill! I’ll definitely be adding to our smart home ecosystem and finding more ways to make our home work harder for us rather than the other way around!

This is a sponsored conversation written by me on behalf of Hive. The opinions and text are all mine.

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