Smart Home 2015 Holiday Wish List

Now that we have recommended holiday gifts, it’s time to think about our own smart home holiday wish list. If Smart Home Santa is planning a trip to AppMyHome, here are some gifts we’d love to see him leave under our tree.

June Oven

The June Intelligent Oven, reserving now for shipment in May, is a gorgeous and functional smart kitchen appliance that would look amazing in our kitchen. The June Oven includes a camera that will stream full HD video to your phone while you cook, and more importantly, monitor your food to help determine when it is baked, broiled or roasted to perfection. You can get alerts to your phone when your meal is done, whether that is measured in time, temperature or many other settings. It includes weight sensors so it can automatically measure your food and adjust the cooking time as well. All of this functionality is in a reasonably sized package, like a slightly larger toaster oven.

Why haven’t we pre-ordered a June Oven already? Well, at $1,495, it’s not exactly an impulse buy. And we have a perfectly functional (and quite lovely) Breville toaster oven already – it’s not smart but it works just fine. But if Santa brought one, we might consider trying out the June and donating our Breville.

Smart Sous Vide

As fans of Top Chef and other cooking shows, we have watched many chefs cook award winning dishes using the sous vide technique, basically, cooking your meal to perfection in a circulating water bath. The trick to cooking things perfectly is getting and keeping a consistent water temperature, something that can be achieved with some patient practice and a digital thermometer, but looks so much easier with a professional sous vide circulator. These tools have been around for a while, but up until recently were in the $500 plus range and kind of bulky. Now there are several companies smart sous vide circulators, all with nice designs, bluetooth or wi-fi connectivity, and accompanying apps. We would love to try any of these in the AppMyHome kitchen. They range from about $129 for the Anova (pictured) that you can buy now directly and from several other outlets, to $199 for the Nomiku and Joule, both that need to be pre-ordered.

Sonos

The Sonos smart speaker system has been around for years, the company started in 2002, and has many audiophile fans around the world who love the quality of sound and the easy to use Sonos app. We went a bit different route when we built our home theater set-up, and our central control is through a Denon receiver that is connected over ethernet and wifi, with several high quality speakers attached via traditional speaker wire.

Looking at the range of Sonos products, it is a bit intimidating and confusing as to where to start. Can we buy just one speaker? Do we need a starter kit? An amplifier? We are curious enough that we’d be thrilled if Santa brought us some Sonos gear, but not curious enough yet to investigate and jump in ourselves.

BigAss Fans

Who wouldn’t love to whisper in Santa’s ear – “I want a Big Ass Fan!” Big Ass Fans started as an industrial and commercial fan company but recently introduced a line of smart home ceiling fans, the Haiku. These fans are beautifully designed and come in many different finishes that would look great in our home, are whisper quiet and come with LED lights. But most importantly, they have great smart features that help save energy and make our home more comfortable.

We have a couple of regular ceiling fans in our house that we rarely used before we put them on our home automation hubs, but the Big Ass Fan would take that to another level with its motion sensing capability and integration with our Nest thermostat. Unfortunately the Haikus we need start at around $1200 each.  Even with the potential energy savings that seems a little steep when new ceiling fans retail around $149.