We’ve done a lot of videos and blogs with 13 gadgets, 15 gadgets, 20 gadgets and 7 Gadgets that I regret buying.
Smart Gadgets for Home
For today, I want to talk about just Top 5 smart gadgets for home that have each actually made my life significantly better, and I hope they’ll do the same for yours.
Auto Mower
So first is the husqvarna auto mower. It only really dawned on me recently that my parents have been spending an average of about 100 hours every single year just cutting grass. So about two months ago, I pulled the plug. I bought this weird Bonnet of a car-looking robotic mower that I’ve never heard of, and honestly, an absolute Game Changer.
You know these robotic vacuum cleaners? Well, it’s kind of like these, but just instead of a vacuum at the bottom, it has a massive spinning blade. Oh my goodness, what have you been up to? It’s just really cool to see how they’ve adapted this concept for the outdoors because, like you might know, that most good robot vacuums will figure out the floor plan of your room by shooting out light and seeing how that light bounces back as it hits the walls. Plus, they have these paddles that allow them to navigate around obstacles. But out here, you don’t have walls.
Well, I mean, if you waited for it to hit the actual walls, then every flower on its way would be history. Three plus grass sticks out, so it’s going to block any kind of light transmission anyway. So instead use this.
This is a boundary wire. It’s a cable carrying a very specific electrical signal that only the auto mower is going to respond to, and it can simulate a wall that the machine knows not to go past. So I just manually planted it around the area that I wanted it to cut, obviously making sure it’s as deep as possible so the wire itself doesn’t get sliced.
Unless you have a flower bed or a tree sitting in the middle, you just loop it around that as part of your boundary. And this wire is a bit of a package deal, really, because it’s not just that it stops the robot going rogue on your hedges, but it also means that when it’s time to charge, the machine can just head towards any part of this boundary and then follow the signal all the way back to the charging station because that’s where the signal originates from. There are a couple of things that I don’t like, like for example, you might struggle to get it cut right up till the edge of your lawn if your lawn, let’s say, meets a wall. And that, if you really want to use this properly, you’ll probably want to pay even more than the product already costs to get the company themselves to set up your boundary wire because it’s taken me a fair bit of trial and error to get it right on my own.
But big picture, there’s a few reasons why this thing has been an A plus investment for me. I mean, for starters, so long as you’re about five meters away from it, it’s silent which, combined with its ability to schedule, means that right now this thing is mowing the lawn at 5am each morning, and you don’t even realize it’s happening.
That it carries on working in the rain which every time I catch it doing it, I feel this sudden twinge of empathy, like should I go help it? That it’s highly impractical for someone to steal because it’s got live GPS built inside of it. So you’d always know where it is and besides, you need a PIN code to do anything with it anyway. And the key thing is that it’s actually better for the grass. Most people that I know, including myself, no one really manually cuts the grass until we absolutely have to. But then at that point, you have so much cut grass that you have to first cut it then do a separate pass where you pick up everything that you’ve cut.
Whereas with this, once you set your desired grass length, every single day that it sets out to cut, it’ll trim a tiny, tiny little bit slowly, slowly lowering the level until it gets there. But what it really means is that you don’t see from the surface the cut grass clippings because they’re tiny, they’re like this but they’re small enough to fall back into the soil and just be used as nutrition to make the rest of the grass healthier.
Plus, it also has temperature sensors so it will only cut the grass when it is a good time to do so. Like for example, if it’s freezing cold and frosty, trying to cut might well just pull out chunks of grass and kill it.
Eight Sleep
The second product is for my sleep. There are a lot of reasons why for a long time I’ve had terrible sleep. I work late so oftentimes I’m checking our final videos at midnight or beyond that because that’s just when the edits are finished. I obsess over all the little things so I probably take on a little bit more stress than I need to. The fact that I have restless leg syndrome so I shuffle around like two times a minute and my allergies I got tested recently and it turns out I’m allergic to 12 of the most common airborne allergens. So a lot of the time this part of my face is very tight and very blocked. This is going to sound silly but it actually got to the stage where I started to fear bedtime.
I wanted more than anything in the world to just wake up in the morning and feel refreshed and ready for the day. And so the bedroom started to become this stressful place where I would try my absolute best to sleep but then just get frustrated because I’d be robbed of it by some sort of thought or distraction. It was becoming a rapidly descending downward spiral until actually, until my fiance Drisha recommended that I try eight sleep.
I bought their mattress cover which just goes around your existing bed and then their hub, this machine that sits next to your bed pumping temperature-controlled water through the cover. The science is pretty simple. Temperature is one of the single most important factors influencing your sleep quality. When you sleep, your body temperature wants to drop to get you into that deep sleep zone.
A cooler temperature sends signals to your brain that it’s time to sleep so you fall asleep faster. It encourages your body to release melatonin, the sleep hormone, which keeps you asleep so that you can hit each of the important sleep stages and also has the side effects of anti-aging which I will take.
Oh, and lower temperatures also increase your metabolism. I was reading something the other day that just sleeping in a cool environment can burn up to 140 extra calories per night, which is the equivalent of almost half of a chocolate bar this size. But think about any normal mattress. They trap heat. Your temperature is going to go in the opposite direction to the ideal. Anytime you wake up in the middle of the night and you have no idea what a or you feel extra groggy in the morning, temperature almost always has something to do with it. So you can probably guess that almost immediately when I set this thing up that downward spiral I was going down, it stops in its tracks.
Temperature is not the only factor that you need to control. You want to think about getting lots of light during the day and not eating your last meal too late. But controlling the temperature was enough to program my body into a sort of rhythm without me even consciously registering that it was happening. And there’s two sides to this coin because as well as lowering the temperature as you fall asleep, I’ve set my eight sleep to start raising my temperature when it’s time to wake up, which you can actually combine with gentle vibrations from the mattress too.
It’s a whole thing which trust me feels a lot better than a sudden, Tring-tring (Alaram) “Well, this at 8am every morning.” It’s definitely not a cheap product, but then there’s few things worth investing in more than your sleep. I mean, better sleep makes you live longer, run faster, and lift more in the gym. The list is endless.
Remarkable 2 tablet
I’m excited to tell you about this one. This is the Remarkable 2 tablet. I actually bought it as part of a different video and to be honest, at the time of buying it, I was pretty paid off at how a product that started at like 399 somehow got up to 700.
Once you’d expect it to them max, but it’s cheaper now and even with that, there is a distinct reason why this has become one of the most important tech products in my life. You might remember about a year and a half ago, I made a video talking about how my health was starting to suffer. Part of that was physical which I managed to make up for with diet and exercise, but part of it was also mental and it took me a while to realize that my smartphone was one of the biggest causes of that.
My phone is my calendar. It tells me what to do. It’s the device I look at all our stats on so it’s constantly reminding me how good or bad of a job I’m doing and it continuously demands my attention with this endless list of people waiting to be responded to. And if you just try and ignore it, this growing pile of unread notifications, it chips away at your willpower meaning that you’re less able to focus on what you’re actually trying to focus on.
So one day I decided I’d had enough. I went to go stay in a cabin in the middle of nowhere, but I was there for like four days with my fiance. We locked our phones in a box for the entire stay. Literally after taking this clip and we had the time of our lives with just a pen and a pad of paper is our only form of entertainment. And restricting yourself to that, it changes the entire way you operate. Like for example, at the time, Drisha and I were house searching.
So one of our favorite things to do was to just pull open a housing app and just doom scroll looking at all these beautiful properties that either didn’t fit our criteria or that we could not afford. But you can’t do that with a pen and a pad of paper. So to just try and scratch that housing itch, what we instead did was use the time to draw out what our dream rooms would look like, like where every single piece of furniture would go in each and every room, thus figuring out exactly what we’re actually looking for in a house.
That was the single most useful exercise we’ve ever done for our house search and we wouldn’t have done it if we were surrounded by tech. So anyways, a few weeks after having that realized how powerful it is to sometimes just disconnect, we got the Remarkable. It’s about the weight of a normal paper pad. With normal usage, the battery will last between one and two weeks. And for us, it’s the perfect sweet spot of something that is smart but not too smart. It’s got smart benefits like the front of your pen being able to write as whatever type of writing implement you prefer and the back being on a razor. It’s got the natural feel of writing manually but with the ability to manipulate text like a computer.
It can even access Google Drive. So for us, this is where we store a lot of our video concepts so I can download these while I’m on Wi-Fi. I can make comments on them while I’m on the go and then as soon as I get back near my phone, it’ll sync up with that.
So yeah, it seems like kind of a dumb investment when you compare the price of this versus the price of a pen and a notebook, but really the value is that this is the equivalent in terms of information held of a lifetime of notebooks and it has them all together in one place. But then the most important aspect of it is that it’s not too clever. You can’t check Instagram. You don’t get notifications. If it was that too, it would just be a worse version of an iPad. It’s the fact that it makes you feel like you’re off the grid, like you’re back to making decisions based on what you feel like doing in any given moment as opposed to what your messages or your calendar dictates.
Funnily enough, as part of the same movement, we also got ourselves this Polaroid because I still love taking photos and this just feels like a really fun offline way to do that. And the cool thing is it now means half the time we leave the house, we can actually leave our phones there and not feel like we’re missing out on anything.
Dyson purifier
Now here is a really weird one that I’ve combined with the Eight Sleep stuff in the bedroom and I could not believe how much of a difference it’s made. The Dyson purifier humidity plus pool for formaldehyde, pho4 catchy, I know, but kind of like the name suggests this is one thing that does a lot of things. Each of which makes your life slightly better.
So when it’s cool, it’s fun. It blows out cool air, but then two, it’s also a humidifier. It’s got a tank of water at the bottom and it uses very small quantities of it. Kind of like a fine mist within that air. Not everyone is going to benefit from humidity, but it is useful if you sometimes find yourself waking up with a dry throat or cracked lips and also having humidity increases the density of the air, which causes allergens like dust and pollen to fall to the ground and be less likely to be inhaled.
Now too much humidity can also be a problem, but I guess much like all of my favorite types of gadgets, this is very much a set it and forget it type situation. It is loaded with sensors that are just keeping an eye on the levels of everything and it’ll just dial up and down the humidification accordingly. Although you can tweak it manually if you want to with this very pretty looking app.
The third thing is the most important for me. It’s how it purifies the air. This thing’s got HEPA filter, it’s a catalytic converter, it’s got activated carbon, internal ultra violet light treatment. So essentially, this is just one massive multi-pronged attack against anything in the air that can cause issues. It can even get rid of viruses like the flu.https://amzn.to/45JMK8l
Philips Hue Lighting
Then I’ve been pairing that with a Philips Hue lighting system designed specifically to wake me up naturally. If you’ve ever looked at Philips Hue stuff, you’ll know they’re very expensive for what often looks like very simple looking bulbs or strips.
But the key perk is the software. So you can set your desired wake-up time in the app and then these two on the side about 30 minutes before I actually need to get up will slowly start to glow with sunrise colors. And then this light strip above me will project those colors kind of like the sky onto my ceiling.
And I know it seems like this really unnecessary 21st-century invention, but it does genuinely solve the problem of you wanting your room to be pitch black at night and using blackout blinds to achieve that, but then really bright early in the morning to stimulate the retinas in your eyes that tell the rest of your body to get going.
So I know I talked about fewer products and I talked about each one for longer, but if you enjoyed this blog then share with your friends.
