9 Smart Home Upgrades That INSTANTLY Improve Your Life (Video)

You don't notice how much friction lives in your house until someone points it out. You dig for keys every time you get home. You cross the room for a light switch that's always on the wrong wall. Your blinds offer blinding sun or total darkness and nothing in between. None of it feels broken, because that's how houses have always worked. I've been deleting that friction one piece at a time, and these are the nine upgrades that did it, from a $40 smart plug to one that costs a lot more than I'd like to admit.

Everything in the video

• Aqara U400 Smart Lock
• SmartWings Motorized Zebra Shades
• Govee TV Backlight 3 Pro
• Govee Floor Lamp 3
• Tapo D225 Video Doorbell
• Eve Light Switch with Matter
• Brilliant Smart Home Control
• Eve Energy with Matter
• Apple HomePod (2nd generation)
• Apple HomePod mini
• Amazon Echo Dot Max
• Google Nest Audio speaker

Start with the front door. I switched to the Aqara U400 smart lock for its ultra wideband support. Most smart locks trigger on Bluetooth and always feel a beat too slow. Because my iPhone and Apple Watch are always on me and the U400 knows my distance precisely, the door is unlocked by the time my hand hits the handle, and it locks itself a few feet after I walk away. If I'm hanging out on the porch it knows I haven't left, so it won't cycle. Everyone else gets Apple Home Key, a fingerprint sensor, or a code, and since it runs Matter over Thread it works with Apple Home, Alexa, Google, SmartThings, and Home Assistant.

The SmartWings motorized zebra shades are my favorite upgrade on the list, and I regret waiting months to install them. Two layers of fabric share one roller, one sheer and one opaque, striped in alternating bands. Line the bands up and you get a soft filtered glow. Shift them and the 90% blackout fabric takes over. I have them in seven rooms, all on Matter, so "good morning" opens every shade to a preset and "goodnight" closes the whole house. No separate app, no extra hub.

The Eight Sleep Pod 5 with the base and blanket is the expensive one. It's a mattress cover, base, and blanket with per-side temperature control from 55 to 110 degrees, and its autopilot adjusts through the night based on your sleep stage. My side runs cooler, my fiancée's runs warmer, and nobody negotiates the thermostat. I wasn't expecting a mattress topper to change much. My sleep is noticeably better, and it's one of the few things here where I felt the difference almost immediately.

For movie night, the Govee TV Backlight 3 Pro clips a camera to the top of the TV, reads what's on screen, and throws matching color onto the wall behind it. A blue scene turns the wall blue, an explosion spills orange around the edges, and the TV feels bigger while the bias lighting cuts eye strain. The Govee Floor Lamp 3 pulls that same color into the corner of the room through DreamView, and it holds accurate color even dimmed to 1%. The feature I use most is DaySync, which takes your zip code and shifts the lamp's color temperature to match the sun, and the weather, all day long.

At the door, the Tapo D225 doorbell gives you 2K video with a 180-degree view of the whole porch and tells people, packages, vehicles, and animals apart. Recordings go to a microSD card, so there's no subscription required to see your own footage. On battery it lasts up to eight months. Hardwired like mine, it records 24/7 with four seconds of pre-roll.

Swapping every bulb for a smart one gets expensive fast, so I control power at the switch with Eve and Brilliant. My porch lights come on at sunset and off at sunrise without touching a bulb. Brilliant's switches add a touchscreen for whole-home control, Sonos included, and double as photo frames. Eve Energy smart plugs, at about $40 each, are the cheapest entry point here. Anything plugged in becomes schedulable and voice controlled with no hub and no account. They run on Thread, so each plug strengthens the mesh, and if your router is on one you can say "reboot the router" and walk away.

A hub ties all of this together. HomePod and HomePod mini run automations locally, so commands fire without a cloud round trip. Echo wins on compatibility with more than 100,000 devices. Nest speakers have the best conversational assistant of the three. I stick to Matter devices so it doesn't matter which one sits in which room. An Echo in the bedroom and a HomePod in the living room both control everything.

If you're only picking two to start, make it the smart lock and a hub. Those two change how the house feels to walk into every day.