Smart Homes let you control lighting, heating, and even locks using your smartphone – the result should be a more efficient and more secure house. There’s a lot going on at the moment to make your house smart. What does that mean exactly? Well, the idea is that more devices in your home, from heating to lightbulbs, will have the ability to communicate with your smartphone or tablet.

The goal is to eventually create a way to automate, control and manage your home via one device.

So your phone might use its location data to turn your heating on when you get to within a mile of your home.

When you get to your door, you might unlock your house with a pin typed into your phone, instead of a key.

Some of this is happening now, and some will happen in the future. Here are some of the products making our homes smarter.

Hive is a smart thermostat that allows you to control your heating using your smartphone. If you have a combi boiler, then you get basic heat control, but for those with hot water tanks you can opt to heat your water ready for a bath when you get home.

It also turns the usual chore of setting up your heating timers into a few taps of a touchscreen, and there’s a web portal that makes things even easier to control and monitor.

The company also recently added geolocation tools, so that the heating can switch on when you’re coming home, and off when you leave. This is really handy, and also could help you save power, by leaving the heating off until you are actually on your way home, rather than sticking to a schedule.

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