A smart thermostat is the most popular potential smart home purchase. – The Internet of Things may be a hot topic in tech circles but it appears that it’s not a popular topic of discussion in the average US household, yet. A new white paper, Smart Home Ecosystem: IoT and Consumers created and published jointly by the Consumer Electronics Association and Parks Associates shows that when it comes to smart thermostats, smartphone-operated security systems, and app-controlled lighting systems US consumers are still very much in the dark.

Much of the data in the report comes from a survey of 10,000 heads of US broadband households; 62% of whom claimed to be unfamiliar with either smart home products or smart home services.

In fact, only 11% of respondents claimed to be very familiar with smart home products (10% for smart home services).

However, when it comes to actually getting one, only 9% of respondents said that they were very familiar with how to go about buying one, compared with 69% of the sample who claimed ignorance.

By the end of 2014, 20.7 million smart home controllers and devices will have been sold in the US and the white paper forecasts that the figure will grow steadily, hitting 35.9 million by 2017.

But at the moment, only 13% of US broadband households, when asked to choose from a list of product types, claimed to own a smart home device.