Smart Home Tech Tour / 2026

The useful thing about the Meross smart power strip is that every one of its four power outlets can be controlled individually through your smart home assistant. In the Meross app, you get switches one through four, with the USB ports grouped on a separate switch.

In my setup, the response is almost instantaneous. I can turn my main light on or off in the app and see it happen right away. You can think of it as four smart plugs in one.

It makes sense if you have a collection of lamps on a shelf, a media console, or several things in one place that you want to switch independently. It’s a fantastic product for that specific use case.

I think the U100 looks fantastic. It has a clean, modern design that goes with a lot of doors, and the touch-sensitive buttons are responsive. What I really like is how many ways you can unlock it.

The fingerprint reader is my preferred option. You can also use a code with six to ten digits, generate temporary codes, or add temporary users and assign codes to them. If you’re in the Apple ecosystem, Apple Home Key lets you hold your iPhone or Apple Watch up to the lock to open it.

You can make a profile for each person in your home and add their fingerprint, lock code, and other unlocking methods. That gives the person managing the lock a way to know who’s coming and going.

There’s also a setting to automatically lock the door after it closes, and the built-in motor is pretty quiet. If you haven’t tried a smart lock, getting away from physical keys is a huge improvement. I found this one easy to install.

Next to my lock is the Aqara Video Doorbell G4. It’s one of the better-value doorbells I’ve tested because you don’t need a subscription to record footage.

A lot of video doorbells charge a recurring fee for cloud storage or playback. This one lets you put a microSD card in the indoor chime and record directly to it. The card lives inside your home rather than in the doorbell itself. In the app, you can scrub through recorded events and see how much storage the clips use. When the card fills up, it rolls over the oldest footage.

The doorbell has a camera, a microphone, and a speaker for two-way conversations. The backlit ring around the button looks nice, the 1080p camera quality is pretty good, and there’s night vision.

There are a few drawbacks. The view isn’t wide enough to show the porch directly in front of the door well, so seeing packages is harder. When someone presses the button, I wish it gave them a clearer audible confirmation; the glowing light is what they get. The speaker also isn’t great. When I tried speaking to an Amazon driver while I was away, it seemed like they couldn’t hear me.

Even with those issues, I’ve been happy with it. Avoiding a subscription is the biggest selling point for me. In my Apple setup, someone ringing the bell also brings up a little camera preview in the top-right corner of the TV while I’m watching. At the $90 price I mentioned in the video, I thought the G4 was a particularly easy recommendation.

Before I owned a TV backlight, I wondered whether it would actually be worth it. After using the Govee AI Sync Box, I think it is. It’s more than a decoration: when the colors extend beyond the screen, the TV feels bigger. Games, movies, and shows become more immersive.

The difference here is the box itself. You plug your devices into the sync box and then connect the box to your TV. It extracts colors directly from the HDMI feed instead of using a camera mounted above or below the screen. That keeps the setup cleaner and avoids the camera-based color matching I wasn’t as happy with.

The Govee app has useful controls, including black-bar elimination, so the system can ignore the black bars in a movie and pull colors from the actual picture. Color calibration lets you shift the backlight hues to better match what’s on screen.

Installation was easy, and the lights get plenty bright. I run mine at about 50% brightness and find that perfect. My complaint is input switching: if you connect several devices, I have to change the inputs through the Govee app.

In the video, I compared its $260 price with the roughly $800 Philips Hue setup. Those were the prices at the time, but the reason I like the product is the experience. The backlight makes the whole viewing setup feel more engaging.

I used to think smart thermostats were just fancy displays on the wall. The Ecobee Smart Thermostat Premium changed that. In my home, it has helped with the electricity bill and means I rarely need to adjust the thermostat manually.

The display shows the indoor temperature, time, and outdoor temperature. As you walk up, the proximity sensor reveals more information, including air quality and humidity, plus controls for heating, cooling, automatic mode, and off.

My favorite feature is the comfort setting: the blue and orange numbers define the temperature range I’m comfortable in. That alone means I don’t need to keep touching the thermostat. You can also make presets for different times of day. My sleep preset is a few degrees cooler than my daytime range, and an away preset avoids unnecessarily running the AC or furnace when I’m out.

You can still override it when you feel too cold or too hot. It will hold that temperature like a normal thermostat until the next scheduled event.

The video also covers connecting a utility provider and your selected electricity plan so it can account for expensive times of day. Another useful part is knowing when you’re home or away. There’s a sensor in the thermostat, and the Premium includes a separate wireless room sensor that measures movement and temperature.

That room sensor can detect activity as you wake up and help the system respond. It also gives the thermostat the temperature of that specific room rather than just the spot on the wall. It works in the background, which is exactly what I want from a smart home product.