Smart Home Upgrades

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To upgrade your home’s thermostat without breaking the bank, we recommend the Honeywell Lyric T5. It’s a CR Best Buy with intuitive manual control and plenty of smart features, including voice control and geofencing, a feature that enables the thermostat to automatically adjust the temperature as you leave and return home.

If you’ve never installed a thermostat before, don’t fret. We have an illustrated step-by-step guide to walk you through the process. In many cases you’ll be able to do it yourself without the need to hire an HVAC specialist. And if you prefer a different aesthetic, there are plenty of smart thermostats that cost $200 or less in our full thermostat ratings

Give your home’s future owners some peace of mind with a smart smoke/CO detector, such as the Nest Protect. These detectors send alerts to your phone if they detect smoke and will even tell you when the battery is running low, saving you from those startling chirps at 3 a.m.

A single Nest Protect costs $100, which can add up if your home requires many detectors. A more affordable option? Make your existing detectors smart.

You can do that by using a smoke alarm listening device, which sends you alerts when it hears your detectors go off. A few options include the $100 Leeo Smart Alert and $70 Kidde RemoteLync Monitor. Or there’s the $35 Roost Smart Battery, which you can put inside any conventional detector that uses a 9-volt battery to upgrade it with an internet connection. The device sends you alerts when the alarm goes off or when the battery runs low.

Video doorbells add a sense of security to any home by putting a camera at a prime location: right at the front door. When it detects motion or someone presses the doorbell, the video doorbell sends an alert to a smartphone and saves a video clip of the activity to the cloud.

We recommend the $250 Ring Video Doorbell Pro, which offers the best video quality of any video doorbell we've tested. This Ring model requires a hardwired connection via doorbell wiring and works with most existing mechanical and digital chimes. If your home doesn’t have doorbell wiring, you can go with a battery-powered model such as the $100 Ring Video Doorbell.

Another way to add security to your home’s front door (and value to your home) is to install a smart lock. To save on installation time, we recommend installing the August Smart Lock Pro, which replaces only the interior part of your existing deadbolt (the thumb turn).

We tested the previous generation August Smart Lock and found that it offers a wealth of smart features that potential homeowners will appreciate, including an auto-lock and unlock function when you leave and return home, as well as the ability to create electronic keys for guests and handymen.

The $280 August Smart Lock Pro + Connect bundle also includes the August Connect adapter, which allows you and future owners to remotely control the lock and take advantage of voice control via Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, and Google Assistant.

Per the Coldwell Banker survey, 63 percent of potential homebuyers would like smart lighting products already installed in their future home. An easy and affordable way to offer smart lighting is through smart LEDs. Try a starter kit, which offers multiple bulbs, so you can add smarts to a few lamps and fixtures.

A few options include the $80 Ikea Trådfri Gateway Kit and the $50 Sengled Element Classic A19 Kit (both have two bulbs), or the  $100 Philips Hue White starter kit (four bulbs). Installing any of these kits involves simply swapping out your old lightbulbs with the smart LEDs and setting up the corresponding hub, which connects the bulbs to the internet. Additional bulbs can be purchased for $12 to $15. Color-changing bulbs are also available but they're more expensive.

After all that effort, you can go one step further and connect all of the above devices (with one exception, the Nest Protect) to a smart speaker. We recommend the Amazon Echo Show, a CR Best Buy pick. It's on the pricey side, but it adds an extra wow factor by allowing you to display a live video feed of the front door via the video doorbell just by asking Alexa. You can also ask her to adjust the thermostat, lock the front door, and dim the lights, or do all three at once via a Goodnight routine that you can program.

To connect all these devices, you’ll have to find and set up their corresponding Alexa Skills in the Skills Store of the Amazon Alexa app. Installing each skill involves signing in to the corresponding device’s account and having Alexa discover the device. The process can be a bit tedious, but in the end it’s worth it. Voice control is growing in popularity and could certainly impress potential buyers.