Future perfect: Our pick of the smart-home tech for 2024

From security drones to foldable TVs, we take a look at the gadgets and technology trends for the year ahead

The Ring Always Home is likely to flit to our shores before the end of 2024.

Looking ahead to 2024, smart-home technology will continue to focus largely on holistic, home connectivity and security products. Smart speakers, cameras, digital photo/art frames, locks, fans, heating controls, lights, and plugs will work better, cooperating seamlessly in one comprehensive home network that talks to compliant appliances and systems. Customised and automated, your smart house will sip necessary information from your hub, apps tuned to your mobile devices, chosen manual settings, and handle all necessary
software updates from the internet.

2024 is all about habit-learning helpers and the experience is approaching near sentient. With wifi choices for DIY set-ups, there is something for everyone to increase comfort levels, entertain, and even save money. New products typical of the latest no-brainer automation are developed using biometrics (the application of statistical analysis to biological data). 

They “learn” to recognise us using smarts like facial recognition, but also pick up on specific patterns of living based on your movement, proximity, and tweaks of manual settings. The result is a more user-friendly, intuitive, customisable home network. For example, if your smart fridge’s camera detects the milk is low, it can already chatter to a personal assistant embedded in your phone while you’re out in the aisles.

Smart lighting is an affordable entry point to a home network experience. Philips Hue, from €30 for a double pack in white (75w equivalent).

My top picks for stepping into intelligent home control in 2024 (with voice assist), remain smart bulbs, and heating helpers including smart TRVs and thermostats. Both areas are affordable, and easily managed even by a witless technophobe like me with Siri, Google Assistant, or Alexa. 

Wiz light bulbs offer fewer toys than the more expensive Philips Hue line, but I’m impressed at the plug-and-play performance, their dynamic light show used in groups, and that their app includes an energy monitor to see power use in real-time. Using your existing wifi router, tune in a wide range of ambiences from energizing cool white to soft warm or select from the preset modes including Focus and Relax. €15-€18 per bulb, various suppliers. Smart TRVs by Tado or Hive from €50.

Robotics and drones

This year is set to see the launch-to-air of Ring’s new Always Home drone, a quadcopter that swoops around the house checking on everything from the villain pawing at the French doors, to the culinary activities of latchkey children. It speeds to the site of a flagged disturbance from a command, sensor or camera. 

Amazon remains coy about the release date of this tiny super sleuth, toying with 2024 for the US and with a price of around €300. Do you need a hopped-up inside drone? Probably not, but every electronics nerd will want one. With motion sensors and standard smart security cameras in place, it seems a little more Pentagon than practical. If someone did get in and heard the considerable buzz of a drone surveilling, they could swat it out of the airspace with a well-aimed cushion.

Robot vacuums including the Miele Scout with Home Vision, already offer HD cameras (€849, miele.ie) and the Ring Always Home uses the same laser technology to map its flight path. A vacuum spying while sucking its way around downstairs is probably less likely to be perceived as a threat by an opportunist criminal. If they steal it, it will provide some fascinating footage until it has left the embrace of your broadband. You cannot yet register interest for Always-Home, but it’s likely to flit to our shores before the end of next year.

There are signs from the US that robotic lawnmowers will also be doing double duty as security personnel. Look for things that also double-job, like air purifiers that are also heating/cooling fans. Sick of carrying groceries to the car? Carrefour in the UK is currently trialling autonomous on-demand delivery robots with a Turkish tech start-up, delivers.ai. These stoic shoppers could soon be rumbling up to your front door within an Irish supermarket’s closest catchment area.

TV times

Previews from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas 2024 (CES) the most influential home technology show in the World, features some incredible new televisions. Intuitive set-up with huge taster-menus of on-board in-screen streaming services, will eliminate boxes and sound-bars and cut the set down to one elegant panel. Where you will have to have your wits about you is choosing content suppliers of course, and matching your apps to your chosen platform. Watch those monthly subscriptions as they can drop out of “the deal” and sky-rocket your entertainment bill. Specify email or SMS alerts every month.

Full-sized screens, which disappear when out of use or that can come with you around the house or on your weekend city break, are trending (look up LG’s 27in StanbyMe Go). This packable, roll-up, and folding television offers a sumptuous 4k-8k experience in self-lit LED pixel or inkjet-printed OLED. 

These shape-shifters are not only ultra-cool but also a foil to the lousy picture offered by most projectors in small or highly designer-sensitive homes. With open and broken-plan spaces, hiding the screen as a piece of artwork has been a boutique choice over the last few years, but the Samsung OLED R offer an ultra-thin screen that fully retracts and rolls up into a state-of-the-art sound system. WAGS and Lotto winners only I’m afraid, at over €100,000. At Display Week 2023 in Los Angeles, Chinese brand TCL unveiled a prototype 8K 65-inch OLED TV that automatically transforms into a glassy coffee table. A gimmick? A future favourite? Watch this space.

Central heating

I guess that 2024 will see many of us surrender to biofuel and non-grant-aided heating alternatives to reach our sustainable, retrofit goals. I think pellet stoves and boilers are due a second coming. With the startling cost of a full SEAI grant-aided one-stop-shop retrofit, it’s logical to look at incremental upgrades to decarbonise our own homes and to take on board potential alternatives to future-proof our greatest investment. Many readers feel coerced by the prospect of all electrical heating. We’ll take a closer look at the fate of biofuel after Christmas, but what about hydrogen? Will this wonder gas save us in a new low-carbon future?

Jim Scheer, head of data and insights for the SEAI, knocks our dreams smartly on the head. “Any rhetoric in support of hydrogen heating homes disagrees with 18 independent studies showing that hydrogen will be too expensive and inefficient compared to the alternatives when it comes to space heating.”

The Viessmann Vitotron wall-mounted electric boiler (Irish supplier Precision Heating).

Environment Minister Eamon Ryan, in a recent publication, backs the SEAI, seeing electrification as the way of the future, with hydrogen confined to industrial processors. It’s heat pumps and (where available) district heating using waste heat from industrial sites delivered to domestic estates and flats in terms of government commercial backing and domestic grant assistance.

Together with half-steps like hybrid heat pumps (adulterated with a standard oil or gas boiler on the side) and more hair-raising prospects like NexGen and iHelios IR heated wallpaper, a proven alternative for someone in a moderately sized home off the natural-gas grid for 2024 is the all-electric boiler. 

These are a respected but lesser-known alternative to HPs with less invasive impact on floor space and tweaks to an existing wet system. Models like the Vitotron 100, offer 8kW performance, 99.4% efficiencies, zero emission at point of use, seven-day programming, and even weather-compensation typical to HP systems.

It’s a matter of contrast and comparing those associated builders’ costs and performance, as HPs do carry up to €6,000 in SEAI grant aid (individual grants and one-stop-shop). Even in a well-insulated home, electric boilers are two or three times less efficient than a HP and more expensive to run than natural gas. They can work independently or as a hybrid in combination with an existing system; POA; for details see precisionheating.ie

One word for 2024 to honour your home next year? Insulation. Whatever tech smarts you use to tickle your environment, or what heating system you bolt onto the property in the coming decade, enhanced insulation and air-tightness, together with appropriate ventilation, is the best investment you will ever make in the energy performance of your home, bar none.