Andrea Shares the Love with Ben

In one of the more adorable stories we’ve heard to date, Andrea bought her boyfriend, Ben, a SmartThings Hub as a Valentine’s Day gift last year. Since then, they’ve been slowly trying to expand their smart home collection while staying on a tight budget.

We recently stopped by their rental home to see how the couple is using SmartThings with their roommate, Trevor, and their cat, Monkey. Take a look!

Ben:
Hey, I’m Ben. I just moved in to this house about a year ago with my girlfriend.

I’m usually the first one up in the morning, and I can tell my Fitbit with just a few taps that I’m awake. It tells SmartThings that it needs to turn on the lights and anything else I want it to do. It’s really simple, I just use the “If I’m awake, turn on the lights” IFTTT recipe and it’s like the house knows I’ve just woken up.

Andrea:
Hi, I’m Andrea, and I’m an interactive designer.

I really like using SmartThings to trigger the lights to come on and off. It gets really dark here in Minnesota, and I like to have a warmly lit house when I come home. I was actually the one who got the SmartThings Hub for Ben last Valentine’s Day. I knew that he’d been pining for it for awhile. We’re trying to build our collection incrementally to stay on a budget.

Ben:
We also find SmartThings to be really useful with our roommate, who has a very different schedule than us. So whether we’re home, heading out the door, or at work, we can easily check in and make sure that a few lights stay on.

Andrea:
That’s especially important for our cat, Monkey.

Trevor:
Hi, I’m Trevor, Ben and Andrea’s roommate.

Yea, we’ve been having an issue with our bathroom fan where it’s so quiet that we sometimes forget to turn it off when we leave and it’d be running all day. So we installed a smart in-wall switch that automatically shuts it off after about 30 minutes or so. And so now, no one forgets to shut it off and we’re saving a bunch of money on electricity.

Ben:
We’ve been working on finishing our basement little by little. We had a wake up call awhile ago when we came downstairs and discovered that water had seeped in and there was some flooding.

Andrea:
We were lucky. We just had stud walls and no drywall or flooring yet, but I did have some of my charcoal drawings around, and the water got pretty close to them. It would have totally ruined them had they gotten wet.

Ben:
We realized that if we placed some SmartSense Moisture sensors near the lowest part of the house, we’d be able to know much sooner if there was a problem and hopefully it’d give us enough to fix it before it got out of hand.

Ben:
Anyway, thanks for stopping by our smart home today. We’re really looking forward to adding some more pieces to our setup and making our smart home even smarter.

This February, Share the Love with family and friends and get $20 worth of credit in the SmartThings Shop!