What to automate first in a 2 BHK

The most common way a smart home disappoints is not that something breaks. It is that two thirds of it turns out to be stuff nobody uses, bought in one enthusiastic go. A 2 BHK is a small enough canvas that this is easy to avoid, if you go in an order that reflects how people actually live in a flat.

First: the lighting you touch every day

Start with the living room and the main bedroom. Not the balcony, not the guest room, not the utility area. The two rooms where you spend your evenings.

The reason to start here is that lighting is the thing your hand goes to twenty times a day, so the improvement is immediate and obvious to everyone in the household — which is what gets them to use the rest. A bedroom module that lets you turn off the living room light without getting up is the single feature people mention most when we ask them a month later.

Specifically: a switch module per lighting circuit in those two rooms, which usually means two or three modules. Keep the wall switches working. Do not buy colour bulbs yet; you can add one later in the room where it turns out to matter.

Before ordering anything for this first phase, open one switch plate and look. Whether there is a neutral wire in the box decides which kind of module you can use, and finding out afterwards is how boxes of devices end up unopened.

Second: the front door

A video doorbell is the other device that earns its place immediately in an Indian flat, for an unglamorous reason: deliveries. Knowing who is at the door without opening it, and being able to tell a delivery person where to leave something while you are at work, is used daily.

A smart lock is the natural companion, but it is a bigger decision and a bigger spend, and it is worth living with the doorbell first. If you have household help coming when nobody is home, the lock moves up the list — a code that works between nine and eleven and can be revoked without changing the lock is genuinely better than a spare key in a neighbour’s flat.

When the lock does move up your list, the things that decide whether it will work on your door are physical rather than digital — thickness, lock type, backset and handing. What to check before buying a smart lock covers them.

Third: the air conditioning

This is where automation starts to pay for itself rather than just being pleasant. An IR controller is a small, inexpensive device that learns your AC’s remote and gives it a schedule.

The useful patterns are simple. Turn the bedroom AC on fifteen minutes before you usually get into bed, so the room is cool rather than cold-then-warm. Raise the temperature by two degrees at three in the morning, when nobody notices and the compressor runs far less. Switch it off if the balcony door is opened for more than a couple of minutes — which needs a door sensor, and is the first time the sensors start to feel worth having.

None of that needs a new AC. It works with whatever unit has an infrared remote, which is almost all of them.

Fourth: sensors, but only a few

Sensors are cheap, and that is their trap: it is easy to buy twelve and end up with a house that announces things nobody asked about. Four, chosen deliberately, is plenty for a 2 BHK.

• A motion sensor in the passage or bathroom, so a light comes on at ten per cent brightness at night instead of full glare. This is the automation people are most consistently pleased with and least likely to have predicted.
• A door sensor on the main door, which tells you it was opened and, combined with the AC rule above, stops you cooling the corridor.
• A water leak sensor under the sink or behind the washing machine. It costs very little and the one time it goes off, it pays for the entire installation several times over.
• A door sensor on the balcony, if the balcony door is how the AC escapes.

Fifth: curtains, if the room justifies it

Curtain motors are more expensive than people expect and need a power point near the track, which an occupied flat often does not have. They are also, in the right room, the automation that makes a house feel genuinely different — bedroom curtains that open at seven change your mornings more than any light does.

Our suggestion is one room. The bedroom. Live with it for a season, and then decide whether the living room is worth it.

What to leave alone in a 2 BHK

• Automating the kitchen. Beyond a leak sensor and perhaps a smart plug on the water purifier, there is little to gain and a lot of heat, steam and grease.
• Cameras in every room. The door covers the realistic risk. Indoor cameras in living spaces raise a question for everyone who lives there, and that is a household conversation rather than a technical one.
• Voice as the main interface. Lovely as an addition. As the primary way to control the house, it fails when the internet drops, when the room is noisy, and when a guest does not know the phrase.
• The guest bedroom. It can wait. It can usually wait indefinitely.

The one thing worth over-buying at the start

The hub and the network. Everything else on this list can be added one device at a time with no disruption. The hub is the piece that is painful to change later, because swapping it can mean re-pairing every device in the house.

So pick a hub that will carry forty devices even though you are starting with six, put it on a wired network point if you can, and make sure your router is not the weak link. That foundation costs a little more on day one and is the difference between a system you keep adding to and one you give up on.

Which hub, and which radio it should speak, is the one decision here that is genuinely hard to reverse. Choosing between Wi-Fi, Zigbee, Z-Wave and wired goes through the trade-offs.

A realistic first phase

For a typical 2 BHK, a sensible first phase is three or four switch modules, a video doorbell, an IR controller for the bedroom AC, four sensors and a hub. That is roughly ten devices. It covers lighting in the rooms you use, the front door, the AC and night-time movement — and it leaves the second bedroom, the curtains, the locks and the colour lighting as things you add once you know, from living with it, which of them you actually want.

Questions on this