A frazzled dad asks: Could a smart home save my sanity?
In partnership with
Greg Bruce asked a Noel Leeming expert to rescue him from tween morning rage. He came away with a plan for the whole house.
As a married stay-at-home dad of three school-age children, my domestic life is shaped by two emotions: hope and fear.
The fear is of the enormous list of daily chores and tasks for which I don’t have time, and which experience tells me I have a high chance of forgetting. When these things don’t get done, they pile up and compound – both physically and emotionally – and piling is something I don't have time for.
The hope is that, each morning when I wake anew into the maelstrom, my day will go more smoothly than yesterday: that I will not forget to buy the Nutella, that I will somehow find the time to clean out the fridge and/or to write the stories that pay my bills.
The struggle is real and the struggle is ongoing and I just need a break, and last week I got one.
It came via the term “Smart Home”: a term that has for a long time been at the periphery of my vision and that I previously believed described a lifestyle that was reserved for people much smarter and richer than me.
I had been asked to interview Noel Leeming smart home expert Scott Hitchens. I should probably have started the interview with a warm up – a question about the nature or definition of the term “smart home” or the products that fit within that category – but I have no time in my life for warm ups. I had to start with what mattered. I started with fear.
Arguably my greatest fear is waking my children for school. Walking into their bedrooms between 6.30am and 7am, I see beneath the surface of their sweet, sleeping faces the rage that roils within, waiting to rush out at me as soon as I whisper, in a voice full of love and meekness: “Time to wake up, darling.”
My fear is probably why my voice sounds so provocative and even taunting as I ask Hitchens if Noel Leeming sells a smart home solution for tween morning rage-outs.
As you would expect from a man who has two children under three years old, Hitchens is calm under fire. He first validates my concerns, then lays out a solution that stuns me with its simplicity and affordability.
I will, he tells me, buy three TP-Link Tapo L530E Smart Wifi Multicolour Bulbs – one for each of my kids’ bedrooms. I will pair them with the Google Home device I already own and create a routine that will gently wake my kids at an assigned time each weekday, automatically increasing the lights’ brightness by a few percent every few minutes.
Once the lights are set up, I will not need to remember anything. I will not need to face my children in their state of heightened viciousness just after waking. I will no longer have to spend several minutes each morning away from the making of the school lunches they will later criticise me so heavily for.
For these benefits, I would pay almost any amount. All Noel Leeming asks for is $18 per light.
Another fear, at the opposite end of the day. The responsibility of ensuring the electric blanket is on. Failure costs me physically, because I hate having cold tootsies, but also relationally, because my wife does not easily forgive.
The price I would pay to alleviate the stress of remembering the electric blanket is again very high but the price Noel Leeming asks is again comically low. For $29, I can get the TP-Link Tapo P110M Smart Wifi Plug, which I can program to turn my electric blanket on and off at the same time every night throughout winter.
And then there’s the fear of who’s at the door and more particularly, what they want. With the TP-Link Tapo C500 Smart Security Camera, I can not just see another salesperson arriving at my door, but can politely tell them I’m not interested without even needing to look them in the eye.
Still more fear: coming home to a stinking hot home after a day at the beach or a freezing cold home after a night at the Warriors. Hitchens tells me the solution is the $47 TP-Link Tapo H110 Hub, which sits in my living room and can be controlled from my cellphone, allowing me to turn on my dumb devices – aircon, heat pump and anything using an infrared remote control – from Penrose or Long Bay. I can arrive home to my perfectly temperate house half an hour later, like some sort of tech-inclined deity.
Then Hitchens started telling me about smart vacuums. He is married and has two preschool children. Time is not his friend any more than it is mine. Like me, he is responsible for multiple people who believe the primary receptacle for household waste is the floor. He used to dread the hours he would spend attached to his manual vacuum cleaner.
But dread, it turns out, is a feeling that can be transformed by a robot vacuum. Noel Leeming stocks a range of brands and models and most of them don’t just vacuum, but also mop. You can schedule vacuuming and mopping so it all happens while you’re out of the house, and newer models feature incredibly smart mapping technology and room-by-room settings, for deep cleaning in even the tightest of corners. Hitchens tells me his own robot vac has given him time back in the weekends that he can now spend with his young family.
It sounds so delightful; life-changing even. I find myself drifting into a fantasy in which I get a robo vac of my own and allow it to clean my house every Saturday morning while I lie in bed rewatching White Lotus season one, guilt-free.
It’s bigger than that, though. Just knowing it’s always there – ready to go – eases my multitude of cleaning-related emotions: the constant worrying and arguments with kids about drops, spills and other accidents. I can just let it go.
This, to me, is the essence of the smart home: an easing of one’s domestic burden and the returning of one’s life to one’s own control, for whatever use one deems best.
It is a freeing, a liberation from tyranny, and an opening up of the possibilities of the world beyond the household. You can’t put a price on that, but if you could, it would almost certainly be higher than Noel Leeming.
All prices reflect pricing at Noel Leeming stores on the date of publication. Prices are subject to change.
This piece was made in partnership with Noel Leeming. Shop the tech to support your life here.
Greg Bruce
Greg Bruce is a freelance writer and the author of Rugby Head, a book about the ways in which New Zealand’s national sport has shaped our lives, particularly his. He is currently writing his second book.
