Welcome to the second part of our series going over the essentials for setting up a smart kitchen. In our last post we covered three main essentials, the refrigerator, oven, and dishwasher. Today we are going to cover three more items that we feel are essential to setting up a smart kitchen environment, or will improve your smart kitchen setup under certain circumstances.
Smart Microwaves
Smart microwaves are quickly becoming one of the essential additions to a smart kitchen design. With the ability to adjust cooking temperatures and times based on input from your smart phone or mobile device, such as scanning the barcode of the food you are cooking, as well as the ability to control your microwave via voice through your virtual assistant, smart microwaves can come in very useful.
There are quite a few makes and models on the market today, but some features that really shine through on some of the models are:
- Prevent food from drying out with moisture sensors.
- Conserve energy with power saving modes that reduce latent energy use when the device is not in use.
- Connect to Wi-Fi and are compatible with voice-control systems such as Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa.
- Can be operated via a smart phone to start cooking cycles remotely and receive alerts when your food is ready.
Smart Water Heaters
A smart water heater is quickly becoming an essential part of a complete smart kitchen setup. The feature set they have allow for fine grained control of temperatures throughout the day, and also saves money by reducing temperatures during low use hours, such as at night.
They also have features that allow them to increase temperatures periodically to kill bacteria, thereby making your hot water supply safer.
The main features to look for in a smart water heater are:
- Customizable scheduling to allow adjustment of water temperature, especially around peak electricity rates, to help reduce costs.
- Vacation mode to allow the water temperature to be significantly reduced for long periods of time while the home is not in use, and bring it back up to regular temperature when you are expected back home.
- A high demand mode that will improve availability of hot water during times when the hot water sees a lot of use.
- Leak detection systems that will alert you via your smart phone (or other mobile device) that your water heater is leaking. This can save a homeowner thousands of dollars in repair costs alone.
Smart Garbage Disposal
Smart devices are getting more prevalent every day, and a new addition to the array of smart kitchen appliances available today is the smart garbage disposal. Composting is very useful for gardeners, but the actual process of composting food scraps can be very messy and somewhat time consuming.
The folks at Sepura have developed a garbage disposal that works just like a normal unit, but instead of grinding food up to send down the drain, it separates solids from liquids, and deposits the solids in a container below the unit. The container is easy to access and remove, and is sealed to prevent odors from leaking.
This is an excellent addition to your smart home setup, especially if you are a gardener.
This device is currently on pre-order from their website: https://sepurahome.com/