3 smart devices that can pair with your air conditioner

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Summer heat is brutal and for most people, their air conditioner is working overtime just to keep their home habitable. Naturally, staying comfortable indoors during another record heatwave often means running the air conditioner around the clock, even though that can lead to sky-high energy bills and an overloaded HVAC system. Luckily, an easy way to beat the heat without draining your bank account is to upgrade your smart home. By pairing a few smart gadgets with your existing air conditioner, you and your wallet can relax.

Coming home to the stuffy oven of a house is miserable, but letting the AC blow while you’re gone all day is a big waste of money. Luckily, there are plenty of useful gadgets to help you beat the summer heat. And better yet, these smart tech gadgets can anticipate your daily cooling needs, perfectly cooling your home when you need it, then turning off when you don’t. And since it’s all about working smarter, not harder, letting these gadgets help you is a brilliant idea.

From smart thermostats that learn your usage routines to tiny sensors that will turn off your air conditioning when the doors are left open, installing the right devices can make a huge difference in how your air conditioning unit handles heat. Overall, these smart upgrades bring intuitive control, automation and energy efficiency to any setup. Here are three of our favorite smart devices that can pair with your air conditioner to help you stay cool.

For homes with central air conditioning, the thermostat is the brains of the entire operation, and the Ecobee Smart Thermostat Premium is total genius. It features a slim, sleek design and it’s easy to see the current temperature and make adjustments on its large screen. Ecobee’s thermostat works with all major smart home ecosystems, like Google Home, Apple HomeKit, and Amazon Alexa, putting voice controls and deep smart home automation at your fingertips.

One of the coolest features of the Ecobee Premium is that it comes with a SmartSensor. While thermostats can only measure temperature in the area near where they are mounted, a sensor allows you to measure temperature from a second location (wherever you place it). Sensors give you the ability to adjust the temperature for the areas you frequent most, rather than just where the thermostat is, so you can stay cool. These are great additions to bedrooms, home offices and your living room. Collectors are also a practical way to balance the uneven cooling that will inevitably occur in a home, especially those with multiple stories.

In addition to keeping your home perfectly cool, this Ecobee smart thermostat has a built-in air quality monitor to keep tabs on indoor pollution and humidity levels. By combining real-time information from your home’s environment with smart scheduling, sensors and a complementary feature-rich mobile app, your home stays comfortable all day without wasting a single kilowatt of energy. After all, there’s a reason why it’s considered one of the best smart thermostats.

Millions of apartments and older homes rely on windows, portable air conditioners or ductless mini-splits to beat the summer heat. Unfortunately, these devices are “dumb”; lacking in handy smart features and limited to fairly basic functionality. The Sensibo Air Pro is a smart air conditioning controller aimed to change that by turning your air conditioner into a smart air conditioner. This is a compact Wi-Fi bridge that takes the signal from that old plastic infrared remote and connects your AC directly to the Internet.

Once plugged in, the Sensibo Air Pro gives you total control over your climate from its companion mobile app, even if you’re at the park. So instead of leaving your AC running all day just to make sure your space is cooled by the time you get home from work, you can now tell it to cool down from the app right before you start your commute home. The magic, however, lies in the Climate React functionality. This allows the system to automatically turn your air conditioner on or off based on specific temperature and humidity thresholds, so your room never gets too hot or too cold.

Beyond basic climate control, the Powerhouse Pro model comes with a built-in air quality sensor that detects unhealthy components like carbon dioxide. And if your indoor air quality drops, the Sensibo app sends you an alert to either open a window or switch the device to fan mode to circulate fresh air. This smart AC controller is a simple, inexpensive way to bring an older air conditioner into the smart home era without spending a ton.

Hopefully this is obvious, but one of the easiest ways to throw money out the window during a heatwave is to literally leave that window open. Keeping a home efficiently refrigerated means trapping that precious cold air inside, but kids, pets, etc., make that a constant challenge. This is where a smart contact sensor, like the Eve Door & Window Contact Sensor, comes in to save the day. These unassuming little gadgets attach directly to frames and can instantly detect if an entryway or window is left open, creating a foolproof barrier against wasted energy.

Since the Eve sensor operates under the universal Matter smart home standard, it works incredibly well with a variety of smart thermostats and AC controllers. With a few clicks in a smart home app, users can also create an automation rule, saying something like “If a patio door or bedroom window is left open for more than three minutes, the air conditioner will automatically pause.” And as soon as everything is securely closed, the cooling system comes back online without anyone having to touch a dial or press a button.

These useful sensors are the ultimate solution to keeping the chaos out when it comes to climate control. And the automation they use helps prevent your air conditioner from working overtime trying to cool incoming heat, extending the life of HVAC equipment while keeping your monthly bills in check. This battery-operated wireless sensor is a simple investment and an absolute must-have for maximizing the cooling power of any AC unit while bringing added efficiency to your home.