Today, we’re going to review the Aqara Smart Home Starter kit. What’s exciting about a product like this is that there aren’t many of them on the market. As smart homes become more popular, something like this is perfect for a first-time smart home user. In the box, you’ll find a hub, a smart plug, a small wireless button, a contact sensor for door or window, and also a motion sensor. Between these five things, you can do the majority of smart home automations, but we’ll get to that in just a minute.

Setting up the system

Setup is straightforward, it comes with an essential instructional book that tells you, step by step, what app to download, what to press, and what to wait for, etc. The book even shows detailed instructions for each device individually, as to how to set it up, where the best place to put it, and stuff like that.

The hub itself is wireless only, and it actually plugs directly into the wall, making this entire kit purely wireless, which is kind of cool. Because of the shape and size of the plug, it will take up two plug spaces, so put it somewhere where you don’t need to use it often. The hub itself has a built-in speaker, but it’s really more for alerts than it is for music or anything like that. You can’t actually put music through it. And it also has a big LED ring around the side, which identifies as a light in your Smart Home.

Why use a Hub?

Now, some of you might be wondering why you need a hub to begin with, or what the purpose of it is. And it’s a good question. A lot of smart home devices rely on WiFi, and that’s fine for anything that’s plugged into the wall and is always powered. A lot of smaller devices, such as sensors or little buttons, can’t run on WiFi because WiFi takes up too much battery, so they’d be huge. So instead, they use a wireless protocol called Zigbee and sometimes Z-wave. These are low power ways of communicating so that you can have a small battery in there. It can be thin, it can be small, and it doesn’t take up a lot of space. Now, your router, your phone, and your modem don’t have Zigbee or Z-wave hubs in them. They don’t have a way of communicating with these small devices. So that’s where the hub comes in. The hub can then directly communicate with these small sensors over Zigbee and then connect with the rest of your network with WiFi. So that’s basically why you need it.

Using the Aqara App and Other Smart Home Platforms

The Home app on a iPhone pretty much immediately recognized all the devices and added them, no problem, even suggesting various automations to add them to. The Aqara app also suggests automations, which is definitely a nice step for people entering the Smart Home because they might not know about automations and think they have to use their phone or have to use Siri to control these devices.

Now, you can go ahead and also add the devices to both the Alexa app and the Google Home app, because they do say it works, both Alexa and the Google Assistant. For the Alexa app, all you have to do is add the skill Aqara, and then you just sign in with your account and then it brings the devices right over. Although in our case, it wasn’t able to find the button. All the other devices we found, like the light in the hub, it found the contact sensor, the motion sensor, everything else, which was interesting. But for the devices that it was able to find, Alexa had no problem communicating with them, was able to turn the Smart plug on and off was able to turn the lights on and off. From that point of view, good. But clearly there is still a lot of work to be done. If you use Alexa as your primary smart home, we probably wouldn’t recommend this just yet.

Google Assistant was much the same way. Adding it was pretty straightforward, but again, it only found a couple of devices but not all of them. We tried deleting it and re adding it, but it didn’t really work that perfectly either. So our recommendation there is pretty much the same. If you have a Google based smart home or you’re looking to make a Google based smart home, this might not be the best option, because, some of the devices didn’t exactly show up. But the ones that did show up worked just fine. So definitely work in progress for both of those ecosystems. It’s very clear that they put HomeKit as a priority and everything else has been added afterwards.

What about value for money?

All of this brings us to the golden question should you buy this? Let’s start with the price. It’s about $130, but they pretty much run promotions all the time. So realistically, you can always get it for about $110 on Amazon. Now, if you bought them individually, it costs about $20 to $30 more. The nice thing about the Starter kit is it’s sort of all in one package. You’ve got everything you need to start are a modest smart home. With all these devices, you can come up with all the different automations that work for you in life. And what’s nice is all these sensors and stuff are pretty cheap, so you can always kind of add them from Aqara going forward.

Ultimately, I’m really impressed by this starter kit. All the devices need to be made out of really high quality materials. I think cheap or flimsy about them, which is nice. No issues with set up, no issues with controlling them from my phone or anything like that. So if you’re just looking to start a smart home, and especially if you have an iPhone or an Apple based household, 100% would recommend the ACARA Smart Home Starter Kit.

You can buy this from Amazon here.

Wrap up

In conclusion, the Aqara Smart Home Starter kit is a great option for those new to the smart home market. The kit includes a hub, a smart plug, a small wireless button, a contact sensor, and a motion sensor, which can be used to automate a majority of smart home tasks. The setup process is straightforward, and the kit comes with an instructional book that provides detailed instructions for each device. The hub is wireless only and directly plugs into the wall, making the entire kit purely wireless. The hub also includes a built-in speaker and LED light, which can be used for alerts. The Aqara app offers suggested automations, which is helpful for those new to the smart home system. Overall, the Aqara Smart Home Starter kit is a great option for those looking to start automating their home and make it a smart one.

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