5 Smart Home Devices Worth Installing Before Winter

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With winter approaching, it's time to start preparing for the colder months. Whether you're looking to deal with dry air once the heater has been running for a few weeks straight, or just trying to figure out why that one room keeps getting chillier than the rest of your house, there are plenty of useful devices you can use to help make your home smarter and more efficient in the winter. Some of these will help keep an eye out for sudden temperature changes, as well as notify you about things such as freezing pipes, leaks caused by unforeseen scenarios, and more.

To help you tackle the impending cold, we've rounded up five devices that are worth installing before winter. These devices range from gadgets like a smart thermostat, a good humidifier, a water leak sensor, and even a couple of options for your outdoor lights and holiday decorations, which are going to get a lot more use once it starts getting dark earlier in the evening. If you're looking for more ways to save, then you can always look into smart home automations that help cut down on excessive energy usage, too.

A smart thermostat is one of the best places to start, as it will help you keep control of your heat during the cold winter months. There are more than a few great smart thermostats out there, but if you're buying one for the first time, then an Ecobee Smart Thermostat Premium is a solid option. This smart thermostat has several useful features, including its Smart Home & Away feature. When turned on, this feature uses a built-in occupancy sensor to detect when you've left the house. It can then adjust the temperature while you're gone so that your heat isn't running as hard when you aren't actually there to enjoy it. You can also set the temperature settings to a chosen schedule, and Ecobee's Smart Recovery feature will help preheat your home ahead of those schedule changes.

The Premium model also comes with Ecobee's SmartSensor, which can track both temperature and occupancy in another room, and the device will also send an alert if the temperature or humidity in your home changes unexpectedly. You can even set up a low temperature alert, which will help detect problems with your heating system before you have to worry about your pipes freezing unexpectedly in the middle of the night. Energy Star says certified smart thermostats save about 8% on heating and cooling bills, which is around $50 a year on average. It's not a lot, sure. But every penny counts when you're trying to save money.

Running the heat all day tends to dry out the air, but a humidifier can help make all the difference. Furthermore, getting a smart humidifier is a lot less work to keep up with than a standard one, as it can detect the current humidity in the air and then change its output based on those readings. The GoveeLife Smart Humidifier 2 is a solid choice thanks to the fact it can hold up to 6 liters of water and because it outputs up to 300 milliliters of mist an hour. The company has rated the system for rooms between 107 and 500 square feet, and it comes with its own built-in humidity sensor. That sensor works alongside the system's Auto Mode.

The EPA suggests keeping indoor humidity between 30% and 50%, and recommends never going above 50%, since higher humidity can encourage the growth of mold and create other moisture-related issues in your home. Auto Mode helps make this easy by measuring the moisture levels in the air and then raising or lowering the mist output for you based on your chosen percentage target.

Leak sensors are handy all year, but they're even more useful in the winter near pipes that might freeze or burst. Pipes in unheated areas are among the ones that freeze most often, and they can often be found in places you don't visit frequently, such as basements, crawl spaces, and attics. Pipes running along exterior walls with little or no insulation are also more likely to freeze, especially during very cold periods.

The YoLink Water Leak Sensor 4 can help by checking for cold temperatures as well as leaks. You can choose to be alerted anytime the temperature drops between 23 and 59 degrees Fahrenheit, and if the sensor detects water, it will sound a 105-decibel alarm and alert you in the app. The sensor features two electrodes on top to catch drips from above and four on the bottom to detect pooling water on the floor. The only real caveat to keep in mind is that you will need a YoLink Hub with an internet connection to get full functionality.

Water leak sensors are one of those essential smart home sensors every home owner should have. And the YoLink is a solid choice because of its versatility as well as the fact that you can connect it to the YoLink app along with external services like Alexa and Home Assistant.

Outdoor lighting becomes a lot more important once daylight saving time ends on November 1, especially around driveways, steps, and entrances. You could swap out an existing fixture for a motion-activated light, but if you already have Hue lights around your house, the Philips Hue Outdoor Motion Sensor is a better fit. It's completely wireless and runs on two AA batteries.

The sensor is rated for temperatures ranging from -20 to 45 degrees Celsius (about -4 to 113 degrees Fahrenheit), and it has an IP54 rating, so it should be tough enough to deal with rain and dust. There's also a daylight sensor built in, too, so your lights shouldn't turn on when it's already bright out. You can also pick different lighting scenes for up to 10 times of the day, which makes it easy to customize how bright your lights are whenever they're activated by motion. For example, your driveway lights could come on at full brightness in the evening and then switch to something dimmer after everyone goes to bed. That way, you can still see down the driveway, but the lights themselves won't blind you through the window. The sensor does require a Hue Bridge for it to work, though, so this option works best for those already invested in the Philips Hue ecosystem.

Holiday lights and inflatable decorations are a pain to turn on and off by hand every night, especially when it's freezing out. Gadgets like the Kasa Smart Wi-Fi Outdoor Plug EP40 can help alleviate that trouble, though. This one in particular gives you two outlets that you can control together or individually from the Kasa app, Alexa, or Google Home. It doesn't even need a hub to work, either, as you just connect it to your home's 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi network and then set things up in the app. From there, you can schedule each outlet on its own or group them into different scenes.

The EP40 is IP64 rated and works in temperatures from -4 to 122 degrees Fahrenheit. Both outlets share a 15-amp maximum load, though. Smart plugs are a pretty cheap way to automate stuff you already own, and they typically last three to five years, potentially longer depending on how you take care of them. We'd recommend sticking to smaller loads like lights here, and the manufacturer recommends keeping the load under 80% of the plug's rated maximum.

When we set out to make this list, we wanted to highlight items that actually had useful perks to offer, as well as items that were rated highly by users who had purchased them. We know that winter can be a stressful time, especially with all the holidays, so every device we decided to highlight needed to genuinely make your life easier in some way — whether that was helping to cut costs, making it easier to manage things you need to manage, or just keeping you in the loop about important issues such as freezing or bursting pipes. If a device didn't at least address one of these parameters, then it didn't make the cut.

Of course, there are plenty of other useful devices out there that can make your home smarter without breaking the bank. And if you shop at Costco, you can even take a look at some of our recommended smart home tech to buy from Costco as you prep for winter to help give you even more ideas of what is worth picking up as the weather cools down.