4 Ways to Winterize Your Smart Home

Snow and ice covered the ground in 49 of 50 states this weekend so we think it’s safe to say that winter is officially here. Love it or hate it, the cold, wind, and snow that the season brings can have a challenging impact on both your home and daily routine. Luckily, winterizing your home couldn’t be easier thanks to a few connected devices and easy-to-set-up automations in the Wink app: 

Combat the threat of frozen pipes

The possibility of bursting pipes during this time of year is too high for any homeowner to take lightly. Avoid costly, inconvenient water damage by placing water sensors near potential trouble spots like the dishwasher or washing machine. We like the leakSMART Valve and Sensor Kit.

Connect the leakSMART Valve to your home’s main water supply and then place the Sensors throughout your home. Pair your valve and sensors to your Wink Hub, then using the Wink app, enable a Robot that will automatically shut off your home’s main water source if any of sensors detect a leak. 

In addition to leak detection, the leakSMART Sensors monitor room temperature so you can keep tabs on your home’s climate from afar (and remotely shut off your water supply if it gets cold enough to freeze pipes.

Keep your home well lit with Schedules

The days are slowly starting to get longer, but the sun is still likely setting well before you get home at night. With a Schedule in the Wink app, you can arrive to a bright home and make it appear like someone is there during those long work nights or (hopefully tropical) holidays. It’s easy to set up and will prompt all your connected lights to automatically turn on every night at sunset. Check out the lighting section of our partner product page for the full rundown of connected light bulbs that work with Wink. 

Avoid black ice on the front walkway with a motion sensor

It’s difficult and dangerous to detect ice and slippery surfaces in the dark. To combat the threat, combine the power of motion sensors with connected lights. The Ring Video Doorbell (which is great for seeing who is at the front door no matter where you are) can be connected with connected light bulbs on your porch with a Robot in the Wink app. From there, anytime Ring detects motion, the front lights turn on so your walk to the front door is safely lit. 

Save energy and money with a smart thermostat

Home heating bills skyrocket this time of year - it’s inevitable. Make your home more energy efficient (and save money along the way) with a smart thermostat like the one by Nest or ecobee. These thermostats let you adjust your home’s temperature from afar through the Wink app, learn your heating and cooling preferences over time, and automatically turn off when you’re away.

How are you using your smart home to tackle winter? Let us know in the comments — we want to hear!

Announcing the Winner of our 2016 Halloween Contest!

A few weeks ago we kicked off our first-ever Wink Halloween Contest by asking Wink users to share how they’re making home automation part of the Halloween fun this year. We’ve received a ton of spook-tactular submissions - from over-the-top lighting displays to elaborate yard decorations that come to life to spook trick-or-treaters.

With that in mind, we’re excited to announce that this year’s winner is Brett Marek!

Every night at sunset, Brett’s home comes to life thanks to Halloween Schedule he set up in the Wink app. The second dusk turns to night, Brett’s SYLVANIA Gardenspots turn a perfect combination of orange to give his yard a spooky feel while the patio glows with various string lights connected to an outdoor GE Plug in Module. He gives the spiders, skeletons, and other decorations  around the home and yard a ghostly aura with various spotlights plugged into GE switches.

Congratulations to Brett! If you want to check out some of the other great entries, follow us on Twitter, @TheWinkApp.

With the holidays just around the corner, we hope this inspires you to get creative with your smart products in the months to come!

In the meantime, Happy Halloween!

How to: Use Wink Without Opening the Wink App

It’s late, you’ve just come home from grocery shopping, and your hands are full. Fumbling once you’re through the front door to find the light switch is a hassle. So is searching for your phone before you get out of the car. Luckily, there are a number of ways you can leverage the power of Wink to make everyday tasks in the home a little bit easier to carry out without even opening the Wink app: 

IFTTT

IFTTT (If This, Then That) is a web service that lets you turn many different products and apps - from Instagram and Dropbox, to Google Calendar and Jawbone - into triggers (IFTTT calls them Recipes) for other actions. IFTTT is a great way to expand the depth of your smart home. For example, you could set up an IFTTT Recipe that turns off the lights, locks the door, and adjusts the thermostat when you’re in bed and set your Jawbone UP to sleep mode. Read more about how to use Wink + IFTTT here.

Wink Robots

Robots can be created within the Wink app to make your connected products and even your location a trigger for other actions to take place (similar to IFTTT). You could set one up that triggers the downstairs lights to turn on whenever the sensor on your front door detects it’s being opened, or another that shuts the garage door, locks the door, and shuts off all the lights after you pull out of the driveway every morning. Read more about how to create a Wink Robot here. 

Wink Schedules

With a Schedule, connected products can be set to turn off products at a desired time, or at Sunrise/Sunset. Particularly handy if you’re someone who often works late into the night, but want to create the illusion that someone is home by having the lights turn on. Read more about how to create a Wink Schedule here.

Amazon Alexa

The Amazon Alexa voice assistant allows you to put many of the automations mentioned above into action, with a simple voice command. You can ask Alexa to turn on/off or dim a Wink-compatible lighting product, or adjust the temperature of a Wink-enabled Nest Thermostat. You can take this a step further by creating a Shortcut within the Wink app (Shortcuts let you control multiple connected products with one tap), activate the Wink Shortcut and Alexa channels within IFTTT, and create The Recipe: “If Alexa is triggered, then activate Wink Shortcut.” 

How To: Create a Wink Schedule

You’ve purchased a Hub, a few lightbulbs, and maybe even a few other connected products and you’re left thinking; “What’s next?” 

While turning products on and off with the tap of a button may be convenient, creating a Wink Schedule makes home automation even easier. Wink Schedules allow users to maintain peace of mind that their devices will operate at a certain time in whatever pattern of days or weeks they choose. Scheduling can also be used to operate your connected devices via Wink’s   “Sunrise/Sunset” feature. With a schedule, you will never come into a cold house after work or leave the lights on at bedtime ever again! 

Creating a Schedule may seem tricky at first, but we’ll walk you through it in this example. Let’s create a ‘Leave for Work’ Schedule to turn all the lights off at 7:15am. 

Step 1: From the Wink App home screen, press the ‘Lights and Power’ icon to bring up all of your connected lights.

Step 2: Click the gear icon (three blue dots on Android) in the top right corner of the Lights screen. Scroll to the top of the page until you see the ‘Schedule’ button and select it. 

Step 3: Press the “+” sign in the upper right corner of the page. 

Name your Scheduled Event by typing ‘Leave for Work’ in the ‘New Event’ space. 

From this menu, you can also toggle your Wink Schedules on or off as needed. 

Step 4: 

• For iOS- Tap ‘Start’. From this menu you may select the date and time you’d like the Schedule to fire. 
• For Android- Tap ‘Date’ to choose the start date of the schedule. Then tap ‘Time’ to set when you would like the Schedule to fire. 

For this example 'Today at 7:15 AM'. 

Step 5: Since we want this Schedule to occur every day when we go to work, we are going to click the ‘Repeat’ button on the Schedule setup page. In this menu we will select each day we want the Schedule to occur. 

We are going to tap all weekdays in this example to ensure the lights turn off Monday- Friday. 

Step 6: Finally, we are going to choose our Schedule action. Select ‘Make this happen’ and you will now see a full list of connected products.

Step 7: Press the product that you are looking to automate and toggle the desired action.

Toggle the light to off by dragging the icon to the left for ‘Off’. Repeat this step for all desired lights. 

Step 8: Don’t forget to click Save/Done! 

You will now see this schedule appear on your calendar as a blue circle. There will be five other circles on the calendar because you have set the Schedule to trigger Monday through Friday. You can scroll through the Schedule calendar to see any events you have set for the current week or individual day, or click on the List page to see any active Schedules or previously fired Schedules. 

I want to turn something off at Sunrise, and back on at Sunset. How do I do that? 

Another popular feature involved in scheduling is the Sunrise/Sunset timer. Under the ‘Start’ menu in the Schedule setup page, along with the date and time scroller, you will see an option to select either Sunrise or Sunset for your Schedule time. On Android, this option can be found within the “Time” menu, directly under where you would select the time you’d like your Schedule to fire. 

If you would like to turn something on and off with a Schedule, you will create two events. One event will turn the product on, and one will turn the product off. 

A great example of this feature is outdoor or porch lighting. A user can create a schedule to turn the porch lights off at sunrise, and back on at sunset. To do this, they will want to create two separate schedules, one for ‘On’ and one for ‘Off’. 

Home automation may seem intimidating to a non user, but with the Wink app, creating a smart home is easy! With a plethora of products and tools available within one app, your imagination can run wild. Life can get crazy, but with Wink Schedules there is an easy way to ensure that you and your home are on the same page day in and day out.