We've been using Cozify in our home for a little bit over a year now. I’ve grown to like the convenience that when the morning or night comes, I don’t need to walk through all the rooms to switch on or off all the individual lights separately. Especially for us who prefer atmospheric lighting, Cozify has given a flexible and convenient way to use individual lights in selected locations.
We have currently a total of 7 different individual lamps across the rooms and balcony in our apartment. This gives us creative and flexible possibilities to use lighting as part of decoration which is constantly evolving. If I’d need to manually to go to turn them on and off every time I 1) wake up, 2) leave the house, 3) return to the house and 4) go to sleep, it would require me to visit to switch those lights on and off 28 times during one day. If we left the house two times per day instead of one, the number would be a total of 42 times switches of lights per each day. It is 2016, and it should be easier, and it is.
You can automate traditional “non-smart” lamps ON and OFF via a smart power socket
Once we leave the house empty, we turn on the AWAY mode on our way out, and all the 7 lights go off + the Sonos music speaker if it’s on. Once we return home and open the door, the Nyce contact sensor tells Cozify to turn on the HOME -mode, switching on all the lights we want with desired settings regarding the time of the day. Once we go to sleep, I will set Cozify to NIGHT mode at the same as I put on the wake up for the next day from my mobile. In the morning as I shut down the phone’s alarm, I turn OFF the NIGHT mode, and all the lights are back on + music/radio in bathroom for a morning routine if we feel like it.
While still in AWAY mode, when you enter your home (by opening the door), the Nyce door sensor turns automatically ON the HOME mode
Of course, as soon as we’d get geo-location tags attached to our keys, going away from home could be also detected automatically, and I believe the geo-tag device support is coming still during this year to Cozify. But meanwhile, I will take the manual AWAY-switching using Cozify application anytime over the manual light switching across the rooms.
Another convenient use of lights in addition to switching them and off, or changing the mood according the time of the day, is at night. If there is movement in the hallway at night time (detected by the Nyce motion sensor), the desired set of lights turn ON and OFF automatically (dimmed at 20% brightness not to blind you in the dark) if one of us visits the bathroom.
Proove outdoor power socket enables controlling also your balcony’s traditional lights and for example heating.
It's also possible to decide when the lights are off, even if someone is at home - I’ve used Cozify’s timer function to turn off the balcony lights when there’s enough light outside. Proove‘s outdoor smart power socket does the job beautifully. Cozify knows when the sun rises and falls, and the balcony lights and some of our indoor lights’ timings are based on that. I have added one hour buffer for those events through Cozify, being: the lights go off 1 hour after the sunrise, and 1 hour before the sundown as the sun in Finland doesn’t often tend to be too bright.
Another fun example we have connected to Cozify is the Sonos wireless speaker which is located in the bathroom. With Proove remote switch I’m able to change a Spotify-playlist or radio channel in the speaker depending on what kind of mood I’m having - without the need to have my phone and Cozify mobile app there with me. Enjoying sauna is often an essential part of a Finnish house party and for that it is also convenient to have switchable music at hand at the sauna premises. I have three dedicated playlists attached to the Proove remote switch. One of them being called “saunaChill” which contains chill out songs to be played in random order while having sauna or in the mornings. If I've been listening music/radio, the speaker goes off automatically with the lights via Cozify’s AWAY-mode as we leave the house for work.
If we are on a holiday elsewhere, we know that everything in the house is fine. In case the front door would open while we are on holiday, or if the temperature or moisture levels (detected by the NyCe multi sensor) would change unexpectedly, Cozify would send us an sms or push notification to our mobile notifying about it. As the camera device support is about to be included to Cozify, via a video camera we will also see then remotely exactly what is happening in the house.
As we’ve grown to the convenience of having Cozify, it definitely is giving added value and convenience to our home experience making every day living more convenient and enjoyable. We’ve just scratched the surface so far regarding the possibilities Cozify. Cozify Hub will introduce a bunch of new features still during this year, such as the video camera support etc.
Here is our Cozify setup:
The total cost of this home automation setup of ours is 806.5 € . What is to be noted though is that over half of the price is formed by the powerful high fidelity speaker of Sonos and the decoration lights, which cost always - them being smart devices or not. The difference in them compared to traditional solutions is of course that they bring now more value and convenience as I have them all working and connected together through Cozify in the house.
One cool aspect is that once you’ve gotten your basic home automation up and running, adding affordable new features to it little by little makes the future of your home and living gradually even more convenient and evolving. Next I am waiting for the camera, and a way to more precisely detect when someone is at home and when not. In the near future I’m considering adding probably a couple of affordable 433 MHz wall switches to control the Cozify’s currently manually controlled AWAY and NIGHT modes. There's also newly added security devices such as water leak detector, which as a home owner I'm motivated to setup next to our washing machine and fridge.
