The best smart home gadgets to protect your house

At the end of a long day, home is where you can fully unwind and relax, knowing that you’re safe and sound. But a little extra peace of mind is always worth it to make sure that you're as secure as possible. Luckily, there are plenty of smart home products that can help protect you and your house.

Tired of carrying around a heavy set of keys or getting locked out? A smart lock provides you with access to unlock and lock your front door from anywhere. You can also use it to set individual keypad codes for visitors, like family members or your dog walker. Many smart locks even work with assistants like Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and Apple's Siri.

Smart outdoor security cameras are a quick, easy way to check on your property. Over the years, outdoor security cameras have improved considerably with better image quality, cloud video storage, smarter video analytics, and even the ability to distinguish a stranger from one of your neighbors.

Security cameras can help keep a watchful eye on the outside of your home, but what about your front door? If you want to see who’s there without getting up, or simply make sure the delivery person actually leaves your package while you’re out, then a video doorbell may be the way to go. Many smart doorbells even come with useful features like live video feed that streams to your smartphone, two-way audio, and timely motion detection alerts.

Leaving the lights on when you’re away can trick others into thinking you’re at home, even when you’re not. However, gone are the days when you had to leave the lights on for the entire day. With smart bulbs and smart switches, you can flip on the lights from anywhere. It’s also easy to set up a schedule for the bulbs and switches to turn on and off, giving the appearance that your house isn’t empty.

Smoke alarms generally have one purpose and that's to alert you of a fire. But did you know that you can make your home even safer thanks to smart smoke and carbon monoxide (CO) alarms? Not only do they send notifications to your phone, but most of them are pretty easy to install too.

Looking for more recommendations from the products experts at Reviewed? Sign up for our weekly Resources by Reviewed newsletter.