Soma Smart Shades Review + Sound Test - Affordable Smart Blind Motor For Your Existing Blinds!

In this video I look at the Soma Smart Shades motors that fit to your existing blinds. Smart blinds are one the great aspects of embracing smart home technology. They offer some meaningful advantages to day to day life. The problem is there aren't very many options on the market with most providers offering the blinds themselves as part of the product. Ikea smart blinds is one of those kinds of products. Luckily there is a really good product on the market called Smart Shades by Soma that lets you use your existing window blinds but makes them smart!

In the video I look at the noise the motors make at their different speeds, show how much power the motors have as well as look at how they work with you smart home setup.

There's also an interesting theoretical security issue that I cover to do with third parties pairing your smart blinds from outside your house.

In the video I mention that Siri/HomeKit can't use the blinds using the slow 'morning mode'. A recent firmware update has enabled this with a bit of a work around. If a blind position is stored with a HomeKit scene it will let you make that position use morning mode whenever that scene is triggered. So you could create a scene called 'morning blind' and it would open it using morning mode. This would actually make it possible to do all the automation of the blinds in HomeKit and not use the native app.

It works with Apple Siri, Google Assistant & Amazon Alexa when you use the Soma Connect hub (I forgot to mention this in the video).

Learn more here: https://www.somasmarthome.com

This is an owner's review with no affiliation or free products involved. I bought these myself nearly 2 years ago so I've had good run with them and am happy to share my experience with them.

Let me know if you have any questions about these neat little motors and I'll reply in the comments below.

Feel free to jump around the video with the timestamps:

0:00 - Intro & background
1:28 - About security & HomeKit compatibility
2:20 - Loudness vs. speed
3:12 - Automation and sunrise/sunset
4:28 - Sound and speed test
5:54 - How to install Soma Smart Shades
6:03 - Battery and charging
7:09 - How it looks
7:27 - Using the blind manually
8:03 - Where a smart blind is useful
8:25 - How powerful are the smart blind motors?
8:45 - Software updates
9:21 - Outro and summary

More cool home tech videos:

Do Dyson Fans Cool Your Room?
https://youtu.be/vHDK5OdLkpk

Dyson Pure Cool Me Fan Review:
https://youtu.be/7sQqmG9uvPU

Smart home-office:
https://youtu.be/7L9GjcrPbdU

How to control Dyson fans with Siri:
https://youtu.be/FxcxHt5fwNc

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Видео Soma Smart Shades Review + Sound Test - Affordable Smart Blind Motor For Your Existing Blinds! канала Ben Vallack