3 ways your home will be ‘high-tech’ sooner rather than later
Once upon a time, your home was where you came back after a long day at work to unplug and relax. However, how people define convenience and leisure changes with the times, and the things they fill their homes with naturally change, too. Nowadays, if you don't have a flat-screen TV, surround-sound system and one or two streaming video services, how can anybody even hope to unwind after work?
If you consider the modern home "high-tech," though, just wait until you see what's right around the corner. From blazing-fast Internet to in-home services that seem straight out of science fiction, these three changes to your home will make you feel like you're living in the future even though they're on their way to the market.
1. Google Fiber
Whether you pay for Internet from one of the big cable companies or patch together a network through smaller providers, everybody has run into problems with speed, service and availability every now and then. When you just need to watch that viral YouTube video and your browser won't stop buffering, you have low bandwidth and data throttling to blame.
However, your in-home Internet troubles might be a thing of the past when Google Fiber finally rolls out nationwide. According to the Charlotte Business Journal, the 1-gigabit service has already made believers in the pilot cities of Kansas City, Kansas, and Austin, Texas. For reference, most residential Internet packages advertise speeds around 10 to 50 megabits per second, but Google Fiber boasts verified speeds more than 100 times that.
What can you do with all that speed in your home? Downloading 4K movies would take a dozen seconds. Pictures and YouTube videos would load instantaneously. As a flagship example, the CBJ explained that you could download the details of the entire human genome, a project that took decades just to compile, in about 30 minutes.
2. Wireless charging
If you have a smartphone, odds are you've gone to bed at least a few nights without forgetting to plug it into the charger. You wake up and find that not only did you miss the alarm because your phone died in the middle of the night, but you can't use it to navigate or play music during your commute.
That, too, will soon be a thing of the past, Extreme Tech explained. With wireless charging technology, your smartphone, laptop and anything else with a battery and the ability to receive a signal will charge purely through the air. In fact, there are already small tables you can buy that incorporate wireless charging pads. Imagine setting your phone down on a nightstand and waking up to a fully powered device.
"Your traditional storage water heater can't keep up with your lifestyle."
3. Instant hot water
Though you're living in the future in more ways than you might appreciate, there are still plenty of old-fashioned things you put up with every day. One of those is the fact that you can run out of hot water in the shower, kitchen sink or anywhere else in your home just because your traditional storage water heater can't keep up with your lifestyle.
That's why so many homeowners have switched over to tankless water heaters as a matter of pure convenience. While it might not be flashy science-fiction, a tankless water heater that's able to provide instant and continuous hot water is no less a way to make your home seem like it was made for someone 100 years from now. Imagine never having to let the shower heat up or waiting until your spouse finished bathing to do the dishes. With tankless water heaters, that's all a thing of the past.