About Us

We’re Joseph and Iryna. We love checking out all the latest releases in home automation, throwing together comparisons, and helping others in their selection of smart home technology. Everything written in our reviews, comparisons, and knowledge base is our heavily, heavily researched opinion. We hope you enjoy our take!

All our reviews are based on our research, personal experience, and/or customer reviews. We don’t own all the products we write about (we wish we could afford it!), but we do our best to thoroughly research them. If you notice any mistake, please shoot us an email via our Contact Us page and we’ll be happy to fix it. Or, feel free share your experience in the comments section.


Mission

Smart homes are difficult to navigate. With all the terminology, protocols, connectivity, and everything else manufacturers decide to add in the future, it’s nearly impossible to understand it all. Our mission is to make smart home technology easier to understand, while still covering all the important details in decision-making.

We want to provide you, the reader, with all the information necessary to make an informed decision about how to improve upon your smart home setup.

If we can help you learn something new, pique your interest, inform, and guide you in the right direction within smart home culture, we’ve achieved our goal.


Our History

Homejell was built out of necessity.

Several years ago, Iryna was working for a huge wholesale home appliances company when she came across a product in smart lighting, the Lutron Smart Bridge to be specific. Upon discovery, she liked the idea of controlling lights from your phone remotely and decided to dive into smart lighting. Having an extensive knowledge of “dumb” home appliances, she quickly understood that pretty much all appliances could (and eventually would) be turned into smart devices — It was only a matter of time. How could anyone not want to improve their home with automation?

There was just one problem: she couldn’t find any real, digestible information about smart home products. Everything was a brand page throwing tech specs at you and saying, “buy it now!” Or it was a bunch of words on a page that didn’t simply explain what the smart home products did or how they worked. The internet was littered with garbage in the smart home space. Which sparked the question: Couldn’t this whole thing (research and decision-making) just be easier?

Since then, Homejell (formerly Just Click Appliances) has grown tenfold from her passion for the space, and her sharing her smart home expertise that she’s gathered throughout the years.


Current Team

Iryna Iuzhanina, Founder

Looking for a way to replace your 3-way dimmer with the new set of Lutron Caseta Wireless dimmers? Well, Iryna is the one to talk to. She spent years writing about home appliances explaining their technical specs to customers. So she can easily filter through product features that are full of marketing bullshit to get to the technical specs that actually matter.

Iryna’s primary focus at Homejell is to make sure our content answers all your questions about smart home tech so you can pick the right products for your home. She usually writes super in-depth comparisons to get to the gist of it.

While she loves sharing her knowledge with our readers, Iryna also enjoys picking up new skills and traveling around the world. Right now you can find her in Vietnam researching the influence of the Asian smart home market on the global distribution of smart home appliances.

Joseph Valle, Marketer/Developer

Joseph has been working with the tech side of marketing for several years now. Building websites has been a hobby of his since he was 13. Turning his hobby into a job is basically a dream come true. He works on the backend of Homejell.

As much as he enjoys reading about smart homes and smart home products, his real interest within the sphere is how smart homes are evolving. Readers are much more likely to see an article written by him about the culture of smart home automation and what the future brings rather than specifics about products. He believes that the smart home products themselves are just an extension of what consumers are being fed as a solution to a problem, and not always an actual solution.

Now that he’s been reading and researching the smart home genre for years, he’s become a snobby “big-picture” person, and is almost a bit too critical of the space.

Anna Miller, Writer

Anna has a passion for researching and learning about new smart products out there, and how they can benefit you, and your home. She is also excited to see where smart technology is going to take us in the future, and the new types of products we can expect.

She is fascinated by how many products are out there and is curious to know how well they work both separately and together, as well as the idea of building a complete smart home environment that is both efficient, and affordable too!

When she isn’t busy diving into the research and writing the next piece, you can normally catch her in a cafe with a book, or strolling on the beach.


The Future of the Smart Home

Ideally, our homes should run without us. They should also save on energy consumption — both tangible (electricity) and intangible (focus, mental stress). We believe technology is here to make life simpler, not just to increase productivity.

Smart home technology is quite a ways out but, when it comes to mainstream adoption, we see a majority (70%) of tasks being automated by 2040: optimal heating, cooling, scheduling, lighting, implementation of renewable energy, and menial tasks, like doing laundry, cooking, and cleaning.

The current state of smart homes is a battle of connectivity: does X Product work with Y Product? This is thinking in the Now. And as much as it is a dream to have home tasks automated now, the main factor that cannot be sacrificed is security. We’re seeing more and more that smart homes are as much of a dream as they are a nightmare.

Before we can begin to focus on complete automation, we see the future of smart homes as needing a giant step forward in security. This means making it easier for the average smart home user to move off the cloud and create closed home networks. Imagine a home that’s completely yours. No outside connection, no data sent to big corporations, no advertising — A private, automated home that learns from you and, in turn, improves it’s performance. The future smart home: secure closed home networks, and the removal of big data from homes.

But what about us, Homejell? Currently, we see ourselves as contributors to the Now — gathering research and putting out information which informs users about the best on the current market.

But in the not too distant future, we see ourselves throwing our hat in the ring to help to build for a safer, future smart home. And we’ll be sure to let you know when that day comes.