You've probably been there—standing in a dark hallway, tapping your phone while a smart light refuses to cooperate, only to discover a forgotten hub buried in your closet has crashed and taken your entire home offline. In this episode, Chelsea Miller draws on three years of hands-on testing with over forty smart home hubs to explain exactly which devices require bridges, why certain protocols demand dedicated hardware, and what that means for both reliability and your privacy. Whether you're building your first smart home or trying to untangle an existing setup, this breakdown of Zigbee, Z-Wave, Thread, and Matter will help you make informed decisions about which hubs you actually need—and which ones are just collecting your data.

• Not all smart devices need hubs: Wi-Fi devices connect directly to your router, while Zigbee and Z-Wave ...