5 Sam's Club Tech Finds To Elevate Your Home's Patio And Deck

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Decking out your patio, deck, or yard with furniture, decor, and gadgets is a great way of turning your outdoor space into an outdoor paradise. There's no shortage of options available to do so, ranging from grills and fire pits to full patio furniture sets, or even personal saunas and hot tubs. When you're loading up on everything you need for your deck or patio, it's easy to accidentally neglect one area altogether: technology.

The great outdoors and tech don't always seem like the best combination, for an assortment of probably obvious reasons. Being exposed to the elements can wear down a lot of electronics, and there's a good chance your deck or patio is too far from an outlet for them to be useful. However, there's a whole market of tech designed to be used outside, alongside a range of gadgets and devices that can come outside with you and be stored in the garage, shed, or closet when you aren't using them. 

Sam's Club is one place where you can find a diverse variety of tech and accessories to use out on your deck or patio throughout the summer — or even during the colder months, if you're brave enough. The membership store offers all kinds of outdoor gadgets, including weather-resistant LED smart lights, outdoor speakers, and more unusual items like bird baths and feeders with built-in cameras. The retailer also offers accessories that help bring your regular indoor tech outside more safely, should you want to. For example, it stocks sturdy projector screens for backyard movie nights, enclosures that allow you to use your regular TV outside, albeit not without some risk, and weatherproof soundbar protectors to match.

Colorful LEDs are a nice way of lighting up the perimeter of your patio or illuminating your deck on late summer evenings. Sam's Club has a few different options for brightening up your yard, but these smart bollard-style path lights are a particular highlight because of their expansive customization choices. According to their product page, the Govee Outdoor Path Lights boast 16 million color options, adjustable bulb temperatures, and a long list of presets, scenes, and further customization options through the Govee Home App. 

As well as offering all kinds of fun settings for crafting the exact ambiance you want, the lights are also built to be protected from bad weather and poor conditions, so you shouldn't need to worry too much about any summer storms trashing them. They're built out of lacquered aluminum and have an IP65 rating, meaning they're protected against fine particles like dust and water coming from nearby sprinklers or the hose when you're rinsing off your patio.

The lights come in a pack of four, which you could place along the side of your deck or patio. However, they are connected by a wire, so you can't get too creative with how you arrange them. Something else to keep in mind if you're considering buying outdoor smart lights is how good your Wi-Fi connection is on your patio or around your deck. Since they're app-controlled, you need a decent connection to make the most of all the different settings and options they have to offer, as noted by some user reviews. 

Lugging your stereo or soundbar to the nearest window when you have guests over or want to enjoy some music while you're gardening isn't the most convenient thing you could do. And in some cases, it just straight-up isn't possible: you might not have an outlet nearby or no way of setting up your speakers inside. That leaves you with a couple of options. You could pick up a portable Bluetooth speaker, and run the risk of damaging it with rain or a poorly placed sprinkler, or you could choose to use an outdoor speaker instead — like the Monster Rockin Roller 360 Portable Indoor/Outdoor Bluetooth Speaker.

This is a rechargeable, portable outdoor speaker with up to 240 watts of output, as well as 360-degree sound, wireless charging, and IPX4 water resistance. Once set up, you can play music from your streaming service of choice using your phone, laptop, or tablet over Bluetooth or via a 3.5mm auxiliary input jack. Or, if you really want to — and your neighbors don't mind the noise coming from your deck — you can hook it up to a second speaker for stereo sound.

With almost 500 reviews and a 4.5-star average at the time of writing, this is one of Sam's Club's most highly-rated outdoor tech offerings. Of those reviews, more than 380 of them give it a full five stars, praising its volume, clarity, and how easy it is to move around thanks to its telescopic handle and five-inch wheels. It isn't all praise, though, with a handful of buyers saying the Bluetooth function can be glitchy. It's also a little limited when it comes to connection points. No SD card or USB port means you have to have another device on hand to control the music with.

Watching the birds is a simple pleasure that doesn't really get old. But just in case you want to put a modern spin on birdwatching, there's some fun backyard tech out there that does exactly that. Birdfy's Smart Bird Bath Pro integrates a solar-powered, waterproof live camera into the basin, allowing you to watch all the small birds visiting your yard and enjoying a splash. 

Birdfy offers a few different smart bird baths with discreet cameras, but this one is a solid option for a deck, patio, or otherwise paved outdoor space, as it comes on its own free-standing base. That means you don't have to find soft ground like a lawn or flowerbed to stick it into. You also don't need to worry about having any tools to set it up with, courtesy of its plug-and-play design — something that's a common point of praise among the user reviews. 

Surprisingly, this bird bath doubles as a mini water feature or fountain. That way, it isn't just wasting precious space on your deck or patio when you aren't lucky enough to have any feathered visitors hanging around. The solar fountain comes with five different nozzles that dictate how water flows when it's enabled. As you might've already realized, that does come with a catch: the feature being solar powered means it won't work if you're not getting enough sun. And, according to a couple of reviews, that specifically means it only really fires when it's being hit with direct sunlight. So, if you do decide to pick it up, choose which part of your patio or deck you place it on wisely.

Portable projectors are a fun way of mixing up your summertime activities once the sun goes down. The Samsung Freestyle Gen 2 is one option that could find its way onto your deck or patio for watching movies, playing video games, or catching the big game outside under the stars. It's designed as an all-in-one home theater device with built-in speakers and smart entertainment features, meaning you don't have to lug any other equipment with you to make it work.

It also comes packed with a few functions to make the setup smooth and easy. If you've bought and set up a portable projector before, then you probably already know that it can be a pain to get the image level and picture focused. That's all streamlined by the Freestyle Gen 2's Auto Focus, Leveling, and Keystone features, which, according to user reviews, mean you can effectively just plug-and-play the device on any wall or screen you want. It also runs on external batteries via its USB-C port, so you don't have to worry about dragging an extension cord across your deck.

There is a catch with this one: it's not designed specifically for the outdoors. It isn't in a rugged case, and it doesn't offer any special weather resistance or waterproofing. So, if you do want to enjoy a spot of "Red Dead Redemption" by a real fire pit for once, be sure you're not so immersed that you mistake any very real rainfall for the sound coming from your game, otherwise your projector just might break.

Of course, you might be hard-pressed to find a clear surface visible from your deck or patio that's good enough to project onto. So, unless you like seeing siding or foliage creeping into the background of every shot during your outdoor movie night, you're probably going to find yourself in need of a projector screen. The Vankyo Staytrue 120-inch T Projector Screen provides a large blank canvas to project onto, so you can achieve as crisp and bright an image from your projector as possible.

Although the screen is large and sturdy enough to use outside, several user reviews noted how lightweight the screen is and how easy it is to move. So, you won't be stuck with having it set up at the end of your deck all year long because you're struggling to move or disassemble it. It's designed to be foldable and portable, so it shouldn't take up too much space once you're ready to pack up your backyard theater. There is one problem that you might run into if you disassemble it and keep it in the garage or shed, though, and that's that it can get pretty wrinkled, according to a review. 

We picked which items to highlight based on a few different criteria. First, we ensured the items we selected were available for purchase from Sam's Club either online or in-store. And, of course, we confirmed they were either electronics or accessories for use with other tech items. Then, we also made sure the items could reasonably be used outside. That means they needed to be weather-resistant, portable, rechargeable, or some combination of the three.

Lastly, we only picked items with a user rating of 4 out of 5 stars and above at the time of writing. A few items didn't have that many reviews or ratings on the Sam's Club listing itself. In those cases, we checked out the product reviews for the same item from a couple of different retailers to be sure the average score was representative of the product and not just the opinion of a couple of reviews.