The unbearable fussiness of the smart home
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The unbearable fussiness of the smart home
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Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home
#2In that same time period, my "plant light" timer, a $15 mechanical item of a design unmodified since the 1970s, has worked flawlessly, requiring attention only when the clocks change or my schedule does. It has not informed Google, Amazon, or anyone else about its job or anything else in my home. It has generated no royalties nor invoked any support or ongoing maintenance costs. It has never needed a software upgrade.
"Smart Home" stuff even since the "x10" standards has been a solution looking for a problem to solve. A hobby for the homeowner who wants to ride the high side of the Laffer curve in effort and expense. It could be argued that quiet, flawless functioning of these products would be exactly what the customer doesn't want in this product space.
Compare it to model trains: is that hobby focused around having a lovely little table set up and watching the trains run? Or is the actual focus the torn up mess that's under construction and "we can't play with it right now but i can get it assembled to show the kids by Tuesday".
Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home
#3A typical "conversation" in my home goes like this:
"Alexa... Turn on the downstairs lights... sigh Alexa, turn on all the downstairs lights... deep sigh Alexa, downstairs lights one hundred percent."
Then, if I'm lucky, Alexa will convince the Philips Hue to flick on a dozen lights.
When everything works - it is subtle magic. When it doesn't, it's obviously a load of poorly debugged JSON parsers with finickity wifi connections.
Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home
#4I’ve become annoyed with “smart home” because the reliability is so bad. About 20% of the time the light doesn’t turn on or off.
I’ve used Alexa with Feit and Phillips Hue for about 4 years and Apple HomePod for about a year.
At least once a day, I get an error message like “Oops, I had a problem with that.” Apple seems worse about this. It sometimes works by calling the other with the same command. It always works when using the app on my phone.
I expect 100% reliability. The same as my light switch. The light switch works every time.
I also don’t like how chatty they are. I can’t turn off the voice confirmations with Apple. I don’t want it to tell me that it turned on the lights.
I laugh imagining a Star Trek episode where the computer responds as shittily as our current state of smart homes.
Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home
#5I love programming ESP32 arduinos - connecting stuff up.
but I will never make my home 'smart' - not with closed or open sourced.
My standard way of thinking is - can I help someone in my family to fix it or replace it, if it was to go wrong over the phone ... whilst I'm out drinking and drunk.
Because given enough time this seems to pop up again and again with anything in the house - and I do not go out drinking often (before someone asks)
Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home
#6This is entirely on the author. Sure these vendors make awful products and poorly maintain them - but nobody is forcing anyone to buy them or integrate them into their house. I have yet to hear, or especially see, these devices make anybody’s life easier than doing the task manually.
I never think about light in my home, I flip the switch if I need it - lights seem like such a chore to my friends who have to issue commands to a speaker and that’s one of the few things this tech is supposed to be good at
Good technology gets out of the way and let’s the user do or be or experience something. This is the opposite
Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home
#7In that same time period, my "plant light" timer, a $15 mechanical item of a design unmodified since the 1970s, has worked flawlessly, requiring attention only when the clocks change or my schedule does. It has not informed Google, Amazon, or anyone else about its job or anything else in my home. It has generated no royalties nor invoked any support or ongoing maintenance costs. It has never needed a software upgrade…
I've got the same old-fashioned mechanical timer. I actually attached it to one of those "box fan filters" that people talk about here from time to time. (So I can filter on a schedule) It works perfectly, and I've never had any issues with it. I'm thoroughly convinced that if I tried to replace it with a "smart" device I'd have no shortage of issues. I like your thinking regarding the lack of reliability with these smart devices. It's clearly possible to build these sorts of things reliably, but for some reason there doesn't seem to be any market pressure on companies to do so. If that's the case, then consumers must at least partially be to blame.
Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home
#8I think it's partly about judicious use of products. I had a pretty minimal smart home setup -- Google Home, Nest, and Hue. It worked 100% of the time, I never had a problem. I get that part of the issue being brought up is that it's not 100% for everyone, but I see friends having the most issues when they're constantly trying new products, and new classes of product. Also, the more complicated the behavior, the harder it is to make intuitively "smart". Stick to the basics and you can have a pretty good experience.
Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home
#9I did my whole house in Lutron’s smart switches (close to 50 of them), and I think it’s good? It’s been about 2 years now and I really haven’t had any issues.
The switches aren’t Wi-Fi connected, because Wi-Fi would be an awful choice for 50 devices that you only communicate with a few times a day. They use their own wireless frequency and communicate in a really simple/reliable way to the bridge, which is wired to my router and doesn’t need an internet connection to work.
There’s no always-running cloud service, the light switches work even when the internet is down (and I can still use the home app too in such an event, just no voice control.)
Siri is finicky sometimes, but I’d wager a 97% success rate in saying things like “set the scene Evening Downstairs” and “turn off all the lights except in the bedroom.”
My favorite aspect is that the pico switches can be programmed to switch whole rooms of lights on and off, which makes it so much nicer in the basement where I have 18 different lights to turn on and I can just hit one switch on my way downstairs and it’s fully illuminated (no voice command necessary) and I don’t have to visit 18 light switches to turn them off again.
Home automation tech must be invisible and fall back gracefully, and must always be interact-able in a “dumb” way, or else it’s just playing games IMO.
Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home
#10I did my whole house in Lutron’s smart switches (close to 50 of them), and I think it’s good? It’s been about 2 years now and I really haven’t had any issues. The switches aren’t Wi-Fi connected, because Wi-Fi would be an awful choice for 50 devices that you only communicate with a few times a day. They use their own wireless frequency and communicate in a really simple/reliable way to the bridge, which is wired to m…
I was about to say the same thing.
I set up all my non-standard lighting fixtures with Lutron Caseta switches, and replaced all the standard bulbs with Philips Hue bulbs. They've both been working flawlessly, together, with my 3 HomePod Minis for about a year and a half now.
It really is a brand thing. Most are bad.
[edit] > My favorite aspect is that the pico switches can be programmed to switch whole rooms of lights on and off...
This is my only gripe with the Lutron hardware. The Picos can only be used to trigger Lutron devices. They don't integrate into HomeKit like the switches do.
This meant I had to go with a bunch of Hue Smart Buttons, which do, but have a tendency of falling out of their homes and onto the ground.
Was looking at the Hue compatible RunLessWire stuff though. [1]