Has to be said I don't understand "smart devices" one bit. I simply don't understand how pulling out a phone and launching an app is preferable to an ordinary light switch. In fact I would say it's in every respect worse. And I don't want something that sits in the room listening to everything I say and uploading some unknown part of that to an unknown cloud service.
The unbearable fussiness of the smart home
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Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home
#12I have had great success with my home automation.
Home assistant running in a container interfaces my lights (Lutron) sensors (zwave) and entertainment (Yamaha / Apple). HA also presents a HomeKit hub that the Apple devices connect to for Siri, etc. All interfacing is via HomeKit because that’s our preferred platform, but the HA interface/app work fine and do everything as well.
None of this relies on remote services!
Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home
#13In 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…
> In 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.
This could just be survivorship bias. If 99% of these plant timers broke and were sent to the scrap heap, you would still feel like they were 'built better back then' because you're only seeing the ones that made it 50 years. Not the ones that didn't.
Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home
#14This 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 co…
> 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
Pre-covid we used to leave the dog at home during the day (I now WFH so not an issue), but it gets dark at 3:30 here during the winter, meaning the dog is stuck sitting in the dark for 2 hours. Philips Hue has routines for turning on lamps 30 minutes before sunset meaning the dog gets to chill out and stare out the window for an hour longer. The bulbs also sync with TVs and devices that will adjust the lighting for tasks/bedtime/movie time.
We use hue bulbs in our bedside lamps, and they sync (pretty much out of the box) to alarms in google calendar so 30 minutes before "up" time the lamps come on and fade up to full brightness when my alarm goes off. It happens 5 days a week, and correctly knows when I'm OOO to not bother waking me. The lights can also do holiday modes so no more giving keys to my neighbour to ask them to turn on lights for me.
Heating is even more key - ever go away for a week and forget to turn down the thermostat? I know I have, and we've just wasted a weeks worth of heating the house to comfortable human temperature rather than just keeping it from freezing. Modern smart heating systems have thermostats in each TRV so you can adjust the temperature in one room rather than the entire house (where right now I am using one room), and can be controlled on timers, and deactivated remotely.
EDIT: I do want to say that the devices (particularly the voice interface to them) is not perfect, however I would estimate our failure rate at once every couple of days rather than every time we try to turn on the lights, and as others have mentioned here it needs to have "dumb" fallbacks - I need to be able to turn off the lights with a switch, or walk to the thermostat and adjust it otherwise it just doesn't work.
Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home
#15Everybody I know who installed smart home devices has abandoned them; none would recommend them.
The main issues are surprisingly poor reliability and overly chatty interfaces.
Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home
#16I am building my own lighting controls (using Bluetooth Mesh as the underlying communications technology), because I don't want the madness of IoT.
There is a misconception that building reliable products with a full TCP/IP stack and internet-based servers is a good idea. It isn't.
We don't have to go back to mechanical devices: there are ways to build reliable home automation solutions. Just don't make them all internet devices with a bazillion dependencies.
Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home
#17About 10 seconds into reading this I got a 'cute' drop-down box that greyed out what I was half-way through reading, and insisted that I attend to a 'Get my weekly IoT newsletter' that demanded from me an email address, name, and company details.
The unbearable demands of advertising.
EDIT (ADD)
I've installed a couple of ESP32's with humidity / temperature gauges, in two of my abodes, that feed into a prometheus -> cortex store, so I can then map them on Grafana.
This is considered 'excessive' by the family, but for me it's deeply interesting and compelling, and I'll be pushing more of them out over the next few months.
But these are very basic devices, with rudimentary access to the local network, and no way (or interest) in phoning out to anything else beyond my router. This is the ideal scenario for these kinds of devices.
Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home
#18In 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…
> In 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. This could just be survivorship bias. If 99% of these plant timers broke and were sent to the scrap heap, you would still feel like they were 'built better back then' because you're only seeing the ones that made i…
Sure, the standard cheap mechanical timer has DOA's and failures because its a cheaply made machanism; but the basic electro-mechanical switch on a clock design has been around since the 70s.
I find the timers are best replaced after say 5-8yr because they're cheap and i dont trust the plastic once it brittles up.If you've been running one over say 50% of its rated load it might be entertaining to crack it open and see how much the conductors have softened.
Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home
#19I am building my own lighting controls (using Bluetooth Mesh as the underlying communications technology), because I don't want the madness of IoT. There is a misconception that building reliable products with a full TCP/IP stack and internet-based servers is a good idea. It isn't. We don't have to go back to mechanical devices: there are ways to build reliable home automation solutions. Just don't make them all inte…
Is there a reason you're not using a standard like Zigbee? It has the same use case, non-wifi stable local connectivity to control lights or other devices. And it's a standard so you can buy components from many vendors.
Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home
#20I 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…
This is how most home automation brands ought to work but it seems that in practice very few do.
Most of them want to proxy all attempts to turn on a light switch via AWS. Which is madness.