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The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

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Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#201

Post by Terretta »

dotancohen wrote: post #57
ninkendo wrote: post #9

I 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 did my whole house in Lutron’s smart switches Sure, but how do you turn the lights on when the power's out and the router is down? Lrf, V'z wbxvat.

> Sure, but how do you turn the lights on when the power's out and the router is down?

Taking this as joke as one doesn’t often turn on lights when power’s out …

But I used Caseta in a home with a generator since the Lutron light switches and dimmers are physical switches that happily work without any smarthome features.

Unplug your hub and they all work except for the ones that don’t get wired (the ones that are their remote, just stuck on a wall).

Pretty much the top selling point of Caseta for me, was working like normal switches. Gravy is how much more responsive than Hue or similar.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#202

Post by Filligree »

pkulak wrote: post #200
h2odragon wrote: post #2

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. 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 love my smart home stuff. My lights turn on in the morning, change color temperature at sunset, and turn off at night. Thermostats set to the right temperature/mode at night and in the morning depending on the forecast for the day. My garden is watered, but not if it's going to rain. When I turn on my TV, the lights turn off and the blinds close. Everything shuts down and locks when the family leaves, resumes when…

What hardware do you use? And how were you able to get hold of something that doesn't talk to the cloud? There's nothing like that in the shops here.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#203

Post by Tagbert »

Why are “smart homes” always presented as either all in or all out?

We have a handful of Wemo switches that we use to turn on various lights, mostly on a sunrise/sunset schedule. They are reasonably reliable with no more than about 1 failure to switch in a month. My husband sometimes needs to repeat himself if he is using voice commands but then, he is a mumbler and I often have to ask him to repeat what he says to me. If I needed to switch one without voice or app, I can just tap the physical button on the switch.

When we leave town, they continue to switch off/on. I no longer have to dig out one of those Daisey-wheel timers and try to figure out what is on and what is off.

None of these lights are ‘critical’ in that, if they don’t switch now and then, I’m not upset. I don’t demand 100% uptime for decades at a time. At worst, I might have to unplug and replug in the switch to reset it. I don’t try to get complicated with them and have no particular desire to automate the rest of the house.

I feel like my home is smart enough at this level, not particularly fussy, and not a source of stress.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#204

Post by karaterobot »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #185
gangstead wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at Lutron my first two years after getting my EE. I wasn't on the wireless products but we did do crazy amounts of fussing over fall back behaviors and corner cases. We very much developed the software with the attitude of hardware: we knew what we shipped had to work for years and field updates were unacceptable. I've been gone from Coopersburg for 15 years but I still practice the engineering culture I lea…

> long standing tradition that engineers put in some time on the customer support phones Before this, the tradition at engineering companies was that the "kids fresh out of school" would start in Manufacturing or Service so they'd have some experience with the difference between design engineering and actually being able to build or repair the thing you designed. It seems that this doesn't happen much anymore.

For a company that sells a product, understanding customers is really important, so it makes sense to have new employees spend time in customer support. There is no faster way to understand what you should be building. The only problem I have with it is thinking of exposure to customers as a hazing ritual that ends after a certain point, after which you never have to deal with them for the rest of your career. This should probably be on a rotation!

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#205

Post by pkulak »

Filligree wrote: post #202
pkulak wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love my smart home stuff. My lights turn on in the morning, change color temperature at sunset, and turn off at night. Thermostats set to the right temperature/mode at night and in the morning depending on the forecast for the day. My garden is watered, but not if it's going to rain. When I turn on my TV, the lights turn off and the blinds close. Everything shuts down and locks when the family leaves, resumes when…

What hardware do you use? And how were you able to get hold of something that doesn't talk to the cloud? There's nothing like that in the shops here.

Most of my stuff is ZWave which is 100% local (big Zooz fan, and I hear that Inovelli is just as good). I have a bunch of Lutron switches too, and a couple Hue bulbs. Both of those will technically phone home, but you can cut off their WAN access and they still work just fine. I control everything with an old Mac Mini running Home Assistant.

The trick is, before you buy anything, look it up on Home Assistant. If its "class" is "local push", you're golden:

https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2016/02/12/classifying-th...

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#206

Post by rendall »

Filligree wrote: post #202
pkulak wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love my smart home stuff. My lights turn on in the morning, change color temperature at sunset, and turn off at night. Thermostats set to the right temperature/mode at night and in the morning depending on the forecast for the day. My garden is watered, but not if it's going to rain. When I turn on my TV, the lights turn off and the blinds close. Everything shuts down and locks when the family leaves, resumes when…

What hardware do you use? And how were you able to get hold of something that doesn't talk to the cloud? There's nothing like that in the shops here.

check out https://www.home-assistant.io/ Open source. You can be as fiddly or stable as you have tolerance for.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#207

Post by GoodJokes »

todd8 wrote: post #151

I have an EE degree and a CS degree. I waste an incomprehensible portion of my life fussing with the technology that runs in my home. Why is it so hard to configure VLANs for my security cameras using the fancy Unifi switches I have? Why isn't there just some documented JSON file somewhere that I can edit? (The key word in the previous sentence is documented -- I'm sure there is an XML or JSON file somewhere they jus…

Haven't seen a legit first world problems comment in awhile that wasn't self-aware. Security cameras, what are you living in the purge? Sprinklers, get rid of your gross lawn dude? Luxury to just shop for a new house, nobody cares.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#208

Post by beervirus »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #183
whafro wrote: post #172

Quick story: On the day we were closing on our 1920s house here in Massachusetts, we noticed that the oven wouldn't turn on. Then we noticed that it was shut off at the breaker. We asked the owner why, and he said "oh, the mainboard in the oven (a Thermidor) has some issue where it beeps incessantly in the middle of the night and wakes us all up – but not a big deal: you can just turn it off and on at the breaker and…

I assume there was some reason you didn't just remove the beeper? Or put a switch inline with it so you could turn it off?

Oven timers aren’t much use if they can’t beep. And the inline switch is probably more trouble than what they came up with.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#209

Post by coryrc »

gkop wrote: post #111
londons_explore wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mechanical timers aren't as reliable as you make out. For example, if you attach loads with high startup or inductive currents, like fridges or big motors/fans to them, then they'll wear out very fast and typically stop working in a few months. If they jam for any reason, they'll usually overheat and melt all the little plastic gears inside. This happens if you tell them to turn on and off every 15 minutes all day...…

Digitizing the timer doesn’t improve the reliability of the electrical components though.

Electronic timers usually use electronic switches, which can switch at the zero-crossing, and thus are far more robust to startup surges than mechanical relays (though without proper heatsinking, cannot handle as much continuous current). I once built a product with a relay and triac, the latter to handle the startup surges from a capacitive load and the former up handle the continuous 12A load. People loved it.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#210

Post by xutopia »

I paid an appalling amount of money to set myself up with Philips Hue. Their application is so rigid I can't make it do what I want. They have automation but they only allow you to turn on your lights when you come home and turn them off when you leave... I'd like some lights on when I leave thank you but their app doesn't allow for that very simple use case!
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