The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

Using an app or voice to control your lights is only rarely useful.

Having one switch control all your table lamps, floor lamps, and ceiling lights is useful. Being able to add new wall switches (really remotes) in new locations for ~$25 also nice (excluding the cost of the rest of the system, obviously).

A few years ago, we had no switches or light sources by the entry way; we had to stumble our way to a switch in the dark. I fixed that with remote controlled outlets at first and later upgraded to Hue bulbs and dimmers. In the bedroom, my wife and I both have remotes for the lights (though she actually prefers voice control, ironically).

We have a few useless wall switches that control outlets instead of lights; turning those into in-wall remotes makes it so we can control multiple lights and use the outlets for devices that need continuous power.

We also have our light bulbs automatically change brightness and color temperature based on the time of day. We get daylight-bright light during daylight hours and dim warm light in the middle of the night. It's really nice.

Another nice smart home feature: checking that the range is off. My wife used to stress about this, it's no longer an issue. Don't worry, you can only turn the thing OFF remotely, not on.

The smart speakers are mostly for music, checking the weather, and time. Occasionally for light control.

Smart/energy monitoring outlets we use mostly for tracking down energy hogs and reducing our energy bill.

The security and privacy stuff is a risk, but as long as you stick to major brands IMO the risk is overblown. Those brands are subject to a ton of scrutiny. Fly-by-night alphabet soup brands off Amazon or Alibaba are another matter.

I'm committed to not replacing any switches/plugs if it doesn't Just Work when the home assistant / hub goes away. My poor kids shouldn't have to wander around in the dark if my hass container craps the bed while I'm out of the house.

> My wife constantly wonders what she will do when I die and the whole thing goes south the day after.

Talking about life insurance is morbid, but.. if you have life insurance, try to either consider $5k of it set aside or try to increase your coverage by $5-10k, as a fund that would pay for an electrician to go around ripping out all the smarts from your home. As a yearly to-do, keep a one-page document up to date with two or three electricians you would consider qualified to do the work without ripping off your grieving spouse, and keep that in your "to my grieving spouse" binder.

If nothing else, consider the idea that they might have to sell the house, you wouldn't want them dealing with real estate showings where the light switches don't work.

I actually agree with your assessment and did think about the issue you mention. I chose this imperfect set of trade-offs because I didn't want to DIY in-wall fixtures and, after reviewing the current tech and market and which "open" standards were being developed, I decided to go with an inexpensive shorter-term solution (~4 to 8 years). The dimmer switches are only $15 each delivered from Amazon (https://smile.amazon.com/Dimmer-Martin-Jerry-Compatible-Neut...) and under Tasmota are highly configurable to the extent of being able to communicate in a switch-to-switch private mesh.

Since I had to commit to hardware six months ago, I knew the kind of longer-term hardware I'd really prefer didn't quite exist yet - at least not at the multi-vendor, commodity-cost level. There are some interesting high-end, proprietary, single-source products as well as some cool experimental DIY & low-volume kit-type designs, using stuff like touchscreen displays and ESP32-type CPUs. I think this kind of flexible display/interaction end-point will be the most likely next inflection point but it will first need to go through the early-adopter Darwinian process sorts and then come down the price-curve to reach Shenzen-container, multi-vendor commodity pricing.

My choices were to either

A. Spend too much now making an early bet on something available today that probably wouldn't be a longer-term keeper.

B. Go with a traditional "dumb" dimmer for $6.50 each and upgrade in a few years.

C. Pay $15 each today on a shorter-term, standard-sized, replaceable "smart" solution that can fall back to a dedicated wifi subnet for control or, worst-case, be a stand-alone dimmer.

I decided to go with C. While I agree with your point that the wireless protocol world will eventually move on, I suspect that wifi as a protocol is so ubiquitous, so standard and so cheap that some form of backward compatibility may survive for decades through bridge devices. A likely contender for the next big multi-vendor standard in home automation is likely to be the ChIP-based standard being pushed by Google, Samsung, Apple and a couple hundred other companies. The standard has been finalized and the wireless will be based on both wifi and Zigbee (2.4ghz and 900 Mhz) as a basic required element, so there's a fair chance my current cheap "Shenzen-specials" will be adaptable through firmware since the vast majority of in-wall wireless stuff installed today is based on wifi or Zigbee. It's okay if they aren't because in my mind they are a short-term disposable solution anyway.

i’m replacing all my caseta and pico with dumb switches. the radio bits and the color matching are of utmost quality. the ergonomics of these devices however is exceptionally poor, and an example of market segmentation. (ra and ra2 provide the entire switch as a target).

zwave doesn’t come close to the reliability of lutron so dumb it shall be

Lutron is a shining example of how you do home automation right and nobody is taking note.