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Why Is My Smart Home So Dumb?
61–70 of 154 posts
Re: Why Is My Smart Home So Dumb?
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Knowing that pretty much all software is buggy and Nest and Wink are pretty new to market, do you want to depend on them with your life? In the northeast US this weekend we will be having a high temperature of zero degrees Fahrenheit in some areas. I don't want to rely on a flaky device determining if the heat should be on. What happens if the temp drops really low, like with a power failure? Did they test that? Same…
As a counter-anecdote, I have been very grateful for my Nest during these especially cold days. It takes the weather outside into account, and does a much better job keeping my house in a comfortable temperature range.
Outdoor temperature reset has been a feature on furnace controllers for a long time (also called modulating aquastat).
(so there is a sense in which it isn't necessarily a smart home type of feature, it doesn't need a great deal of integration or whatever, and will work with any dumb thermostat)
Re: Why Is My Smart Home So Dumb?
#63I think a big part of the problem is that integration is hard, and that the companies more or less resist it (I guess because they think keeping people in their garden is a good strategy). It's also easy to oversell (to yourself) the value of a room having a movie mode. Most smart home features are 'nice to have', not worth a lot of messing around and cash.
> It's also easy to oversell (to yourself) the value of a room having a movie mode. Most smart home features are 'nice to have', not worth a lot of messing around and cash. My girlfriend used to occasionally watch a show about house-buying (House Hunters). In general the show wasn't terribly interesting, but the real estate agents featured sometimes had some interesting tips. One of those tips was to carefully consid…
This makes a lot of sense.
I've heard that the best ROI comes from upgrading (1) kitchens and (2) bathrooms. Why? These are the rooms where people spend a lot of time. The trend for many years has been for big, open kitchens because they are used day to day, and during special occasions (parties, etc) everyone gravitates toward the kitchen anyway.
Re: Why Is My Smart Home So Dumb?
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Turning off the lights on the other side of the house after you are already in bed is such a nice feature :)
If you're in bed, how do you know those lights are on? Also, why wouldn't you turn the light off as you left the room? Most of these "smart home" devices really do seem like a gimmick at this point. Maybe in the future, they'll be well enough debugged and refined to be useful, but for now, I just don't see a benefit in a normal* home. My dad uses Nests, "smart" locks, and remote cameras alarms (off-season) on his bea…
If the app works it should tell you the state of your devices.
Re: Why Is My Smart Home So Dumb?
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a counter-anecdote, I have been very grateful for my Nest during these especially cold days. It takes the weather outside into account, and does a much better job keeping my house in a comfortable temperature range.
Outdoor temperature reset has been a feature on furnace controllers for a long time (also called modulating aquastat). (so there is a sense in which it isn't necessarily a smart home type of feature, it doesn't need a great deal of integration or whatever, and will work with any dumb thermostat)
Yeah, to be fair, my Nest replaced a dial thermostat with a mercury switch on a bimetal coil...
Re: Why Is My Smart Home So Dumb?
#66There's a few 'handy' things I'd like to do - for example, I am considering replacing my basic central heating/hot water controller with a Raspberry Pi and having features such as a low-heat, vacation mode where the system knows I am 'x' miles away from coming home (tied to my phone's location) and it will fire up everything again. Although I'd consider doing more (ESP8266 modules with MQTT looks interesting, albeit…
Water heaters use a lot of household energy--automating them is a great idea.
One smartthings customer did it here: http://community.smartthings.com/t/water-heater-automation/1...
Re: Why Is My Smart Home So Dumb?
#67My main issue with my wink is that it has to go all the way across the internet to connect to the box 10ft away from me. A much "smarter" system would simply connect directly over my home wifi and avoid most of the lag and connectivity issues.
I understand WHY they did it this way (because they don't want to support an open device/protocol for interacting with the hub...) but it seems really short-sighted in terms of the user experience.
I've already rooted my wink hub and fully intend to implement this myself just to reduce the annoyance.
Re: Why Is My Smart Home So Dumb?
#68There's a few 'handy' things I'd like to do - for example, I am considering replacing my basic central heating/hot water controller with a Raspberry Pi and having features such as a low-heat, vacation mode where the system knows I am 'x' miles away from coming home (tied to my phone's location) and it will fire up everything again. Although I'd consider doing more (ESP8266 modules with MQTT looks interesting, albeit…
I think one of the big problems with the whole "smart home" idea is that people don't consider the use cases. As the article mentions but doesn't really follow through the logic of, trading a light switch flip for a smart phone fumble just isn't a win.
But remote access is one of those cases that is a win. I have a relative that spends a lot of time about 1000 miles away for business and he's gotten some mileage out of his remote furnace control. Access for people with physical issues also makes sense, but relative to what I think the market is "expected" to be for this stuff, that's still quite a small niche too. (Large in absolute terms, that is, but nowhere near "we're going to have one of these in every house!")
Beyond that, though, what's the best case scenario in practice? I spend perhaps a minute during the day tops flipping light switches... if you 100% eliminate that I will, frankly, not particularly notice. My heater already has a standard modern (and therefore a bit featureful) electronic control and I already don't use its sophisticated features.
This isn't one of those cases where technical advances just made home automation possible, like the way tablets were a joke until all the pieces came together for the iPad and gave us a practical device for the first time. The tech has been here for decades, and it has never taken off, even among the geek set. I think the problem is there just isn't a use case here.
At the risk of sounding simply contrarian, I'm still not convinced the whole "Internet of Things" isn't going to fizzle out the same way. It's a basic principle of good software engineering that it isn't enough to just throw code at people and hope; you need a use case that makes sense. There will be some use cases here and use cases there, but I'm not convinced there's a massive new market that deserves a new moniker so much as "use cases here and there".
Re: Why Is My Smart Home So Dumb?
#69Sounds like my experience with Nest last summer. Got the thermostat, can't get it connected to my wireless. Support basically tells me to get bent until I go into full IT guy mode and prove its an issue with the unit. Replacement unit comes, doesn't work at all (first one was at least a nice looking thermostat with no connected features). Third unit comes and it's been fine ever since. For some reason I thought it wo…
Dumb detectors can have the same problems. I'm not sure if they get contaminated or suffer some kind of other breakdown, but I had to switch out two smoke detectors in recent time due to their propensity for going off on a whim. Of course, normal smoke detectors don't come with the Nest's hefty price tag...
Where were your faulty detectors? My ex-girlfriend's dad used to do testing for a smoke alarm company a while ago. I learned an interesting thing from that. You know what they use to simulate smoke when they test smoke detectors? Hair spray. The fine mist is actually pretty good at tricking the sensor into thinking there are smoke particulates in the air. This also leads to an interesting failure scenario for many home smoke alarms: those close to bathrooms or in women's bedrooms tend to get gunked up with hairspray.
Re: Why Is My Smart Home So Dumb?
#70There's a few 'handy' things I'd like to do - for example, I am considering replacing my basic central heating/hot water controller with a Raspberry Pi and having features such as a low-heat, vacation mode where the system knows I am 'x' miles away from coming home (tied to my phone's location) and it will fire up everything again. Although I'd consider doing more (ESP8266 modules with MQTT looks interesting, albeit…
I think one of the big problems with the whole "smart home" idea is that people don't consider the use cases. As the article mentions but doesn't really follow through the logic of, trading a light switch flip for a smart phone fumble just isn't a win. But remote access is one of those cases that is a win. I have a relative that spends a lot of time about 1000 miles away for business and he's gotten some mileage out…
I think as soon as there is a comm protocol that is worth calling a winner (works well, widely supported), it will quickly become the case that LED bulbs and fixtures will come with it built in. A while after that, whole home lighting control is a $100 feature that you expect in every house (or less for smaller places), not a $500 or $1000 feature that doesn't work very well in houses where the owner really pursued it.