zlacker

The older I get the more I de-value "smart" things. I love dumb things. Lightbulb must be dumb. Incandescent lightbulbs were a direct evolution of candles and gas lamps leveraging on simple physical laws and principles. They were not very effective turning most of the energy into heat and LED light bulbs must have been great. But they bring electronics and multiply complexity. I already cannot just simply get a lightbulb. Because I need to take into account several different variables and characteristics of it (temperature, luminous flux, dimmability, trust into lamp lifetime claims and absence of flicker, etc.) And then some clowns bring even more electronics with all this wireless remote-controllable color changing lights. It is like wtf? Give me a simple lamp that will be dirt cheap to replace or will serve me a lifetime without me thinking about its guts.

Vote with your wallet. Don't support over-engineering.

P.S. Some of the best LED lightbulbs I have were installed in 2012 and they are still working with very small degradation of brightness. Nowadays whenever I need to buy a LED bulb it is like a lottery. Smart IoT light bulbs? Just plain no. As with the rest of the gimmicks.

>>nrvn+(OP)
I tend to agree but there are use cases where the smart bulbs have been great for us.

1. Next to our bed we have reading lamp sconces. The sconces we picked out do not have light switches (oops). It turned out to be a blessing in disguise as now the reading lamps automatically switch on in the evening before we come upstairs to bed, then turn off as part of the “good night” scene (which also alarms the security system, etc). If the alarm goes off, the lights automatically switch on to max.

2. Our front porch and rear lights automatically turn on and off with the sunset/sunrise. They also turn onto a flashing red/blue if the alarm is triggered (kind of corny but hey anything to scare off would be intruders)

3. Our kids have smart bulbs in their room lamps. We are able to switch them to a low red colored light as a night light automatically when it’s their bedtime.

Most of my lights are “dumb”. The few use cases for smart bulbs are nice though. I use the Nanoleaf essentials through Apple HomeKit so I don’t feel like I’m exposing my personal details to some third party.

>>ipytho+H2
Yea, that's mostly where I am on this too.

Primary lighting is dumb and controlled by switches.

Secondary lighting/mood lighting is smart and has the ability to be color changed and timing controlled.

That said, 'smart' systems love to lose connection or their settings and do the wrong thing too frequently.

>>nrvn+(OP)
If I want some sort of remote control or automation, I use products that rely on an IR remote. This way a Raspberry Pi with an IR LED can do anything I want without depending on vendor software.

>>pixl97+ms
I’ve found HomeKit to be pretty resilient. During internet outages it still functions locally, which was an important design choice for me.

There was one time where it went on the fritz and ultimately fixed itself when I restarted my phone (wish there was more troubleshooting or audit logging, but that’s endemic to all Apple products not just HomeKit)

>>Krssst+lx
I rigged up the lights in my room to be controlled over Bluetooth and strictly no wifi. Stuffed a rpi pico into the wall to run it.

https://github.com/Yossi/Bluetooth_lightswitch

>>ipytho+H2
How or why is it helpful for the lights to switch on in an empty room just so you don't have half a second of darkness when you walk in there twenty minutes later?

>>TRiG_I+gC1
You sound irrationally angry but I’ll bite anyway.

1. At night we are turning all of the other lights off. Our bedroom door is open, so the light dimly illuminates the way to our room without having to turn on hallway lights.

2. When we aren’t home it still happens giving an impression someone is home.

3. It looks nice when you walk in.

4. The convenience is worth the $0.00036 in electric cost per day. (Approx 6w * 0.12/kwh * 30 minutes). That works out to be 13 cents per year. The benefit of 1, 2 and 3 above divided by 13 cents per year gives quite the positive ROI.

>>ipytho+xK1
I often come across (in writing, at least) as far more irritable than I actually am. It's something I'm working on.

>>pixl97+ms
My primary lighting in the main areas of the house is zwave. The switches work like regular switches and require local access only. It's smart if I want it to be.