I have nothing automated in my life, that I know of? I don't have a garage; the door to the house has a key; the lights I turn on with a switch; no Alexa, don't use Siri... I am not exactly opposed to automation, but I am hesitant to share even more demographic data to cloud services.
Problem is, it comes with a ton of headaches.
The cloud is a problem, as you noted, but also a bunch of fiddily, unreliable software, firmware updates that go haywire, and apps that are tied to iOS and will stop working with my physically installed home hardware if the manufacturer ever stops treading water and fails to update for the latest breaking iOS update.
Home automation could be simple, reliable, and future-proof. It’s really not, though.
I only set mine to warm, cold and purple/blue but I don't have room for three lamps.
Stuff like the sunrise timer, switching lights on when you're on holiday, and out of home control are just gimmicks though.
Automation is not about having an app for your lights, it’s about not having to think of trivial stuff like turning on a light.
But if you don’t personally need it, you also don’t really need to drop in and bash the concept. It is useful for lots of folks and it’s just a fun game for lots of other folks. And most people can just ignore it.
Other than that, I just enjoy having the remote ability of turning lights on/off from my couch. I don't even have mine accessible via WAN, so it's not like "oh I forgot to turn off the lights" after leaving the house. they're LEDs, so I don't care!
But we'll generally have very very dim lights on throughout the early evening into bed time which makes it much easier for me to fall asleep.
Waking up to office-white-lights will also really wake you up.
Also: parties. It's fun to be able to do nice pink and blue lights or a low-lit candle-like scenario, depending on the vibe.
Everyone is chasing the lowest price, and it has to compete with existing solutions that are cheap, like just putting a filter on a white bulb, or installing a dimmer switch. What these products are offering is convenience, but not fundamentally new life experiences. So they can't charge a lot.
Meanwhile, they have to interact with an absolutely enourmous range of interfaces. The wi-fi router, the phone, the electric service itself, etc. And the user has high expectations for ease of use (after all, it is a light bulb, it should be simple!) while needing good security (it is your home after all, if you can't be safe in your home then where can you be safe?)
A simple experience with a wide range of interfaces at low cost has almost never been successfully done. Even Apple can't do it; they offer ease of use, but in a limited ecosystem and at a premium price.
So these products are fundamentally flawed and they probably can never be fixed. This industry is fundamentally not viable until someone comes along and solves the interface issue or until people accept paying a lot of money for these kinds of things, and even in that case it would probably be a reseller performing a home install then providing API access to these services, which is only one step away from home-as-a-service.
And I personally do not think I could tolerate a home-as-a-service. But many young people or students might like that just fine.
I walk into a room, I turn the lights on. I leave the room, I turn the lights off. I have no need to operate lights in rooms that I'm not in.
(As for automatically turning on lights, that is also good. I have two receptacles outdoors that aren't on a switched circuit. Thanks to the magic of smart lights, they are now off during the day.)
The first is, my mailbox is across the street, and I'd like to know when the mail comes. So I have a Z-wave door sensor in the mailbox to send me a notification to my phone when the mailbox is opened.
The other is to nag us to move laundry to the dryer. I have a Z-wave power meter that my washing machine plugs in to, and another Z-wave door sensor on the door. When the power meter detects the washing machine stop using power, it waits a few minutes and sends a notification to unload every few minutes, until the door is opened.
the appeal is technology as hedonistic consumption. People just love spending money on 'tech', even if it actually costs them more time and money, which is fundamentally the opposite of what technology is supposed to accomplish.
So in this sense it isn't even automation, it's anti-automation because just about every person I've met who is into home automation spends significant amounts of resources on things like flipping a light switch on.
Depending on your definition of future it's very possible. Find some devices classified as "Local Push" or "Local Polling" https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2016/02/12/classifying-th.... Make a VLAN with no internet access in your router and put them (and HA) on it. Never update the firmware (why would you, they work don't they?), connect them to HA and pin the version of it and your plug-ins. Don't let the devices talk directly to HA if you're extra paranoid.
Update at your leisure or never.
I live in an old house. 80% of the lights in my house are operated by walking up to them and twisting the stem. The remaining 20% are switched.
To properly turn the lights on in my living room, I have to visit four separate lamps and turn each one on. The dining room has three lamps, bedroom has three, office has three, etc. When it's time for bed, I have to walk around the house turning each lamp off. If I want them dim, no luck. To do that would require either all new lamp fixtures, or rewiring the house with new dimmer switches.
Or, that was how it was before I did the Zigbee/HomeAssistant thing. Now I just hit that master switch on my nightstand and all the lights turn off. My whole house changes into "Night Mode". The thermostat will widen the setpoints. The doors lock if they weren't already. If I happen to get up at 3AM to take a piss or get a glass of water, the lights all know to come on at minimum brightness, and to turn off shortly thereafter.
My front door lock used to be a pain in the ass when I had my hands full of groceries. Or my coffee and the mail. Now my door unlocks automatically when I walk up to it. It's a small joy, but it reliably makes me smile each time. (And I don't have an ugly keypad, and still have a standard key slot if I need it).
I have an ancient stove and oven. No electronics at all. So I wrote a simple automation to alert me if the kitchen motion sensor's temperature rises 10°F more than the rest of the house, for longer than 30 minutes. This has saved me a couple of times now when I forgot to turn the oven off. (It takes a good hour for that temp sensor to reach the threshold as well. I wrote that automation after discovering that my oven had been on for hours. When I looked through the temp logs, I saw a clear signal I could use in the future.)
I also put a remote temp sensor in one of my HVAC registers. Comparing its reading to the ambient reading gives me a ΔT on my air conditioner, and a couple years ago the steadily-declining value of that delta alerted me to a refrigerant leak weeks before it would have been large enough to notice otherwise. I was able to get that repaired in the spring rather than in the heat of summer. This isn't something I would have done with a regular thermometer; having to remember to check it every so often and do the math taking into account the humidity and the elapsed time since the start of the cycle. But seeing all that temp data logged over many weeks makes the pattern easy to spot.
In the den I sometimes want it to be bright enough to read or do detailed work, and other times I want it dim so there's no glare while watching TV. Before, that meant I would have to buy lamps with a dimmer on them, then dim each one and go flip the ceiling fan light off. Now when I click the switch[1] to turn the TV/stereo combo on, it automatically dims the lights at either end of the couch, and turns the overhead light off.
Color temperature! That's another thing that isn't possible without some smartness in the bulbs. At night my whole house is as close to 2200K as possible. I really like that kind of light. But in the middle of the day, my kitchen lights are closer to 3300K.
My porch light turns on 30 minutes after sunset and off before sunrise. It's under a roof so I would have needed to either replace the switch with one of those fancy ones, or installed a photocell somewhere else. But it was just a couple automations added to the config file to get that functionality.
[1] I originally put a Tasmota wall relay in to save the 20W (!) of idle power my old stereo receiver was constantly drawing. When I realized I always fiddled with the lights whenever I turn the TV/stereo on, I just automated that away.
Their model is shipping ESP devices flashed with open source firmwares. They still go on their own firewalled wifi network, but this is about as future-proof as I can imagine: the software is open source, the updates can be run locally, the parts they're made of are actually pretty simple PCBs you could get a fab run of your own done if you wanted to.
In terms of "future" proofing, everything I've installed I've been putting in accessible junction boxes well labelled - electricity isn't going to change, so as long as it fits in a box, I'll always have the option to replace the hardware (if you have light switches with a neutral wire then you're basically set).
I wouldn't say "simple" per se but that's really more on the "you need a box running some type of home automation stuff". I suspect simple enough for the consumer would be something which came with it's own wifi AP and pre-configured mesh routers so the IoT network would start out intrinsically separated.
however, mine is much more caveman like. during the day, the sun is up. at night, it is not, so it is dark and cold. man made fire. fire is good. fire is warm. light from fire is orange. man evolve using warm light at night. industry brings us blue light at night. blue light strange. makes things look harsh, unpleasant. caveman pushes button on magic rock that makes light back to warm color. caveman happy again.
Solution: Hue lights that I can control from Alexa. If I'm dozing off while reading on the couch before bed, I can turn the lights off without having to wake up enough to actually go reach a switch.
All my locks are normal locks that use normal keys (although they are actually called "SmartKey" locks, but that just refers to the clever way they can be rekeyed [1], which is entirely mechanical). I have considered getting one smart lock that has voice and app control because I live alone.
The idea there is that if I have a medical emergency that incapacitates me so that I cannot unlock a door but doesn't incapacitate me so much that I can't call 911, I can unlock a door so when the ambulance arrives they don't have to break in to get me.
[1] The way you rekey them is you put in your current key, turn 90 degrees clockwise, insert a tool they provide into a hole that is next to the keyway to press a release in the back of the hole, remove that tool, and you can then remove the current key (carefully leaving the cylinder rotated 90 degrees). At that point you can put a different key in, and then turn the cylinder 180 degrees counterclockwise. The lock is now keyed to that key instead of the key you started with.
Anything that makes life a little easier is good for anyone with marginal capabilities, which is like millions of people and eventually everyone if they manage to live long enough.
Do other people not struggle with apps the way I do?
also, caveman employer not like caveman. replace caveman with Flo since grug feng shui is so easy, even caveman can do it
I use a connected smart bulb, that has color changing. During bed time, I use it for reading books, and before sleeping, change it to a night light. I use it as a soft light when watching movies on my laptop. This is a convenience for me.
I also use smart lights to automatically turn on and off inside my home, and outside, in the portico.
I use automated socket outlets to turn on / off the water heater in my bath, on a schedule.
A lot of advantages in these things is in the option to schedule them, or make them act on the input of a sensor (movement, light, etc)
Maybe I’ve become a crusty old man, in years gone by I would have thought that people would notice me getting up and wonder where I was going. Now though, I’ve realized that no one is really paying that much attention to anyone else, even if someone were curious about why you walked away for a moment, the room getting brighter and you sitting back down doesn’t require a brain surgeon to piece together what happened.
Once you remove the completely voluntary awkward part of that video call, fiddling with an app and flipping a switch are on a lot more equal footing.
I don’t get the mood lighting. And really, if I lived alone I would just keep the shades up all the time and forgo the electric shades as well (but given my wife they are indispensable).
Smart thermostats are nice when you want to adjust things from all over the house or keep a schedule relatively easily. I also like knowing if my basement sump pump isn't keeping up with rain water and flooding things.
In general, it's nice to be able to monitor things and control them across the house, and the Lutron setup has been pretty painless.
I have lived in America my entire life, a relatively comfortable life, and this sentence makes me feel extremely alienated from first world culture.
* Turn the light red in my laundry room when a load is done
* Turn all my lights off when I set my alarm at night
* Slowly turn light on before my alarm goes off in the morning
* Turn off lights when I leave the house, then turn on the one by my front door if I get home after dark
None of these are life changing, but they're all marginally useful. And for me, half the fun is the sense of accomplishment getting these automations to work
that said, useful in this case means saving a bit of money by adjusting its settings. a manual (non cloud) thermostat would work too.
I only have them for that and I love to adjust the mood via lighting. I don't care about any further automation. I also don't care much if it was Philips or someone else that gave me light bulbs.
With Apple TV + a home pod I also get a fair bit of TV control with my voice which is nice.
When it works, it just feels good but certainly isn’t a necessity. And of course that’s just lights. I used to have my hvac system integrated into HomeKit too and again, it was nice being able to control the thermostat in my kids room without having to go in. More recently I’ve had a neighbor that smokes a lot of weed and something about the closets being badly insulated is letting in all his smoke in my daughter’s room. Tried talking to the guy and nothing happened. Luckily, his smoking schedule is super precise and I was able to set timers for my kids air purifier to go off at his exact smoking time for 1 hour. It’s been 3 months since I’ve seen particulate matter go above 30ug/m^2…it used to get as high as 180!
Being a renter means I’m only halfway into the automation game but I gotta say, given the right product and platform I’m all in. And if something doesn’t work right then it’s time to reverse engineer it and make it behave.
- schedule
- motion sensing
- voice
- routines / iftt (if it's a cloudy day, and zoom is open, then set brightness to x, maybe even open the shades)
What equipment did you use for your lock? Is it an off-the-shelf or roll-your-own setup? I'd like something like this but so far all the consumer-oriented smart locks give me very little confidence.
It's hardly a bulletproof solution but it's better than the old solution of, "Oh shit, I think I left X running… welp, time to waste 40 minutes driving back and forth."
Eww, that's gross, especially for all the migrating birds and wildlife, just so you can have a terrible light on outside when you don't need it at all.
Basically you're harming wildlife https://birdcast.info/
And you're worsening the environment with needless and completely unutilized light pollution. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_pollution
Wow.
It's gotten to the point to where when I visit someone and they have a warm-colored light I compliment them on the fact. It's so rare.
Yes but it's nice to have extra functionality.
I use the wireless Hue dimmer switches, the batteries last a long time. I have one on my coffee table... it's nice to dim lights for multiple lamps from the couch, or adjust the colour temperature. My wall switches have no dimming dial, nor do my lamps. I can't go back to non-dimmable lamps.
If you don't need 'em or like the idea, don't spend $75 per switch. I got into smart lights because my apartment was apparently wired by a madman; the switch for my desk lights are right outside the bathroom. (Different circuit though!) I was very tired of walking that far to turn them on and off. I then replaced every other switch the week after, and have no regrets whatsoever, except maybe not having white tint adjustment. (I just have regular old LED bulbs. The switches are smart, not the bulbs.)
Once I was fully invested, I got a wall mount remote control that fits into a dual-gang faceplate (but only needs a single gang box), so I can control all of my lights when arriving or leaving. Very convenient.
Like others, I agree that automations are also nice. I have two fixtures outside that are unswitched. They turn on at sunset and off at sunrise now. No wasted electricity trying to overpower the sun. (Those are smart bulbs, of course.)
I am using Adaptive Lighting with Home Assistant & Zigbee2MQTT + Hue bulbs.
My home has never felt this "smart" before. Every time my lights turns on I find the color and brightness to be perfect.
But aside from that, do you have issues with Face ID in the dark? For me it works in pitch darkness. It sends out some laser light when scanning your face and hopefully not frying your eyes.
It turns out that they are hard to find and very expensive ($30) for what they are. Even if you can find them it's hard to tell if its an original unit or some super cheap knockoff that might burn your house down. :(
I like to dim and make the color warm at night too. But every already said that hundred times.
But this is absolutely not "consumer" by any means. If my grandmother can't do it, you failed the simplicity test. This is exactly why we end up with cloud services for everything. Because real-world integration with the entire fleet of possibilities for consumer interaction is by definition an open-ended problem that can never be finished.
This is a trivial wiring change, and a run-on timer from a local hardware or electrical store from a reputable brand is $25.
I understand small mains wiring jobs like this probably beyond some peoples ability or desire, but the benifits are:
One off up front cost
Probably never fail
No possibility of the product vendor having any impact on the products ever, other than the possibility of a product recall due to safety.
It's just a different type of consumer luxury or hobby, unnecessary but also fun and rewarding.
I do hardware modifications and small electrical upgrades / changes myself, it's cheaper and I find it enjoyable and rewarding. Most recently I fit a dimmer to a high velocity ducted workshop fan, so now it has full variable speed control, as it's quite powerful and all the CFM isn't always required or desirable.
In the later evening in our house we switch to all lamp-only lighting, as I find over head lights offensive in at least some time period immediately prior to going to bed.
Second is more common, but also makes me happy every time: I put a contact sensor on the interior door to the attached garage that when opened quickly turns on the light to the garage, and turns it off a few minutes after that door next closes. It sure beats walking into a dark garage to fumble for a switch.
It’s creepy af
Huh? I have the Homeassiant app on my phone and I proxy the web interface to a VPC so it's accessible to me everywhere.
This was never intended to be a solution for your grandpa. This is a solution for nerds who want to build a future proof setup with consumer equipment (Phillips smart bulbs vs. commercial lighting like https://www.crestronlighting.com/)
Motion sensing can be solved with Passive Infrared sensing light switches, it works great for my laundry, closets, and pantry.
What I think is that there's going to be a fundamental flaw in the device's security, and before there's any update from the manufacturer, word will get out in the criminal underworld that you just need to install such-and-such app on your phone and load a data file and then you can make all locks from Company X pop open just by walking down the street.
One assumption I've made is that people just have much better and responsive phones than I do: I regularly wait 2-4 seconds for even the simplest things to happen on mine and it's overall a terrible experience. Overall I would say most phones I've had were like this at some point in their lifetime (often the majority of the lifetime), including a latest model Samsung phone that arguably was ahead of most available phones at the time.
I'm not sure what to think: I think it's just a matter of being used to a certain way of interacting with things in the end. Nothing's been able to replace a computer program for me, whether it be CLI, TUI or GUI.
As for home automation with apps vs. traditional switches and stuff I've always assumed that most of the stuff is done for coolness sake and because it's fun. Certainly what draws me to some of these things (though I haven't pulled the trigger on any of it) is that I could actually interface with the rest of the world from my computer, which I just think is a fun idea.