This is just one anecdote, but I believe the problem is more pervasive.
I was called to an elderly lady's home to "un-haunt" the building. See, her husband had recently passed away; he done "all of the cool things" to make the home smart. Unfortunately too smart. The wife could not operate the devices in her own home.
She had the tenacity to handle living in a dark house. All the time; she just gave up on the lights -- she couldn't figure it out and lived like this for an entire year.
She finally called for help when lights started randomly turning on and off. She believed it was the spirit of her late husband, but after some diagnostics, we found some cross-channel noise from a home further down the block. Whenever this neighbor would come home, he would turn on his lights via his home automation. About 75% of the time, it would turn on our lady's lights too. In her bedroom. And the neighbor worked 3rd shift.
I spend the next two days removing all home automation devices and, as she put it, putting in "turn the light on and off again" switches.
When choosing technology -- any technology, it's important to consider the life of that device and the people impacted far in the future.
I programmed a dead man's switch tied to the presence feature so if my phone or smartwatch don't show up in the house for six months, it turns on the "HAUNT FAMILY" program. There's no way I'm leaving my afterlife up to crosstalk from a distant neighbor.
That reminds me: I have to hook up the smart speaker so that it says "WHAT ARE YOU DOING, DA- HONEY?" any time my partner walks up to the RaspberryPi.
This is one of the reasons that smart bulbs and the like are generally bad - you never want a situation where the switch doesn't just act like a switch.
Smart houses should be designed from the perspective of remaining identical to use when the smarts go away. And if there's weird behavior it should all stop if you unplug the hub or controller.
I generally like in-wall smart switches but even there they tend to die faster than dumb switches, so you may be leaving your survivors a bunch of calls to an electrician.
Fortunately, we're both reasonably fit people, but I know people who would've just had to give up and use a flashlight.
Depends on your devices, but I have (Philips?) smart bulbs that can be turned on/off "regularly", but keep it on and you can control it via google home.
The main drawback is that this means I have to have the bulbs set to light up after power is restored. A middle-of-the-night power outage is fun when the entire house lights up at 3am :)
I've done a few new installs of lighting in my garage, driveway, and patio. Because that was "greenfield" work, I got to put smart switches in. If I ever rewire this house, I'll use that opportunity to do some more.
This means that instead of a light switch, there is a button. And when I relocate, I can just remove these devices from the switches and take them with me
It outlined a future where everyone started automating elements of their messaging to each other. Simple things like automated "Happy Birthday" messages. Eventually, people started setting up auto "Thank you" replies to these messages. It only got more complex from there with increasingly elaborate conversations being automated between people.
Eventually, some calamity hits civilization and humans go extinct. But their technology is resilient and keeps running without them. The ghosts of a dead people continue talking to each other in perpetuity, long dead people cheerfully wishing each other "Happy Birthday" until the lights finally ran out.
Haunting story that I still think about from time to time. Would love it if anyone else recognizes the story and could credit it.
- "Everything 'smart' must continue to function if the internet is disconnected"
- "Everything 'smart' must fall-back to normal 'dumb' operation if the automation server is not available"
I use Kasa (TP-Link) plugs but there are a bunch of different brands.
A friend of mine bought a house with an expensive system, but it wasn't very useful and later had a fault. To remove it would require replacing all the switch plates - I would guess $1000 to get rid of it. He was technical so he fixed it instead.
"I've had 18 heart procedures. My wife is in perfect health. The odds of me outliving her are zero...We're moving back to Coronado. This is a complex house, even though I think it's simple! For her to try and teach somebody else how to run everything and do everything would be difficult if something happened to me. So we're just kind of jumping ahead."
Then I decided I didn't really want to put electronics in my wall at all and did something more useful with my time instead.
My issue with those is that they fail the "normal person" test. A normal person will try to turn on a lamp and it will never work because the smart plug is off. But with a smart bulb, it'll come on after they twist the stem a couple times. (And it never gets noticed! People are used to 3-way style lamp sockets needing a couple clicks to turn regular bulbs on and off, so they don't really notice that they had to double twist the stem to get the light to turn on)
The best compromise are smart switches. Switch still manually controls the light, and smart features are always available. The downsides are that the lamp's outlet must have switch wiring, and smart switches aren't like normal toggles: they're more like push buttons so the switch isn't in a strange physical state.
(By the way, Philips Warm Glow bulbs are awesome for this. I use them in my dining room lamp connected to an Inovelli Z-wave dimmer. They get warmer the dimmer they go, mimicking how tungsten filaments work)
My current setup is a mix-n-match of all three types, using each one where it beats the other two for simplicity and predictability.
I'm not getting rid of the existing switches and plate covers, so at least I can more easily remediate it if the future buyers don't want the system.
Hopefully this isn't a common situation. I know that for me, not being able to control basic things like lights/heating/cooling without calling on and waiting around for somebody else would drive me nuts and one way or another the situation would have been resolved before the only person who knew how to handle the tech had a chance to sleep let alone die.
I've known a lot of people who couldn't figure out to how to use their own TV remove for anything more advanced than getting to the point where they can watch their usual shows and change the volume, but not being able to turn off a light at night is like not knowing how to turn a TV on at all!
Home stuff needs to generally work for 20 years, and lot of things (light switches, etc) will be even longer. Tech has no conception or demonstrated discipline for functioning that long.
HA/IOT is an interop disaster currently, and the current cacaphony of standards/acronymns guarantees it will be cycled/replaced in a decade's time.
The INTER-NET of Things doesn't have a functional INTER, nor a NET.
Inter is software, which should be mathematically doable but historically improbable.
The ubiquitous NET part basically means you buy the device, and it will work with zero-config networking that means you can find it.
And the final issue is the interface. Interfaces do NOT age gracefully either. Perhaps voice interfaces are what is needed.
Consumer IOT is yet another 10 years away.
This btw is the source of the word "turnkey". You turn the key, and it works.
...immediately, every single time the occupant wants it to do that. Regardless of the state of any other component.
Which is why Homeassistant is a godsend - you can add the mess and present it in a sensible way. As long as you stay the fuck away from anything cloud you are pretty much golden no matter what the parent company decides to do.
E.g. Telldus had a huge range of 433mhz things that still work IF you avoided their TelldusNet or whatever.