Maybe this is a sign of getting old, but I never got why this is such a hassle. Light switches are within reach when you enter a room. Once you're inside, you rarely have to touch them again until you exit. On the rare ocasion that I do, maybe it's also a good time to stretch my legs, take a bathroom break, or get a snack.
Is that such a major inconvenience that we have to overengineer solutions using expensive and complicated ecosystems of gadgets and software?
Maybe I'm in the minority with this line of thinking on this forum, but I never got the smart home appeal. I want devices that I can control directly, not those that will interpret or anticipate what I want to do and, more than likely, cause frustration rather than satisfaction. The switch is the ubiquitous and perfect mechanism of control, especially if it's directly wired to a simple state machine, and not layers of indirection and "protocols". I wish more devices used dumb switches, not less.
Don't get me started on the motion sensing lights TFA mentions. I curse the times I've entered a public bathroom that has these, only for the light to go off at the most inopportune moment. Don't want to use a physical switch because of sanitation? That's fine, but cheap and low-power LED lights exist for them to be always on during your service hours. You won't save much having the light turn off, and potentially annoy your customers.
In my case I just have two lights. The ceiling one is controlled by a switch near the door, and the lamp is controlled by a switch on its cord. I use either depending on what I'm doing.
This is a lot cheaper than a home automation system.
2. Turn on primary light
3. Walk to bedside lamp and turn it on
4. Walk back to primary light and turn it off
5. Walk back to bed and climb in
6. Turn off beside lamp.
It's not _the worst_, but it is toil.
One of my clients carries an echo dot with a battery pack with her when she's in her back yard, gardening. She mostly uses it for music, but the ability to drop in/phone call if she falls an can't get up has been a real benefit to her peace of mind.
FYI for the interested, and I admit a data point of one, but tp-link's Kasa stuff have been the most reliable of the smart switches, plugs, and bulbs that I've tried. Never once had an unexpected desync with any of it.
For multi-entry rooms (many rooms that aren't bedrooms or bathrooms, and even occasionally bedrooms and bathrooms) this is often true of less than all the entrances to the room.
> Once you're inside, you rarely have to touch them again until you exit.
Not all that true if you are in a room with substantial natural light across the day/night transition.
> Don't get me started on the motion sensing lights TFA mentions. I curse the times I've entered a public bathroom that has these, only for the light to go off at the most inopportune moment. Don't want to use a physical switch because of sanitation? That's fine, but cheap and low-power LED lights exist for them to be always on during your service hours. You won't save much having the light turn off, and potentially annoy your customers.
Motion sensing lights with sensors designed to track motion outside of the stalls and a short timer exist specifically to "annoy your customers". Or. more specifically, they exist to discourage activities that involve spending an extended time in the stalls, whether it is various uncouth activities or merely employee malingering. Obviously, that also has adverse impacts on people doing normal bathroom activities that happen to take longer than average times, but that's a tradeoff the people employing these systems have decided is worthwhile.
It is not about energy savings, so arguing against it as unnecessary for energy savings misses the point.
- If I've been out (defined by my phone's wifi connection or alarm arming state) and then come home and turn on the light nearest my front door, all the lights in my house will turn on (at a predefined brightness level according to time of day)
- When I start a TV show/movie/etc on the TV (but only in the evening), the lights in the room where the TV is will dim. If I pause, they get a bit brighter. Switch the TV off and they get fully bright.
- If I'm watching TV or listening to music and get a phone call, the TV/music automatically pauses
- When I leave the house, all the house lights get switched off automatically in case I forgot to switch any off (again based on phone wifi connection and/or alarm arming state - my alarm state is one-way so HA can't control the alarm, only the other way around)
- If someone leaves the bathroom light on for too long, it will automatically switch off
- In the morning, the lights in my bedroom dim up very gradually to help me wake up (with timing and whether it happens linked to my calendar so it happens later at weekends or during school holidays when I don't need to help with the school run)
- I get a notification on my phone when my washing machine/tumble drier are done which means I don't forget to unload/reload them
I also use HA to unify energy sensors (which are then sent into a Victoria Metrics instance) to monitor the energy usage of various things in my house - this has been pretty helpful to identify where I should prioritise trying to save energy.
All of this is done locally/without cloud services and I think I've probably just scratched the surface of what's possible so far - eg I don't have my heating/AC/blinds/curtains integrated into HA so far and I also plan to investigate whether I could usefully adjust the "wake-up time" in my HA setup depending on traffic/public transport status.
All of these things are of course possible manually and my guiding principle has always been that if the HA instance isn't running then nothing should stop working - but the automations do make life a lot more pleasant.
1. Enter bedroom 2. Turn on primary light 3. Do getting ready for bed activities. 4. Turn on lamp when convenient 5. Use bathroom 6. Turn off main lights 7. Get in bed and turn off the lamp.
I blame the designers though. The fine grained control is completely unnecessary. If each room had only one circuit for all the lights in the room, controlled by switches at each doorway, that would also fix the problem.
The music quiet when phone call thing is particularly attractive. I think I have most of the pieces of it here. HomeAssistant, Owntone, airplay (shairport-sync) speakers, a phone running the HA client.
I think the "ringing" state provided by the companion app only works on Android, not iOS though.
OwnTone has an HA integration so I would expect you can do something similar with that.
I reckon that most of these deployments are done because the owner is a tech geek and enjoys tinkering, and not because of necessity. Which is fine as well, whatever floats your boat.
HA Owntone integration works very well as does shairport-sync & its mqtt interface. Owntone also does Spotify.
Thanks for your thoughts btw.
1. https://github.com/fuslwusl/homeassistant-addon-victoriametr...