I am failing to see the interest in having tons of IOT devices to manage, connect, segment, etc… Why would someone want to do it? To be clear, I have friends deep in it but… I still don’t understand. Can anyone try to explain the magic I am failing to see?
Edit: Thank you all for sharing your experiences! The ones I found more interesting are those that can easily translate in reducing or tracking consumption. The rest I hear but makes more sense when I look at it from an hobbyist perspective.
My wife is nearly home. System alerts me. I quickly tidy my day’s mess. She doesn’t need that after a big day.
She arrives. Gate opens for her automatically.
As she approaches the door, the light turns on for her.
Her night time play lists starts on low volume, overriding mine.
A leopard approaches the house. The house robot with bolt on subscriptions, (the expensive “hunt and defend” add on), wreaks carnage on said leopard, only to find it was a child trick or treating. Lawyers for subscription bot are arranging payment to child’s family for their lost family member.
All in all, it’s really useful.
That was an interesting twist
Well, I’m sold now!
Well, it’s a hobby/passion. Simple as that. I’m a nerd, i love such things. And home automation is a thing I’ve dreamt of since the first automatic door in star trek. Automatic lights, alarm-system, cameras, a smart AI (locally, no stupid alexa et al),a tablet at the door which tells us everything we want to know on a quick glance (weather, shopping-list, fuel-prices, status of all machines etc). And all that with some many thousand lines of code and triple redundancy 😍
When i visit other people I actually find it “retro” to use light-switches 😁
In short, enlightened laziness.
I can turn the bedroom lights on and off, from my bed.
I can turn the bathroom light off, after my young daughter left it on, in the middle of the night.
My livingroom lights colour shift, to keep my family’s sleep cycle in vague check.
I can turn my heating down room by room, if it’s not needed. Conversely, I can preheat the house, on the way home.
While the setup took a bit of prep work, it’s now highly reliable, and makes my life a lot easier.
Agreed, a little home automation can be nice. I like being able to turn my lights weird colours on a whim, it’s pretty. With the exception of edge cases and people who have a disability I really don’t understand smart large appliances and smart locks. I really hope there’s a reliable smart lock for them and people in the edge cases. I haven’t looked into it at all so I’ll just leave it there.
Unfortunately, a lot of appliances have jumped on the IoT bandwagon, but have missed the wood for the trees. They all want you to use their own proprietary app to control it. This cripples the biggest advantage of IoT, synergies.
A tumble dryer that you can turn on and off from an app is fairly useless. A tumble dryer that can sync its load with the other appliances, and the current solar panel output is a different story. Even with simpler setups there are synergies. Having a light pulse when the washing is done could be extremely useful to some people. Particularly if the appliance is in another part of the house.
As for smart locks… The less said about them, the better. Unfortunately, the “S” in IoT stands for security. That’s fine for a lightbulb etc, but not for a critical door lock. It’s frustrating. I would love a decent smart, well made, door lock, with a viable open protocol. They just don’t exist yet.
As for why a smart lock would be good? Dynamic access control. With a normal lock, if you give someone a key, they have full access, whenever. They can also copy your key, and so taking it back isn’t always reliable. A smart lock lets you authorise and de-authorise people on the fly. E.g. it works normally for you, but your mother in law’s login (keycard, dongle, app, fingerprint etc) sets off a warning on your phone. You might also want to let a delivery driver open the door, while watching them through a camera. Your package is now secured, and even the driver can’t get back to it.
I have a Yale front door lock tied in to Home Assistant through Zigbee. It’s completely controlled locally.
I own a bed and breakfast. The day a guest arrives, I have homemade apps that get the last 4 digits of their phone numbers and program them into the lock. The day they leave those numbers are deleted from the lock. The lock also runs on schedules. It locks at 10pm and unlocks at 7:30am, unless we have no guests where it just always stays locked.
It’s so so nice. It’s also pretty secure.
My favorite automation is adding a door sensor and motion sensor in the bathroom and replaced the bathroom light and exhaust switch with a ZigBee switch. Now we don’t have to worry about bathroom light anymore. I haven’t touched the bathroom light switch for months now. It’s automatically turned on when the door opened, stay on if the bathroom is occupied, and turned off if the bathroom is empty (15 minutes of no movements, lower than that you’ll start gettinh the light turned off when you’re sitting on the throne).
I have ADHD. It’s easy for me to forget something in my routine. So I’ve set up many of my routines to be automatic or controlled with a single voice command.
When I wake up to my alarms, my lights start turning on gradually at a dimmer setting and blue. Then they turn white at full brightness to really wake me when it’s time. When I leave for work, I simply say “I’m leaving” and my lights all set themselves appropriately. I even have certain things like space heaters on a smart switch and they automatically turn off when I’m not home in case I forgot to manually shut them off.
Then when I get home, instead of needing to hit a bunch of switches for all of my various lights, I simply say “I’m home” and in 15 seconds everything does for me what would have taken me 5 minutes manually. By the time I have my shoes off, my house is already ready for me.
When I go to bed, it’s the same. A simple “goodnight” turns my TV off, turns my fan up, and turns the lights off, all with me not having to get out of bed.
When I do laundry, my phone gets a notification when things are done. I’m able to plan my cycles more efficiently and do things like run an errand and be able to be back just in time to swap loads. When there’s an error, instead of “E43” or some nonsense on the screen that I need to lookup and is still vague, I get a notification in the app that says “Error: Washer unbalanced. Please check load and restart” and actually helps me.
If a fire alarm goes off in my house and I’m not home, my security cameras will pick up the noise of the alarm and send an urgent push notification to my phone. I can check in and see if someone just burnt food or if there is an actual emergency.
I could go on. I’ll admit that being tied to google/Amazon isn’t ideal and you should use something like HomeAssistant instead so you have complete control. It’s just a steeper learning curve, is all. But regardless, you want a home from The Jetsons? It’s already here. Not perfect mind you, but in large parts it’s already obtainable and really not that expensive. Just swap a bulb/switch here and there.
Please be sure to check that the smart switches you have space heaters plugged into are rated for that many amps.
I love all this but it would survive contact with my family. :)
I have tried to set stuff like up but mainly in my wfh office and then just as an experiment.
Yep, I feel this one. I’m of the opinion that automation should stay out of the way. As a result, my automations are all very carefully crafted to be wife-approved - Anything I can automate is done without interrupting the usual way you’d interact with the thing. My lights are all z-wave light switches, so that anyone who needs a light can just click it on. Any light-based automations are disabled while someone is in the room the lights are in (except ones like “when a movie starts on the Roku, turn off the home theater room light”).
Can you explain your laundry setup?
Nothing more than a LG washer and Dryer and their app. It tells you a lot more, including exact times things will finish, in the app.
Also, unrelated, but are you aware your account is listed as a bot account? Or at least it appears that way to me. You have the little bit emoji by your name. It’s in your account settings if you’re unaware.
Thanks for pointing it out. I have no idea why my account is flagged as a bot account, and I haven’t been able to fix it all this while. At some point I just gave up.
Ever think about a home-assistant setup for your washing machine?
Haha no worries. You’re a good bot.
I am in fact. I just got a raspberry pi and want to set up HomeAssistant for everything. I don’t like that if the Internet goes down, all my stuff goes haywire. So I want to get it all on my local network.
I have smart radiator valves I use to reduce heating cost. During weekdays the morning when the heating comes on, I know the main living room isn’t going to be used, so the rads turn themselves off, coming on late afternoon, just before the kids get home.
Smart bulbs are only really used while we are away on holiday, to simulate people being in.
I have solar panels, batteries and am on sn agile electricity tariff that changes every 30 minutes with 24 notice. Automations make sure the batteries are charged up ahead of any peak rate. Occasionally energy prices go negative if there is an excess of wind power on the grid. At that point my immersion heater starts heating water in my hot water tank, saving gas and making me money.
Please tell me more about these radiator valves.
Here you go https://www.evehome.com/en/eve-thermo
This does sounds useful!
JEA – Just Enough Automation.
For some people that’s ‘none’. For others, that’s more.
People who don’t understand why their level of preferred automation is different from yours and challenge you on that, those people are bigots. Look, Braydenn, we don’t care whether your blinds open and close at sun-down based on the temperature and light inside vs outside; it’s neat, but it’s like ‘fridge art’ neat to people whose preference is less than yours, and we keep quiet.
A different take from a different person.
Accessibility for my disabilities, able to have the lights turned down when I have a migraine and can’t get up because of pain, as well as reminders and timers with just my voice. Automation helps with my disabilities too.
I’m bedridden and home automation allows me to control the heating without getting up. I hate the app I have to use and would rather have an open solution, but it’s better than nothing.
You should give Home Assistant a go! It’s an open-source Home automation platform, managing all your smart home device from a single place. Being open source, it supports almost everything out there, and anything that is not supported out of the box is provided by the community.
A college of mine started using it, and he is very happy with it. Automating all his lights, temperatures etc.
As I said to people I know, fun. I have fun setting this up. Its a hobby. I like to search for bargains and build the automations. If you don’t have fun doing it, its usually not really worth it. It gets expensive quick and its kind of a lot of work to research and setup if you want to keep your privacy.
When I wake up and leave my bedroom l, the lights at the backdoor turn on so I can see where I’m going. When I get back from walking the dog, the camera knows it’s me and triggers the heater in the bathroom so it’s toasty when I’m showering. When I’m done in the shower, and turn the heater off, the coffee machine turns on. By the time I’m dressed, my coffee is ready to go.
That’s just one routine I’ve got set up. I’ve got ones for both kids rooms for wake up and bedtime stuff.
It’s pretty nice.
- Waking up via lights slowly dimming on is much nicer than an acoustic alarm.
- Light temperature adjusting to current time of day is very nice and does loads for my mood
- Lights automatically turning on and off based on presence and measured light levels is totally unnecessary but just so convenient
- Getting a reminder to take the wash out when the machine is done
- Smart plug automatically turns off power to other devices when the TV is turned off
Honestly for me the draw is in minimizing the mental/emotional overhead of forgetfulness. My wife and I both have ADHD, and I have autism. That leads to a potent combination of spacing out and forgetting even very important things.
So both in service of that and as a fun hobby (My special interest is computing), I have automation using presence detection, various timers, Z-wave outlets/light switches (I refuse to use IoT, I prefer local access/control every time), GPS position and various stuff like that, in order to avoid things like leaving our home theater projector powered on unwatched (reducing bulb lifetime), leaving the oven on, leaving the espresso machine on (boiler heating water over and over again unnecessarily, wasting thousands of watt-hours of electricity), turning reptile enclosure lights on/off on a schedule with sunrise/sunset, that sort of thing.
I have this ultimate vision in my head of my bedtime routine going from “Walk through the whole house for a few minutes and lock doors/turn things off” to “Triple-click my bedroom light switch ‘off’ and it turns off the rest of the house lights/TVs/projectors, reduces AC temperature a couple degrees, locks the doors, arms the security system for ‘home’, locks the car…”. You get the idea.
I guess I got a kick out of it. Every time Home Assistant automatically turning on all lights 30 minutes before sun down, me and my kid would cheers. It’s also nice to not worry about “have we locked the door?” or “have we turned off the AC/water heater/stove” etc because the automation take care of turning off everything when no one home, and automatically turning on lights when we got home at night. Also, there’s an automation that send intruder alert if no one at home and the motion sensor/door sensor are tripped.
Note that they’re not hassle free though. There is always a malfunction or two every one or two months, so I don’t recommend it to anyone unless they like tinkering with stuff.
This sounds like my use case. I dan’t have as many issues, but the platform makes a big difference. I’ve been diligent about keeping everything z-wave, not wifi, and it’s been reliable.
It saves me tons of money by optimizing my heatpump and my car chargers for low energy pricing and lots of PV availability. When bad weather is on the horizon it will keep the buffer batteries and the cars charged in case of an outage. It closes the blinds following the sun if it’s too warm outside. It reminds me when I forgot an open window and the room starts to get too cold. It turns on the lights on the driveway when I come round the corner in my car. It turns on the pump in the fireplace when I light a fire and reminds me on my watch when the fire has burned down and needs new wood. When it has frozen a lot overnight, it will preheat my car if I’ve got a appointment somewhere else before ten. When my smoke alarms go off, it raises all the blinds and unlocks the main door. The list goes on and on, it’s just so useful.
God damnit you’re living the life.
Does ylour system need a lot of maintenance? Are you using home assistant?
Yes, I’m running HomeAssistant, 100% local. Knocking on wood, no, it didn’t need a lot of maintenance, but there was a lot of tweaking necessary, e.g. until the heatpump controller hit the right indoor temperature depending on outside temp and wind speed.
There were some breaking changes in HA over time, but the authors of the integrations I’m using followed those. If they hadn’t, I would have had to push some python around myself, which I probably would have managed.
I’m doing regular restore tests and I’m monitoring the health of the HA backups. That’s my plan in case shit goes south.
This is the sort of stuff I use it for. I have a bed time routine. The thermostat connects to the local grid to conserve power during peak times. Eventually I plan to put up LED light strips for better lighting and to be able to “redecorate” on the fly. So when we have people over for a board game night, we can have dinner with inviting light and later switch to something appropriate to the game.
So many reasons.
Smart locks on doors that disarm house alarms when they’re unlocked with a code. Lights that turn on when someone is in a room, and off when the room is empty. The garage door alerting you that it’s still open around the time you go to bed. The house stereo turning itself off at a certain time on weeknights, and the house alarm system turning itself on at the same time. Being able to check that the gas fireplace is off after you’ve driven out of your neighborhood on your way somewhere. The house disabling the security system for 20 minutes when it detects you on the second floor landing, so that you don’t trip the motion sensors when you go down for a snack.
A non-trivial example of some more complex things our house does: when one of our phones enters the neighborhood, and it is after dark, our carriage and porch lights come on. If no other phones are already home, some of the inside lights also turn on. When we turn onto our street, the garage door opens. After the garage door is closed, the outside lights turn off.
Any number of things ranging from small to large conveniences. Some small conveniences become large ones when you have guests staying over.
Edit: ooo, ooo, one other thing: I have a bunch of these switches around the house that have multiple buttons and are programmable (they recognize single click, double click, hold, etc). It allows me to hook almost any part of my house to any switch, without rewiring everything. I have several configured to turn off the alarm system, I can manually turn off all of the first-floor lights from the upstairs master, I have one in the entryway set to toggle a lamp in the office to avoid having to walk in there, navigate around the desk to the far side of the room, and switch it from there. I configured one to turn the gas fireplace on and off, because the builders had not seen fit to wire the controls to a wall-switch.
