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!
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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 😁
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.
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.
You can read measurements without going to the device itself, instead, you use a phone or similar. This also means that a device doesn’t require a display. Consider an outside thermometer as example. Home automation allows you to draw a little graph giving you a good idea how cold it got. Let’s add another measurement device, say a radon meter. Again, no display needed and you could stick it somewhere less accessible.
You can make home automation as silly or useful as you want it to be.
My journey started innocently. I wanted some dimmers in my basement which has my office and a theater setup with 3 separate light sets. Then my wife wanted a craft area so I added another dimmer. I then bought some smart plugs to control my desk lamp and my monitors. Initially all of these devices were individually controlled either via web page or by the company app (Shelly) all within the confines of my LAN. I then spun up home assistant to see what it could do on a whim - and found it had built in hooks for my projector, receiver and Nvidia shield. When I sit down to watch a movie, I can now dim all lights, turn off distracting things (my office monitors and desk lamp), kick on the projector and control the shield to pick a movie. And if I have to use the bathroom? Pause the movie, turn up the accent lights and walk without fumbling for a single switch. Also - the dimmers are all connected to physical switches on the wall so it’s not a “phone only” setup. Press the wall switch, lights come on. Hold the switch, and the lights start at their lowest point. Double click the switch and full brightness. Pretty versatile!
I operate a rooftop solar power station. While I have scripted all the individual components like battery management, Inverters and the various sinks (for where the power goes when it’s not needed immediately) using Grafana to get alerts, I use automation to activate the various scenes and settings to maximise the useful power I get from the system.
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.
Many people live on a schedule. When you can automate things according to that schedule it’s nice.
I’m not deep into it, but I’ve been trying to get deeper in with Home Assistant. I have several smart plugs, a smart thermostat, some Google Nest products, and even an indoor security camera.
What drove me to home automation, specifically the smart plugs where it all started, was that I live in an apartment. Most of the outlets aren’t connected to wall switches. So I’d have my various lamps around where the plugs/attached switches are like behind furniture or other awkward spots to reach to. It got annoying. The smart plugs solved that so I could turn them on/off from my phone.
Next, I started placing them on a schedule. So that when I got home (back when I was working from the office), I could come home to a lit house. Or if I fell asleep on the couch, all the lights will turn off at some point instead of being on all night. Or when I’m out of town, I can play with the lights to simulate someone being home.
Then I got a free Google Nest Mini (similar to an Amazon Echo). Controlling the lights from phone was great, but controlling via voice was even better! Because what if my phone wasn’t on me? Or battery dead? How about if I had guests who wanted to turn on/off lights? Now both bedrooms have one, plus the living/dining room. I can control everything from those, by voice.
The thermostat here, though digital, wasn’t even programmable. So I replaced it with a smart one, free from the power company. I can even control from my phone (or voice). Now I can schedule heating/cooling. During a trip, I’ll leave it outside of my at-home temp range to save money. But on the way back home, like from the airport, I can have it start heating/cooling so that by the time I get home, my apartment is ready for me.
Security camera is obvious. I travel a fair amount, so it’s an extra piece of mind.
Altogether, it’s about convenience and ease. These all solve or at least mitigate admittedly minor issues, but still, I don’t have to worry about them anymore. Some, especially the thermostat, even help me save money. And a couple even provide me with a bit more security (at least I feel that way).
I personally don’t have any of that but here’s what I would like to use it for. When I go away for, say, two weeks, I’d like to be able to randomly flick lights and TV on and off in my apartment to seem like someone’s home. Currently I do it by plugging floor lamps into timered power socket controllers, but they aren’t internet enabled so all I can do is program them to come on and off at specified times during the day, which an observant burglar could figure out.
I would also like to save on gas bills and turn the heating off when I go away. But if it’s winter time and I go away for 2 weeks, I hate coming back to a cold flat that take ages to warm up to comfortable temperatures. I’d like to be able to turn the heating off when I leave, and then back on, say, a whole day before I come back.
That latter one can be accomplished by plenty of different WiFi thermostats. That’s become such an integral part of things that I hardly think of it as any kind of home automation anymore. Damned if I want to get up at night to go adjust the thermostat when it’s too hot or cold.
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.
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.
For me it’s a fun hobby, plain and simple. Some people like maintaining saltwater tanks, some people like miniature train sets, I like maintaining a smart home and automating repeat tasks.
