It's the surveillance home for marketing and ads. Actual smart homes need a lot more dumb and existing technology first.
If it were really smart, I'd have a toilet and shower that uses 1/4 of the amount water, my gas stove would not have a pilot light, and "dumb" motion sensors for light have been around quite a while - but not ubiquitous (more common the EU).
Commercial buildings have had computers driving heating and cooling systems for a couple of decades (without thermostats but with temp sensors) so you don't need internet for that either. And I've never seen a house with VAV's installed in the ducts to actively heat/cool only the occupied portions of the home. And the easiest of all before construction - just "rotate" the foundation towards the sun to take better advantage of passive heating and cooling, that's an easy 15% energy bill savings.
I lived in Asia last year, and the whole bathroom was tiled and waterproof, with a small drain in the floor next to the bathtub (where water usually drops after you get out). There was also one in the kitchen, I assume they were intended for draining excess water after mopping.
As well as that the bathroom had a bidet sprayer [0], so that's what I used for cleaning the floor and tub - it which was pretty much the same as using pressure washer. After I was done I just left it to dry which took an hour or so.
My bathrooms in Australia have central drains but painted ceiling, cabinetry that isn't entirely waterproofed, etc. I wonder if you could automate the cleaning and drying (blasting hot air) like some new public toilets or a dishwasher. Put away towels and trinkets, walk out, close the door and press a button.
Hell, even just self-cleaning toilets and basins would be a start.
To be honest, most US homes don't really need one. We're not a tea country and most boiling of water is done in a pot to cook with. It's changing, and I personally love the things (Alton Brown suggests cooking hard boiled eggs in them), but my parents don't even own a kettle I think...
We own a kettle here in California, for tea and press coffee. In the morning, they are quick and work well. Only problems are arguments over too little or too much water.
Despite a nice gas stove, the electric kettle is quicker to use. It also has some "brains" in that it shuts down after awhile if not turned off (say 3-5 minutes at desired temp).
I don't know how many times I've had things cooking on the stove and forgot about them due to work, etc.
The main use of my electric kettle is parallel processing for my cooking water. I put one fourth of the cooking water into the pot and turn on the stove, then I put the other three quarters of the water into my electric kettle and turn that on as well. The kettle is usually done right before pot and then I pour all the water from the kettle into the pot. This greatly reduced the time to get boiling water for cooking.
My wife and I received an electric kettle as a wedding gift and it's pretty amazing how fast it brings water to a boil. But, she may end up taking it to her office at work as she has no stove there whereas we have a really nice gas stove at home. I have not run the calculation as to if the electricity or the gas costs more to bring a 1/4 kettle of water to a near boil. But to be honest, most of our hot water drinks are coffee so the 12 cup drip coffee maker or even the Mr. Coffee espresso maker, both of which are electric get used far more.
My parents always used a kettle on the stove to heat the water to make ice tea. Bring it to a boil and then pour into a pitcher with two big tea bags. Sometimes as a kid I would do that using the microwave instead of the stove, but to the same effect.
Here (in the Netherlands) I see more and more kitchens with built-in instant hot water dispensers (like a Quooker[1]) instead. It's been a long time since I've seen anyone use a 'dumb' kettle.
What I did find interesting is that it's not actually environmentally unfriendly, because the hot energy is stored in a very well insulated manner, and because it's near 100% efficient in the amount of water heated/used (whereas in a regular kettle you tend to overboil and boil too much water, and in an electric kettle there's often even a minimum fill that's larger than the needed water).
At least that's the story I've been reading on unaffiliated websites.
Haha you must hang with the right crowd, I've literally never seen one of 'm in the Netherlands (except when my gf was babysitting in a fancy place and I came over to hang out a few years back).
Considering how peak usage for electricity in the UK is the time every house in the country "puts the kettle on" while watching soap operas, I wouldn't personally champion them as very energy-efficient -- especially since a lot of that boiled water is invariably wasted rather than turned into tea.
I don't know much about science, but there must be a reason the cheapest way to warm the average house is gas-powered boilers.
I don't see what that has to do with efficiency though. Granted gas is probably easier to modulate for spiky usage—I've seen the same BBC documentary that I suspect you have, with the quip about France having to donate some capacity to satisfy the post-EastEnders surge—but that doesn't really tell us anything about efficiency per se.
Having used both kettle technologies, my gut feeling is that heating a traditional kettle on gas just wastes a lot of the heat into the air by forcing the heat to penetrate an intermediary layer, whereas an electric kettle is insulated and puts heat directly into the water. This isn't a problem if you are boiling water to heat radiators because the lost heat is still helping heat the house. In that case you are saving the losses of converting heat to electricity (at the power plant) and then back to heat (in an electric heater).
We in the USA can't get as much power out of a wall, so boiling water with an electric kettle takes twice as long as in the UK/europe (same amp breakers, with half the volts (115 vs 230), means half the watts.
Thankfully this is false. This would be incredibly dangerous and unreliable. The general design is a heating coil with an insulator that is then then jacketed in a steel or iron sheath.
When the element on my neighbors electric stove failed, the heating coil found its way through the insulator and the steel jacket. The electric current bored a hole through the aluminum pot she was using.
I have an electric kettle plugged in to a standard US 110 socket, and it boils a few cups of water very quickly - about 2 minutes from the tap to boiling. Plus, the kettle has an automatic shut-off and I can hold the handle with my bare hands after it's done. Way better than the microwave or a stove-top kettle.
I think electric kettles are pretty common in the US among tea drinkers, but houses where everyone drinks coffee won't typically have one. Since most of the US prefers coffee, you don't get a lot of electric kettles.
?? You can buy a $14 kettle that will boil water in about an minute and a half and works on 120. very easy , very common, people in the U.S. I don't think drink that much tea or you know, habits of culture, they don't consider it as something to have on their counter.
It's probably the container. Nuke up some water and before using it, pour it into the same kettle where it would be heated by other means; see if it still tastes different.
I microwave my water for coffee and tea in a glass french press container which has had enough use that it doesn't let the water superheat... this is important to prevent aftertaste (superheated water burns the tea).
Not if you have to heat 1 l in the kettle, if all you wanted was 250 ml.
For a large quantity, the kettle wins. You could boil 4 l of water in a microwave oven, but it would take long. Over that time, a lot of heat would escape.
I'm not sure if you know how electric kettles work, but the heating element is always right under or even in the water. Most kettles are also insulated quite well, there's not a lot of energy lost.
A gas water heater usually has an always on pilot light to avoid leaking unburned gas in case the main valve is stuck-open (or not fully closed). It's a failsafe, not a bug. (Which is why many heating systems refuse to turn back on automatically if they detect the pilot light goes off)
> Commercial buildings have had computers driving heating and cooling systems for a couple of decades
And they're expensive as fuck, and even today companies manage to mess up their setup (Berlin Airport cough).
Always-on systems constantly burning petrofuels are an engineering failure. Solar radiators acting as heat exchangers have no pilot light. Neither do "instahots" or on-demand water heating systems that waste energy keeping 50+ gallons at 82+ degrees F. As for your stove, well, let's just say that there are other options for lighting them, including a bic or more "exotic" electric heat.
They're only expensive "as fuck" because they're more like an overpriced SCADA system with multiple fail-overs and backups than the 12-20v system you have in your home. But that happens when you have 10 - 250 tons of heating and cooling for 500 - 30,000 people in a building.
For every over-engineered Berlin Airport (Siemens runs there, right? Arup won't make that make mistake) I can show you 10,000 buildings, factories, and warehouses done right. Or one Viipuri library (1935).
> Solar radiators acting as heat exchangers have no pilot light
Depending on the technology used, not entirely true. If molten salt is used as heat exchange medium, it must be kept above its melting temperature at all times or you can scrap all the pipework.
Let me exagerate a bit, there are videos of people living in woods on youtube, I feel their 'home' is smarter than mine. Everything is crafted from almost nothing, full of nice geometry tricks (baskets, fire pump).
I remember some years back an interview (maybe Bill Gates?) mentioning that software have a long way to go compared to other technologies.
E.g. If you turn on the oven and it doesn't work it's baffling, while for any program to just fail is expected.
Great to see we are fixing the gap by going in the opposite direction :)
> I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone.
I still think C++ is the best possible language that could have come out of the constraints they'd given themselves - near-complete backwards-compatibility with C, while adding OOP features in a style that maintains the C ideology of being as close to assembler as possible.
Ovens are pretty simple machines, there's a gradation surely. People are not so surprised when a digital oven timer fails as when an analogue thermostat dial. fails.
If you went on holiday the cat would more likely starve than roast. Australian and many other cats also regularly endure high heat - 32 degrees C plus. The author really should have left that out or thought it through a little more, detracts from the argument
"No Wi-Fi, no heating" -- this makes no sense to me. I had a Nest and when the wireless network went away, it did the sensible thing and maintained its current schedule. The only thing it lost was remote control/monitoring and the ability to talk to Nest Protects.
This is not to say that Nest doesn't have problems, but there's no way I'd have allowed it in my home if an Internet outage meant freezing my family.
"My Nest thermostat, which after some early teething problems I’ve come to like, falls flat on its face when my broadband connection goes down."
The implication here is that like the other thermostat mentioned, it doesn't work. That's simply not true, the Nest still works albeit only from the device itself like a traditional thermostat.
There have to be open protocols and control needs to happen locally (as in: on the home network). The good news is, you can absolutely have that, today. The bad news is, it's not as easy to set up as a Nest. People have to understand this tradeoff.
For my home, I fully believe that if things continue this way, I will need to have three networks at home. The household network and wifi for my wife and our family to use, the work network (hardwired Cat6 because that's how I like it) for my multiple work computers and NAS, and a third network with its own wifi just if IoT. IoT devices need not have access to the other two networks. It would be nice if this level of segmentation were to be built into the higher end home routers.
Personally, I enjoy setting my house up "like a data center". But that is far beyond most home owners' abilities or desires for their network.
Yes, my router does have this. Which we use to have a simpler wifi password just to give to guests. It can only access the Internet and nothing on the LAN.
I tried doing this - but there are two complications.
Firstly, how do you get your phone/server to talk to the IoT network? Some devices - like the Lifx - expect you to be in the same IP range in order to work properly.
Secondly, some IoT devices are wired into the network - specifically smart plugs which use powerline networking, and some HVAC stuff like Tado.
It's not an insurmountable problem, but requires careful configuration and accepting some loss of functionality.
That's why i'd like to see a separate network for IOT.
Think z-wave and friends. Then have an interchangeable controller which can be firewalled to all hell if you want and can run locally if you want as well.
This is how I have it set up. I have a separate network for IoT, with a home-built webpage to reach all of the devices using their API. No Net access for them. It works pretty well for me, but I'm guessing your average-joe doesn't want to write a webpage for every new gadget he gets.
I have interesting tales from the trenches to tell. I used to work for a company that did home automation devices. This was quite a few years ago, when the whole craze was in its incipient stages, but I didn't lose contact with it.
I could fill a small book with reasons why IoT products are so bad, but the top reasons would have to be:
1. There is an intense pressure of delivering simply because everyone thinks the market is ripe for the taking and being first offers some kind of guarantee of winning it. Truth is, there is a very significant overlap between people who are interested in this whole IoT crap and people who involved in its development. Most products are so embarrassingly bad that no one in their right mind would want them.
2. Products could be better, but most of them are...
2a) ...developed without any kind of vision, because the management and product design teams don't really understand these things. The vision behind developing most smart home appliances is "we'll make a <insert company's top selling appliance here>, BUT ONLINE".
2b) ...developed by bad engineering teams, because projects are perceived to be too high-risk to be worth investing much into, so they're outsourced somewhere cheap (before you start yelling racism at me, please realize I was one of the cheap guys these were being outsourced to.)
2c) ...seen as little more than platforms for service and/or ads delivery. They see little investment, because management teams completely unfamiliar with hardware design believe the vehicle through which services and/or ads are delivered is pretty much irrelevant and/or can be easily fixed. They treat hardware platforms for delivering ads and services much like they treat web platforms, because that's all they ever built.
3. Standardization in this field is... exaggerated, at best. Even platforms that standardize things at the application layer (e.g. Z-Wave) routinely get it wrong. 90% of the "ground-breaking" gadgets that "open up the exciting world of <whatever> to everyone" only work with five or six phones, at best.
4. The main challenge of every marketing department in this field is coming up with reasons why someone would buy these things. Oftentimes that's done ad-hoc: a device already exists because someone with C in its title had a "strategic vision" and the device is already in beta, and now someone has to figure out how to sell it because the money have already been spent.
5. A lot of big names are in this game pro-actively, in case it actually turns out to be of some value. This is why you see big companies that should know better demoing embarrassing things (like LG's drunken robot). They need to be sure they have a foot in the door in case this actually takes off, but aren't willing to invest the funds needed to provide a serious, integrated system.
6. Testing is virtually non-existent and safety standards are embarrassingly lax. Half of the things that plug into a socket and do fancy Internet things are fire hazards.
7. Virtually every device that does fancy Internet things is a privacy and security hazard. Companies either lack management and development teams that realize how important these things are and know how to build them, or are actively disinterested in fixing them because it's detrimental to their business model.
The true "smart home" won't come until all these funky devices will be integrated in a single system. With everyone competing and raising walled gardens because they don't want to share profits from ads, that won't happen until a big enough player decides to invest the huge amount of money that's needed to create a comprehensive line of devices, that can cover everything from thermostats to sound system.
Until that happens, "smart" homes will be so incessantly dumb and annoying that no one who isn't paid to say they're awesome or build "smart" devices...
Found this one particularly salient: 5. A lot of big names are in this game pro-actively, in case it actually turns out to be of some value. This is why you see big companies that should know better demoing embarrassing things (like LG's drunken robot). They need to be sure they have a foot in the door in case this actually takes off, but aren't willing to invest the funds needed to provide a serious, integrated system.
Many big companies are hedging their bets and playing catch up, which is downright dangerous when you're selling devices that scale up the threat vector for life-critical devices such as refrigerators, security cameras, door locks, thermostats, and cars.
I think Apple has the best shot at winning the connected home game due to their ownership of the iPhone ecosystem (used as a remote for the smarthome), tight product control, and their new marketing story of we are security - and they actually do implement the most rigorous key management and cryptography standards in the industry. I'm looking forward to their next hardware reveal - I think a Siri-integrated router (ala Amazon Echo) would complement their portfolio really well at the moment.
Negatory on Apple winning. I think Amazon is much more likely. They're dominating the connected home right now with the Echo; as a developer, integrating the Echo with Plum's Lightpad is extremely easy, I can't do the same thing with Siri.
> They're dominating the connected home right now with the Echo
Have any numbers to back up this assertion as opposed to sales figures of iPhones, iPads, AppleTVs, Macbooks, AirPorts, etc. - all integral fixtures in the smarthome ecosystem?
> integrating the Echo with Plum's Lightpad is extremely easy
Amazon does not have tight enough control over its smart home ecosystem. While it may be easy for you to integrate your thoroughly designed and tested product, it's also easy for shady vendor x to integrate their cheap, disaster of a product, and Amazon will not expend the resources to vet it, but in the end the user will blame Amazon when that product catches fire because they branded it as OK to work with Amazon products.
Apple doesn't want an outside dev ecosystem building up around its products before its in a position to tightly vet and control what engineers create to enhance the ecosystem. Third party applications/devices are an integral part of the user experience, and by extension, the customer's feeling towards Apple as a brand.
Nope, just anecdata (based on being a startup in the IoT space).
> Amazon does not have tight enough control over its smart home ecosystem...
I don't know that for sure, TBH, though I think the more open and universal platform will win. Currently the Echo is that, it's not an app you have to launch from your phone (Revolv), you just talk to it, and it does things for you.
Echo's superbowl ad also catapulted it, we have emails from people left and right asking for Echo integration (not Apple TV integration).
Also, why would the customer blame Amazon if their bulbs cause a fire? The customer clearly bought the bulbs, then hooked Echo up to the bulb (in the case of Philips Hue), I'm not saying Echo is infallible but I do think your criticism is unfair.
I also expect Apple to be the winner here, but for a very different reason -- they just seem to be the only ones involved in this market that also have the ginormous financial and management services required to pull this off.
The hip startups who sell web-enable smart watches or whatever is trendy nowadays won't come up with the first smart fridge that's actually useful, not because they lack vision or understanding but because they won't be able to build a fridge that doesn't suck in the first place. The SF get-something-through-the-door-quickly development model is fine for stuff that you patch in production, but it can barely produce a working thermostat, a device of barely sufficient complexity to be considered as an engineering diploma project.
I've seen at least five projects ran this way. All of them were utter failures. In some cases, by the time the umpteenth prototype had revealed the correct direction, the market had long moved on or the amount of money and time spent had long outweighed even optimistic sales provisions. In other cases, the first thing that lasted through a fifteen-minute demo without crashing was christened an MVP, but it later turned out to be not quite what was needed because no one bothered doing specifications and studies, so the devil in the details made it a nightmare to use. By the time this was realised, it was too late to change anything anymore and an almost-but-not-quite product got released.
Developing connected appliances is a complicated and expensive business and they require a great deal of interdisciplinary expertise that's very hard to find. It may not seem so, but a dishwasher or a refrigerator worth their money are a lot harder to design and build than the Pebble.
(I should stop eating chips over my keyboard. Half of my past tenses are wrong because I have bread crumbs uner my D key. Crap).
Most of these home automation solutions seem like a step backwards. Manually flipping a switch is fast and usually convenient. Pulling out my phone, unlocking it, toggling a widget or god forbid launching an app waiting for it to connect and send its command sucks. I looked into getting a Clapper as a happy compromise. It turns out they didn't care about safety either. Clappers had a tendency to start fires.
Remember the good old days when software was designed from the assumption that Internet wouldn't be available, and then if it happened to be, it would do some other interesting things? I get that these are connected "smart" devices, but is it that difficult to tell the NEST thermostat that when the service is unavailable to simply keep running whatever settings were last used and just wait for it to come back? I cannot imagine sitting through a features meeting where we decided if our support smart thermostat has no internet connection, it just shuts everything the hell off.
My beefs with smart devices are numerous, but I think their most offensive component is software that seems to have been all designed by the same kind of moron.
Losing power is a disaster, a ruptured gas line is a disaster, and both of those things are required to have an operating furnace. Losing Internet is not a disaster, it's in fact a pretty much daily occurrence for I would argue the majority of Internet users (at least here the States, where Internet sucks). Losing the Internet shouldn't break my thermostat, much like having a clogged toilet shouldn't cut my power. They're two entirely different systems in the home.
The valves in your watering equipment failing open doesn't seem better to me, can't imagine the bill and how flooded the garden (neighbours garden, and house) would be.
Perhaps better to leave fail state optional.
On the Alaskan situation I'd expect a frost sensor to put the heating on when it fell below 5deg C, or a settable temp, as a separate system to the normal thermostat.
You're both forgetting that according to the situation as I understand it, NOTHING HAD FAILED, other than the Internet. The NEST thermostat was working perfectly as far as we know. Nothing had broken, it had lost connection to a resource, yes, but that should not prevent it from doing it's job, i.e. keeping the temperature of the home at or near a given temperature.
"The valves in your watering equipment failing open doesn't seem better to me"
I was reacting (a bit 'shoot from the hip') to the categorical statement that failing off is the better option. However, as you acknowledge for the heater, depending on the reason for failure, there may be other options.
For example, if the humidity sensor fails in a plant watering system, the system could fall back on an average regime instead of shutting down completely. If it has a clock, that regime might be adjusted for the season.
The designer of a system should design its failure modes, too.
I worked for a short stint at a product development company that was getting into IoT. I came to the realization that IoT products are going to be just like the WWW in the early days - we are going to have a lot of dumb ideas before we have some really smart ideas.
We will have to endure the Internet of Stupid Things first, sigh.
As you mentioned the problem is IoT 'gone wild', not necessarily with home automation specifically. It's great to see companies in that space doing interesting research and coming out with useful products ... but this whole things seems more like a 'gold rush' for now. Maturity of this market will eventually come.
One thing i wonder about - why does it take so much hardware and sales to try out a new consumer product concept ? Isn't there a process to aim the products better and a simpler way to verify them ? What is it, and why aren't more companies using it ?
I think its to ensure that they are in the 'first to market' group with Internet of Things. Right now, like Malic mentioned, its a gold rush of throwing money at anyone that can hook up bluetooth to a 'dumb' device. Its the same reason that after the Pebble was created, every consumer electronics company started spitting out smart watches as well.
We need the IoT bubble to happen so people realize you don't need everything controlled from a single device. I think its more of an uncanny valley of what is wanted and what is excessive. The Roomba, for example; doesn't need to be a wifi-enabled device, but can still have a computer inside it driving. People are adding wifi to it, but does it was successful without it.
I think as we mature in the IoT market, the sales and hardware will drop, but as of right now, we don't know what works and what doesn't, so we are trying everything.
Am I right in thinking televisions need to be 'smart' in order to run an OS, televisions need to run an OS to run apps therefore we need 'smart' TVs in order to rid ourselves of these 'set top' boxes?
Sure. Or, alternatively, you can buy a big reliable dumb TV and upgrade the set top boxes (TiVo, Roku, AppleTV, Android-whatever) cheaply every couple of years.
Even better, have the set top box as a device you control, such as raspberry pi running Kodi, so the software is flexible and less likely to become horribly obsolete. Not a solution for the mass market however, due to the setup work involved.
Or use the TV as a dumb monitor connected to something like a Chromecast. I understand why the TV manufacturers probably hate this model, but as a user, sending content from a tablet to a TV seems just about ideal.
I don't think so. Even a dumb TV can have an OS controlling the program and channel settings, or respond to commands from the remote. Set-top boxes generally aren't any smarter than a dumb TV, so you don't need it for that either.
What we call "smart" are simply TVs that have a general-purpose OS, indeed to run apps. That doesn't have anything to do with TV viewing, but with fragmentation of the delivery landscape: with the current appification, every video outlet considers your TV to be part of their "user experience" and wants to control and monetize your TV.
You can improve the reliability of stuff like this by minimizing programmability and by using reliable parts. I have a mercury thermostat in the basement set to 12C connected directly across the heat demand leads. So my house is pretty much not going to freeze down no matter what the software does.
I have a mercury thermostat upstairs set to my normal indoor temperature. It is connected across the heat demand leads through a software controlled switch. So no matter what the software does, the house can not get too hot or two cold. This means that I only have two set temperatures, but in practice that is enough. Setback occurs whenever the system detects that the alarm is set or when I set it before I go to bed.
The alarm panel is a traditional system in a box with a separate backup battery. It tells the automation when it is armed. It can be disarmed from the automation with a code, which the automation has to generate as a hash from an electronic key.
> My Nest thermostat, which after some early teething problems I’ve come to like, falls flat on its face when my broadband connection goes down. No wifi, no heating in the house.
Could this be due to relying on the broadband provider's box for Wi-Fi instead of your own Wi-Fi router for running your local network?
I can still reach my webserver or printer when broadband is down. Gee, why is that?
Though that may be true of that unit, my point is that you don't need broadband to be up to have Wi-Fi. The whole Wi-Fi based control should be contained within your LAN, which has no reason to be down, other than a power outage or equipment failure.
If someone's local Wi-Fi LAN dies when the broadband connection isn't up, they should buy their own Wi-Fi router and then get some fifth grader to set it up for them.
You can also use component following the KNX standard and build a smart home based on a standard (with about 400 providers of appliances, switches, etc.) and control it fully using open source software[1]. Note that the components can be programmed to work without any cloud or centralized control system. So, your heater will work even if your "app" to control it is not working because of a faulty update as everything can work in "standalone" mode.
The thing to realize is that outside of very simple cases like connecting your Echo to your lighting, the smart home is a high-end product. If you can't afford a custom installation and hands-on support, you're not a real customer of the smart home. That means, for the 97%, it isn't a usable product.
People who can afford it can get a well-integrated smart home that works and continues to work and isn't spying on them (to the extent that anyone with a home security system isn't being spied on). Just don't try to do it yourself. Sure, some people can, but it's in the same category as home-built airplanes. For every one that flies, there are 500 sitting partially assembled in teh garage.
The fundamental issue is that, if I were to put down a list of things I wish were easier/automated around the house, there's very little that overlaps smart home or home automation products.
- Heat control. OK but I have a non-network connected programmable thermostat that's really pretty effective.
- Vacuuming. OK. Roombas are a start in this direction although how effective they are depends a lot on your house layout.
- Clean up dirty dishes, wipe down counters, etc. Nope, unless you count my dishwasher.
- General food prep. Cutting/chopping. Nope, unless you count things like my food processor.
- Smarter light control. Eh. A few dimmers work pretty well.
- General dusting, bathroom cleaning, etc. Nope.
- Laundry. Nope (other than my dumb washer & dryer).
- Lawn cutting, general yard maintenance. Nope.
- Water plants. One can setup complicated systems but you still need to get water from a water source to individual pots without leaks.
The list goes on. The bottom line is that the tasks I'd like to eliminate or streamline are largely not things that I can buy devices to help with.
A dishwasher is home automation, which is why I listed it. But it's not a "smart home" and it only automates part of the process. Most of us have a variety of dedicated appliances in our house. Washers and dryers certainly count as well. But that's sort of my point. We automated a lot of the obvious pain points around the house a long time ago. Most of this new stuff doesn't really incrementally help.
>>Robot lawnmowers exist
They're expensive and limited. You generally need to setup a wire for the boundary. I looked into them a bit. They might make sense for a small fenced in yard but they certainly didn't make any sense in my case.
I've been daydreaming of an automatic dish cabinet that takes in dirty dishes individually into a queue, cleans them, and places them in a cabinet such that a human could open it and pull out a dish by hand. It'd come with a specific set of dishes that had dedicated spots in the cabinet, and the washer section would have an individualized routine for each dish type to reduce water waste and ensure all surfaces are cleaned. I foresee commercial uses first, as it's size and shape would probably require a change in how kitchens are laid out in most homes.
General cleaning is an amazingly hard to define problem. I think "general food chopping" might be within reach, if computer vision lives up to the AI promises. I'm thinking of a breadbin or printer-sized object into which you place (e.g.) an onion, a carrot, and a turnip, close the safety interlock, and come back in a couple of minutes to diced onion, carrot batons, and cubes of turnip. Empty the waste container and possibly change out the knife and it's ready for re-use.
(The classic problem with kitchen labour-saving is devices that take longer to clean than the effort they save. Dishwashers help a lot, but your device has to be dishwashable.)
Precut seems to be the better solution than a machine.
It doesn't even have to be low paid humans doing the precutting, it can be a big machine that only needs to be cleaned every 1000 potatoes or whatever.
You're probably right. Although precut vegetables don't last nearly as long even if you don't mind paying the premium. (And, of course, you don't have the same degree of control.)
Generally though, in the absence of additional home automation options that could save time and effort, the overall approach has been to do exactly as you say. Eliminate end user work in the manufacturing process and other places.
There are lots of examples in food. Modern clothing wrinkles less (and many people just don't care as much). Autopayments and online banking. Amazon.
>The classic problem with kitchen labour-saving is devices that take longer to clean than the effort they save
Yeah, since I discovered having good knives and keeping them sharp, I've used things like my food processor a lot less. The chopping is more even and, for a couple vegetables, it's at least as fast.
I vaguely know someone who seems to use electric appliances in the kitchen for seemingly every task. When I discovered that her husband does all the cleanup, this made a lot more sense :-)
> - Water plants. One can setup complicated systems but you still need to get water from a water source to individual pots without leaks.
The programmable hose timers are very easy to use. They are essentially a "programmable thermostat that's really pretty effective" that controls the flow of water. In order to move water somewhere without leaks I use hoses without holes and hand tighten any connections.
I was talking mostly inside plants. I know there are various systems one can put together and I may actually do that this summer. But, as you indicate, there's nothing very complicated about the brains behind such a system.
The reason why the smart home is such a failure is because even the "smarter" home is a total failure. I had a programmable thermostat in my residence. I always used it in "hold" mode and just turned it off when I left for the day. This thermostat also had the option for the power company to disable the AC during peak load. I could care less about this as the interruption was brief. The problem was after they re-enabled the AC, the thermostat always returned to "program" mode. Twice this turned on the heat with a setting of 85 F in the middle of the summer. Needless to say, that thermostat is now sitting in a cupboard.
Air travel is safe now because people died, died and then died. IoT companies will probably have to kill a sizeable bunch before understanding what responsibility means.
Its an interesting point in the article about the indignity of smart TVs. I was contemplating getting a new TV, but I felt I was getting ripped off. I have a ton of external devices which handle providing Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Instant, whatever. I don't want to pay a huge premium on a TV because the manufacture thinks this is a novelty to me. As is evidenced in the article, I also don't want my TV to have a complicated OS that can literally crash when I attempt to change the channel.
Fundamentally, I just want my TV to be a display - an amazing display. I don't even want or need it to have those shitty speakers TVs necessarily have - I already have a fantastic sound system. I want as close to 100% of my money going into the quality of the picture, not huge feature lists I have no need for.
I was given advice when shopping for a new screen to find the highest model range, as in the highest leading numbers, and then get the lowest number within that range as that usually trims out the "features". However, looking at LG's range of OLEDs, everything comes with "features", even the lowest model in the highest model range.
I've been shopping for the same thing for the past 2 years. All I want is a decent picture with low input lag (for gaming) at a reasonable price. That's it. But it doesn't exist anymore.
Every TV comes with enough bloatware to bring Watson to its knees. And the ones that manage to display a picture quickly despite that all extra processing start at $1,500, which is twice the price you would've paid 10 years ago.
Main problem here seems to be a lack of reviews/testing. Every aspect of mainstream TVs is thoroughly tested and reviewed, but with these monitors you're basically rolling the dice. You don't know the color accuracy, viewing angles, black uniformity, etc. until you get it back to your house. That's a big gamble when you're spending ~$1,000 and planning to keep the device for several years.
The DELL E5515H looks nice though. Wish they made a 60" or 65" version.
Consumer markets are generally awful at supplying what consumers want. For example, if you ask many consumers what would they like their white goods to have, is reliability at affordable price. But it's impossible to find, even though manufacturers have an amazing selection of materials to work with.
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[ 46.3 ms ] story [ 337 ms ] threadIf it were really smart, I'd have a toilet and shower that uses 1/4 of the amount water, my gas stove would not have a pilot light, and "dumb" motion sensors for light have been around quite a while - but not ubiquitous (more common the EU).
Commercial buildings have had computers driving heating and cooling systems for a couple of decades (without thermostats but with temp sensors) so you don't need internet for that either. And I've never seen a house with VAV's installed in the ducts to actively heat/cool only the occupied portions of the home. And the easiest of all before construction - just "rotate" the foundation towards the sun to take better advantage of passive heating and cooling, that's an easy 15% energy bill savings.
As well as that the bathroom had a bidet sprayer [0], so that's what I used for cleaning the floor and tub - it which was pretty much the same as using pressure washer. After I was done I just left it to dry which took an hour or so.
[0] http://brondell.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/500x...
My wife's family, in Iran, has a drain in the middle of the floor for this reason. She think it's very strange that this isn't common here in the US.
Hell, even just self-cleaning toilets and basins would be a start.
Despite a nice gas stove, the electric kettle is quicker to use. It also has some "brains" in that it shuts down after awhile if not turned off (say 3-5 minutes at desired temp).
I don't know how many times I've had things cooking on the stove and forgot about them due to work, etc.
[1]: http://www.quooker.co.uk/enuk
Definitely! Starts a little under ±1000.
What I did find interesting is that it's not actually environmentally unfriendly, because the hot energy is stored in a very well insulated manner, and because it's near 100% efficient in the amount of water heated/used (whereas in a regular kettle you tend to overboil and boil too much water, and in an electric kettle there's often even a minimum fill that's larger than the needed water).
At least that's the story I've been reading on unaffiliated websites.
I don't know much about science, but there must be a reason the cheapest way to warm the average house is gas-powered boilers.
Having used both kettle technologies, my gut feeling is that heating a traditional kettle on gas just wastes a lot of the heat into the air by forcing the heat to penetrate an intermediary layer, whereas an electric kettle is insulated and puts heat directly into the water. This isn't a problem if you are boiling water to heat radiators because the lost heat is still helping heat the house. In that case you are saving the losses of converting heat to electricity (at the power plant) and then back to heat (in an electric heater).
Only if you've overfilled the kettle. They consume 3kW, but only for a short time. David MacKay FRS investigated the gas vs. electric question in detail: http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/sustainable/hotwater/
Fun additional fact: British tanks come with electric kettles enabling the crew to make tea in combat situations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_vessel
When the element on my neighbors electric stove failed, the heating coil found its way through the insulator and the steel jacket. The electric current bored a hole through the aluminum pot she was using.
I didn't say anything about a bare, uninsulated electric coil being immersed in water.
The point is that this assembly is immersed in water; all the heat which escapes from it goes into the water.
This is not true of a stove top heating.
I think electric kettles are pretty common in the US among tea drinkers, but houses where everyone drinks coffee won't typically have one. Since most of the US prefers coffee, you don't get a lot of electric kettles.
edit: searched using duckduckgo, not google
For a large quantity, the kettle wins. You could boil 4 l of water in a microwave oven, but it would take long. Over that time, a lot of heat would escape.
900W is weak for a microwave oven. You can get 1200W or more.
Doing some googling, it seems that around 1600W is still home use; 1800W and up is "commercial".
A gas water heater usually has an always on pilot light to avoid leaking unburned gas in case the main valve is stuck-open (or not fully closed). It's a failsafe, not a bug. (Which is why many heating systems refuse to turn back on automatically if they detect the pilot light goes off)
> Commercial buildings have had computers driving heating and cooling systems for a couple of decades
And they're expensive as fuck, and even today companies manage to mess up their setup (Berlin Airport cough).
They're only expensive "as fuck" because they're more like an overpriced SCADA system with multiple fail-overs and backups than the 12-20v system you have in your home. But that happens when you have 10 - 250 tons of heating and cooling for 500 - 30,000 people in a building.
For every over-engineered Berlin Airport (Siemens runs there, right? Arup won't make that make mistake) I can show you 10,000 buildings, factories, and warehouses done right. Or one Viipuri library (1935).
Depending on the technology used, not entirely true. If molten salt is used as heat exchange medium, it must be kept above its melting temperature at all times or you can scrap all the pipework.
Great to see we are fixing the gap by going in the opposite direction :)
- Bjarne Stroustrup
The same went for light switches, fridges, VCRs and whatever, each "new technology" had to mature, and so should computing but it hasn't yet.
If it's that critical maybe you need to design in some network redundancy. That's not really a Nest issue.
This is not to say that Nest doesn't have problems, but there's no way I'd have allowed it in my home if an Internet outage meant freezing my family.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/14/fashion/nest-thermostat-gl...
It might not be any "better" of an excuse, but it's not the same thing as "not being able to call home"
The implication here is that like the other thermostat mentioned, it doesn't work. That's simply not true, the Nest still works albeit only from the device itself like a traditional thermostat.
Personally, I enjoy setting my house up "like a data center". But that is far beyond most home owners' abilities or desires for their network.
Firstly, how do you get your phone/server to talk to the IoT network? Some devices - like the Lifx - expect you to be in the same IP range in order to work properly.
Secondly, some IoT devices are wired into the network - specifically smart plugs which use powerline networking, and some HVAC stuff like Tado.
It's not an insurmountable problem, but requires careful configuration and accepting some loss of functionality.
Think z-wave and friends. Then have an interchangeable controller which can be firewalled to all hell if you want and can run locally if you want as well.
It's ridiculous that I've had to do this
I could fill a small book with reasons why IoT products are so bad, but the top reasons would have to be:
1. There is an intense pressure of delivering simply because everyone thinks the market is ripe for the taking and being first offers some kind of guarantee of winning it. Truth is, there is a very significant overlap between people who are interested in this whole IoT crap and people who involved in its development. Most products are so embarrassingly bad that no one in their right mind would want them.
2. Products could be better, but most of them are...
2a) ...developed without any kind of vision, because the management and product design teams don't really understand these things. The vision behind developing most smart home appliances is "we'll make a <insert company's top selling appliance here>, BUT ONLINE".
2b) ...developed by bad engineering teams, because projects are perceived to be too high-risk to be worth investing much into, so they're outsourced somewhere cheap (before you start yelling racism at me, please realize I was one of the cheap guys these were being outsourced to.)
2c) ...seen as little more than platforms for service and/or ads delivery. They see little investment, because management teams completely unfamiliar with hardware design believe the vehicle through which services and/or ads are delivered is pretty much irrelevant and/or can be easily fixed. They treat hardware platforms for delivering ads and services much like they treat web platforms, because that's all they ever built.
3. Standardization in this field is... exaggerated, at best. Even platforms that standardize things at the application layer (e.g. Z-Wave) routinely get it wrong. 90% of the "ground-breaking" gadgets that "open up the exciting world of <whatever> to everyone" only work with five or six phones, at best.
4. The main challenge of every marketing department in this field is coming up with reasons why someone would buy these things. Oftentimes that's done ad-hoc: a device already exists because someone with C in its title had a "strategic vision" and the device is already in beta, and now someone has to figure out how to sell it because the money have already been spent.
5. A lot of big names are in this game pro-actively, in case it actually turns out to be of some value. This is why you see big companies that should know better demoing embarrassing things (like LG's drunken robot). They need to be sure they have a foot in the door in case this actually takes off, but aren't willing to invest the funds needed to provide a serious, integrated system.
6. Testing is virtually non-existent and safety standards are embarrassingly lax. Half of the things that plug into a socket and do fancy Internet things are fire hazards.
7. Virtually every device that does fancy Internet things is a privacy and security hazard. Companies either lack management and development teams that realize how important these things are and know how to build them, or are actively disinterested in fixing them because it's detrimental to their business model.
The true "smart home" won't come until all these funky devices will be integrated in a single system. With everyone competing and raising walled gardens because they don't want to share profits from ads, that won't happen until a big enough player decides to invest the huge amount of money that's needed to create a comprehensive line of devices, that can cover everything from thermostats to sound system.
Until that happens, "smart" homes will be so incessantly dumb and annoying that no one who isn't paid to say they're awesome or build "smart" devices...
Found this one particularly salient: 5. A lot of big names are in this game pro-actively, in case it actually turns out to be of some value. This is why you see big companies that should know better demoing embarrassing things (like LG's drunken robot). They need to be sure they have a foot in the door in case this actually takes off, but aren't willing to invest the funds needed to provide a serious, integrated system.
Many big companies are hedging their bets and playing catch up, which is downright dangerous when you're selling devices that scale up the threat vector for life-critical devices such as refrigerators, security cameras, door locks, thermostats, and cars.
I think Apple has the best shot at winning the connected home game due to their ownership of the iPhone ecosystem (used as a remote for the smarthome), tight product control, and their new marketing story of we are security - and they actually do implement the most rigorous key management and cryptography standards in the industry. I'm looking forward to their next hardware reveal - I think a Siri-integrated router (ala Amazon Echo) would complement their portfolio really well at the moment.
Have any numbers to back up this assertion as opposed to sales figures of iPhones, iPads, AppleTVs, Macbooks, AirPorts, etc. - all integral fixtures in the smarthome ecosystem?
> integrating the Echo with Plum's Lightpad is extremely easy
Amazon does not have tight enough control over its smart home ecosystem. While it may be easy for you to integrate your thoroughly designed and tested product, it's also easy for shady vendor x to integrate their cheap, disaster of a product, and Amazon will not expend the resources to vet it, but in the end the user will blame Amazon when that product catches fire because they branded it as OK to work with Amazon products.
Apple doesn't want an outside dev ecosystem building up around its products before its in a position to tightly vet and control what engineers create to enhance the ecosystem. Third party applications/devices are an integral part of the user experience, and by extension, the customer's feeling towards Apple as a brand.
Nope, just anecdata (based on being a startup in the IoT space).
> Amazon does not have tight enough control over its smart home ecosystem...
I don't know that for sure, TBH, though I think the more open and universal platform will win. Currently the Echo is that, it's not an app you have to launch from your phone (Revolv), you just talk to it, and it does things for you.
Echo's superbowl ad also catapulted it, we have emails from people left and right asking for Echo integration (not Apple TV integration).
Also, why would the customer blame Amazon if their bulbs cause a fire? The customer clearly bought the bulbs, then hooked Echo up to the bulb (in the case of Philips Hue), I'm not saying Echo is infallible but I do think your criticism is unfair.
The hip startups who sell web-enable smart watches or whatever is trendy nowadays won't come up with the first smart fridge that's actually useful, not because they lack vision or understanding but because they won't be able to build a fridge that doesn't suck in the first place. The SF get-something-through-the-door-quickly development model is fine for stuff that you patch in production, but it can barely produce a working thermostat, a device of barely sufficient complexity to be considered as an engineering diploma project.
I've seen at least five projects ran this way. All of them were utter failures. In some cases, by the time the umpteenth prototype had revealed the correct direction, the market had long moved on or the amount of money and time spent had long outweighed even optimistic sales provisions. In other cases, the first thing that lasted through a fifteen-minute demo without crashing was christened an MVP, but it later turned out to be not quite what was needed because no one bothered doing specifications and studies, so the devil in the details made it a nightmare to use. By the time this was realised, it was too late to change anything anymore and an almost-but-not-quite product got released.
Developing connected appliances is a complicated and expensive business and they require a great deal of interdisciplinary expertise that's very hard to find. It may not seem so, but a dishwasher or a refrigerator worth their money are a lot harder to design and build than the Pebble.
(I should stop eating chips over my keyboard. Half of my past tenses are wrong because I have bread crumbs uner my D key. Crap).
I usually see industry tendencies (such as "big data" or "machine learning") skeptically, but this one I'm just plain pessimistic. I hope I'm wrong.
My beefs with smart devices are numerous, but I think their most offensive component is software that seems to have been all designed by the same kind of moron.
When you connect your thermostat to the Internet then they're no longer entirely separate systems.
If you live in Alaska, you don't want your heater to switch off if something goes wrong.
If you are on holiday, you don't want the software watering your garden to "failsafe" by stopping doing anything at all a week before your return.
Perhaps better to leave fail state optional.
On the Alaskan situation I'd expect a frost sensor to put the heating on when it fell below 5deg C, or a settable temp, as a separate system to the normal thermostat.
I was reacting (a bit 'shoot from the hip') to the categorical statement that failing off is the better option. However, as you acknowledge for the heater, depending on the reason for failure, there may be other options.
For example, if the humidity sensor fails in a plant watering system, the system could fall back on an average regime instead of shutting down completely. If it has a clock, that regime might be adjusted for the season.
The designer of a system should design its failure modes, too.
We will have to endure the Internet of Stupid Things first, sigh.
We need the IoT bubble to happen so people realize you don't need everything controlled from a single device. I think its more of an uncanny valley of what is wanted and what is excessive. The Roomba, for example; doesn't need to be a wifi-enabled device, but can still have a computer inside it driving. People are adding wifi to it, but does it was successful without it.
I think as we mature in the IoT market, the sales and hardware will drop, but as of right now, we don't know what works and what doesn't, so we are trying everything.
What we call "smart" are simply TVs that have a general-purpose OS, indeed to run apps. That doesn't have anything to do with TV viewing, but with fragmentation of the delivery landscape: with the current appification, every video outlet considers your TV to be part of their "user experience" and wants to control and monetize your TV.
I have a mercury thermostat upstairs set to my normal indoor temperature. It is connected across the heat demand leads through a software controlled switch. So no matter what the software does, the house can not get too hot or two cold. This means that I only have two set temperatures, but in practice that is enough. Setback occurs whenever the system detects that the alarm is set or when I set it before I go to bed.
The alarm panel is a traditional system in a box with a separate backup battery. It tells the automation when it is armed. It can be disarmed from the automation with a code, which the automation has to generate as a hash from an electronic key.
Could this be due to relying on the broadband provider's box for Wi-Fi instead of your own Wi-Fi router for running your local network?
I can still reach my webserver or printer when broadband is down. Gee, why is that?
If someone's local Wi-Fi LAN dies when the broadband connection isn't up, they should buy their own Wi-Fi router and then get some fifth grader to set it up for them.
[0]: http://knx.org/
[1]: http://www.openhab.org/
People who can afford it can get a well-integrated smart home that works and continues to work and isn't spying on them (to the extent that anyone with a home security system isn't being spied on). Just don't try to do it yourself. Sure, some people can, but it's in the same category as home-built airplanes. For every one that flies, there are 500 sitting partially assembled in teh garage.
- Heat control. OK but I have a non-network connected programmable thermostat that's really pretty effective.
- Vacuuming. OK. Roombas are a start in this direction although how effective they are depends a lot on your house layout.
- Clean up dirty dishes, wipe down counters, etc. Nope, unless you count my dishwasher.
- General food prep. Cutting/chopping. Nope, unless you count things like my food processor.
- Smarter light control. Eh. A few dimmers work pretty well.
- General dusting, bathroom cleaning, etc. Nope.
- Laundry. Nope (other than my dumb washer & dryer).
- Lawn cutting, general yard maintenance. Nope.
- Water plants. One can setup complicated systems but you still need to get water from a water source to individual pots without leaks.
The list goes on. The bottom line is that the tasks I'd like to eliminate or streamline are largely not things that I can buy devices to help with.
A dishwasher is a very specialized robot. I think it counts as home automation.
> Lawn cutting, general yard maintenance. Nope.
That's wrong. Robot lawnmowers exist, and they're made by several different companies:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotic_lawn_mower
>>Robot lawnmowers exist
They're expensive and limited. You generally need to setup a wire for the boundary. I looked into them a bit. They might make sense for a small fenced in yard but they certainly didn't make any sense in my case.
(The classic problem with kitchen labour-saving is devices that take longer to clean than the effort they save. Dishwashers help a lot, but your device has to be dishwashable.)
It doesn't even have to be low paid humans doing the precutting, it can be a big machine that only needs to be cleaned every 1000 potatoes or whatever.
Generally though, in the absence of additional home automation options that could save time and effort, the overall approach has been to do exactly as you say. Eliminate end user work in the manufacturing process and other places.
There are lots of examples in food. Modern clothing wrinkles less (and many people just don't care as much). Autopayments and online banking. Amazon.
Yeah, since I discovered having good knives and keeping them sharp, I've used things like my food processor a lot less. The chopping is more even and, for a couple vegetables, it's at least as fast.
I vaguely know someone who seems to use electric appliances in the kitchen for seemingly every task. When I discovered that her husband does all the cleanup, this made a lot more sense :-)
The programmable hose timers are very easy to use. They are essentially a "programmable thermostat that's really pretty effective" that controls the flow of water. In order to move water somewhere without leaks I use hoses without holes and hand tighten any connections.
Fundamentally, I just want my TV to be a display - an amazing display. I don't even want or need it to have those shitty speakers TVs necessarily have - I already have a fantastic sound system. I want as close to 100% of my money going into the quality of the picture, not huge feature lists I have no need for.
I was given advice when shopping for a new screen to find the highest model range, as in the highest leading numbers, and then get the lowest number within that range as that usually trims out the "features". However, looking at LG's range of OLEDs, everything comes with "features", even the lowest model in the highest model range.
Every TV comes with enough bloatware to bring Watson to its knees. And the ones that manage to display a picture quickly despite that all extra processing start at $1,500, which is twice the price you would've paid 10 years ago.
Unfortunately you will almost always have to pay freight to wherever; you can't pick them up at a local store.
If you find a model # you like, you could always try your luck searching for it in auctions on Craigslist or EBay, as you would for office furniture.
http://www.newegg.com/Large-Format-Displays/SubCategory/ID-6...
or just big monitors:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=sr_hi_eb?rh=n%3A172282%2Cn%3A541...
The DELL E5515H looks nice though. Wish they made a 60" or 65" version.
These can be purchased individually, but unfortunately they tend to be more expensive than a "smart" TV.
And TV's are just a case in point.