The smart home is a thousand small problems to solve and should never be one catch all.
The automatic cat feeder works well. So does the roomba. I like my automated blinds but will stick with manual light switches. I consolidated my home theatre remotes. Note how they’re all seperate problems.
The smart home is here. It’s just that it was never a use case for a singular smart home platform. It was always 1000 seperate problems to solve that in no way ever belonged together and the experience was always worse when trying to combine it.
I was going to say I feel like my smart home technology is working great.
Then I remembered that I have to make shortcuts to bridge two products, it fails half the time, my ikea bridge has to be restarted every 30 minutes, and my smart garage door opener takes 30 seconds to respond now.
arguing with an AI that is intentionaly obtuse, is not what anyone wants when its time to try enjoying your home. noone needs to have a conversation with thier lightswitch, its for turning light on or off not pretending to be your pal and trying to exploit emotional reflexes.
i have a broken record for this, "stop wasting time and effort trying to pretend to be human, and get to work building something that does what its told to do."
Perhaps it popped because of devices from Google, Amazon, Apple, Sonos, etc. that surveil everything you say in their presence. My houses are fairly automated, but I have excluded any device with a microphone.
I don’t know why you’d want to over pay on basic widgets that are really just glorified timers, not to mention are likely just full of security issues waiting to happen.
The smartest thing is having a light switch you walk over to. Doesn’t fail randomly, doesn’t need an internet connection to operate, doesn’t stop working when your internet is down.
My garage remote is in a PIN number lock box next to the garage. Open lock box, press remote, close lock box.
I think it’s also just that there’s not that much it makes sense to automate in the home. I run Home Assistant, and I do not have much of the typical home stuff on it. Why would I want to automate lights? My cat feeder has a timer already. I’m not about to get a smart lock and can’t imagine why I would want to automate one.
The useful things I do use it for are:
-heating control to take advantage of cheaper electric rates (I’m on 15 min spot pricing)
-automatically setting EV charging times to optimized cost
-a remote to start and stop a water pump to water plants in the garden, optionally with a timer
-a remote to consolidate a couple of lights that I want to turn on and off simultaneously to watch movies.
That’s it. Controlling my pool heater would be good but unfortunately it has a safety that trips if the power is interrupted. I’ve been using this system for years and simply cannot think of much else I want to automate.
The reason really is the extreme arrogance of every single manufacturer that wants you to install their app and use their ecosystem. That might have worked if one of them became super dominant and pushed everyone else out. But because that didn't happen, now I have to install 20 apps for 20 different manufacturers with no guarantees of interoperability.
Instead of that I'm choosing to vote with my wallet and mostly stay away until this is resolved. Skyrocketing inflation is not doing anything to change my mind either.
> every single manufacturer that wants you to install their app and use their ecosystem
That's good. I don't want a single company to control everything in my house. Having multiple vendors with different implementations is healthy for the industry.
The real problem is there's nothing "smart" about those "smart home devices" to begin with. They are just remotely controlled devices. Technically, someone or something still has to control them because these devices can't really make decisions on their own. And then, to make those decisions remotely (either in the cloud or in a home local controller), every home installation needs to be highly customized. There are several light switches in my house that I never need to touch -- their states are automatically shifted based on like ~15 conditions: time of day, light conditions, occupancy, human activities(iOS focus modes). Non technical people can't do that.
I would want those devices to make simple decisions on their own (I have a few "dumb" light switches with motion+light sensors and they are pretty good already), and for complex decisions, they expose some APIs for other devices/controllers to call. Matter seems to be the right direction, but it is still controlled by a handful powerful players.
> That's good. I don't want a single company to control everything in my house. Having multiple vendors with different implementations is healthy for the industry.
Imagine that every vendor would have different implementation of TCP/IP stack.
The arrogance is similar to manufacturers of EV chargers who went above and beyond to not add normal Debit/Credit card reader and instead insisted on applications in a phone.
Most of this smart home stuff doesn't do much. Managing lights and entertainment just isn't that interesting. It doesn't cook or clean. Vacuum, maybe.
There's been generation after generation of lighting control. There was a 1950s/1960s thing of putting everything on relays with 24V control signals and panels full of rocker switches. There was x10 in the 1980s. There were "smart" light bulbs in the 2010s. It's just not all that useful.
I mentioned this a few years ago, after I came back from an "Internet of Things" meeting in Dogpatch, in San Francisco. The Samsung guy pitched a refrigerator with a tablet mounted in the door. It didn't really have any more functionality than a refrigerator plus a tablet, but cost more. I asked him why, and he told me because there's a fraction of the population that likes to show off their kitchens, and it would be marketed to them. There were a few other IoT things pitched, all forgettable.
What struck me at the time was that we were in a room that really needed intelligent control. It was an office/meeting space, about 5000 square feet, in an old industrial building. Openable windows looked out on the bay, and there was a manual system with a shaft with a chain fall and a rack and pinion system to open the windows. A similar mechanical setup controlled windows in an openable skylight. The room also had a modern HVAC system, ceiling fans, and lighting.
None of this was coordinated. What should have been happening was that, as people came in and the CO2 level went up, the bay side windows and skylight windows should have opened, to get the CO2 level down and cool the room a bit. As the sun set and the outside temperature dropped, the bay side windows should have mostly closed, the ceiling fans should have started in the upward direction, and the skylight windows should have stayed open, to prevent the room from cooling too much while keeping the CO2 level down. Lighting should have increased as darkness fell.
As it got later, and people started to leave, the bay side windows could close completely and the fan RPMs could drop. When everybody left, as noticed by motion detectors, the system should have dimmed the lights and done a quick fresh air purge - skylights open, bay windows open, fans to max in the downward direction. Temperature would drop, but unless it went below 60F, no need to turn on heat on an empty room. Then everything seals up tight for the night. Very little energy consumption.
Tomorrow is another day, and the room should continue to react to the people load.
But no. You rarely see that kind of control. Except in hotel function rooms. Hotels put in systems like that because they have big rooms with widely varying people load, and customers who complain if a conference room is stuffy or hot or cold. Hotels have significant HVAC costs, and it's worth it to have the HVAC systems adapt to room usage. Honeywell and Johnson Controls sell systems for this for commercial buildings. They have both inside and outside sensors, and can operate fans, dampers, and HVAC separately.
Great observations! I've no idea what the sales numbers show for smart home products. To me they all represent more effort to manage things I'm already happy with as is. My fav lighting gadget is the dimmer switch, which got introduced to the consumer market in 1959!
Smart home seems to suffer from the old-school AI curse in that it stops getting the name as soon as it works. Roomba, thermostat automation and remote control, casting content between devices, the video door bells, siri (to say nothing of dishwasher, rice cookers, laundry machine, etc). Anything that works gets bundled into an appliance and becomes normal. Smart home only means stuff that's at the edge of working, plus maybe some stuff that requires gluing multiple discrete appliances together (ie unlikely to work easily). In particular lighting for the latter, which has stiff competition against light switches.
Recurring revenue, K-factor, long shelf life and low actuation rate.
Few verticals outside of video storage could support a monthly subscription putting negative pressure on supporting a shipped product.
Most smart home products are anti-social and had a low k-factor. You don’t want to share access to your scale to more than a handful (2?) people. This makes market adoption slower than a social networking app.
Touched on in the video but median shelf life for these $200 products is 8 years. Thats very “bad” relative to most other consumer hardware. Especially say a $1500 smartphone that’s replaced every 2 years.
Actuation rates on many categories are abysmal. Your smart smoke detector may go years without sending you a message. Compare to say screentime for ChatGPT on mobile averaging hours per day.
Interestingly a lot of those floundering smart home products became thriving businesses when pivoting to smart office focus. Subscriptions go up, user counts go up, utility goes up.
It depends on what you need to be "smart" about your house. If you live in an apartment there is not much to be automated. However, (if like me) you live in a free-standing house with solar panels, possible power outages and all heating done through electricity, a PHEV you want to charge, being able to have smart energy management is actually very useful.
Ideally my house should have 3 phase power, but I'm not yet inconvenienced enough to go through the headache of getting this organized. This means that at any time my maximum power draw can be 13.8 kW (60A at 230V).
Generally this is enough, but I have on occasion tripped my mains due to drawing too much at a particular moment, I have the following significant power draw items:
- 4x underfloor heating circuits at 3kW each.
- 2x electric geyser at 2.5kw each.
- Electric oven and induction stove, not sure on amount but I think they can collectively pull 6kW easily.
- Pool pump at 0.6kW.
- Inverter re-charging batteries at night (I only have 10kWh of storage and want backup power at night in case of a power outage), I can configure maximum draw here, but could probably pull up to 8kW if I wanted.
- PHEV at 3kW.
When we had regular load shedding here (South Africa) it was very easy for the power to trip if I didn't manage things, particularly if I left underfloor turned on in the winter at night. What would happen is that power would have been off for ~2 hours, then comes back and everything on a thermostat would turn on AND the inverter would start charging its battery.
If I proactively turned the floors off then I wouldn't generally have an issue.
Even without a power outage, it is possible to trip things when using stove/oven with underfloor heating turned on or if both the geysers happened turn on their elements at an inopportune moment.
IoT can allow this to all be managed, it can have rules like:
- Don't run ALL the underfloor heating circuits at the same moment, alternate between them.
- If the stove/oven is in use, don't turn on the element for either of the geysers, it can wait.
- Temporarily stop charging the PHEV or inverter's batteries until there is less power demand.
- Temporarily turn off the pool pump if it would help.
It can also create other opportunities around solar energy production, you can do things like have only "excess" energy go into your (PH)EV provided it has a minimum charge level.
Other automations which I wouldn't mind:
- Exterior lights on a schedule based sunrise/sunset.
- When I'm away it would be nice to be able to remotely turn on/off particular interior lights and open/close curtains at particular times of the day.
What I actually have automated:
- My alarm system has (not great) app, I have wired it up to my garage door so I can remotely let in the armed response security company in the event of the alarm going off and I'm not at the house.
- I use the Tuya ecosystem to automatically turn my geyser and pool pump off on a schedule and if there is a power outage or load shedding. This allows me to heat the geyser still even if there is a power outage and it's the middle of the day with lots of sun on my solar panels.
HA is something I want to look at one day (when I have more time), meanwhile the Tuya ecosystem is very useful considering its minimal amount of time investment required.
Matter is hopefully changing it. It's a local first standard, based on IPv6 with security and provisioning in mind. BLE is used to give devices wifi or Thread credentials. Thread is a new protocol to replace ZigBee. Lower power using the same radio hardware. Ikeas new line is all Matter.
My one issue, while building a custom HA controller is... There's no standard for discovering the HA controller and have it join WiFi... So that will require an app. Just to do mDNS and TLS bootstrapping. Maybe I'll use a cloud relay and Web Bluetooth for it. Would relieve both issues and provisioning could happen in any browser supporting Bluetooth.
Z-Wave is tried and true, and works even without an available hub. I don't see the appeal to Matter from a professional standpoint.
It may have it's place in the consumer market, but with product financing from major adtech firms it is clear the ultimate incentives are different than that of the licensed Z-Wave revenue model.
- Buy an Homepod/Apple TB as a home station
- Everything works locally, even the internet is down.
- no Accounts.
- only one privacy policy: Apple's
- but ofc, you can control everything remote, and Apple makes sure its easy and secure.
Since its Apple, they have to make sure there are downsides, too (beside price):
- If Apple does not deem it worthy, it will not get implemented. [1]
- Things that should be simple are not. Try to set the lights to turn on 10 minutes before your alarm goes off. I'll wait here.
I see a market for a company which builds on home-assistant.
You can tell the nerds: If "corporate" does sth you dont like, you can always go back to home-assistant.
And for everybody else, you can offer a support, a list of compatible/certified devices, an extendable, open API, a vetted applications/script market place, a secure remote connection, ...
[1] It has been a few years, but last time I checked, CO2 Levels still can only be reported as labeled Levels ("high/low/.."), with the actually ppm Value hidden in some auxiliary value. No way around it, Apple needed to put CO2{ type: integer, range: 0-10000} in some json some where, and they did not come around to do it for like half a decade, at which point I stopped caring.
Tech Enthusiasts: Everything in my house is wired to the Internet of Things! I control it all from my smartphone! My smart-house is bluetooth enabled and I can give it voice commands via alexa! I love the future!
Programmers / Engineers: The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise.
Despite being a techie and loving playing with gadgets, I've only recently (in the last year) got anything smart home related. The TP-Link smart plugs are great - they enable me to control a power socket over wifi/internet, so I can remotely reboot my media server, or properly power off our bedroom TV rather than leaving it on standby.
For me, they just never did anything useful. I have light switches that work nicely. If voice transcription + LLMs + conversational AI had been good in 2017 I might have used my google home speaker, but the quality of the interactions was so extremely awful that I couldn't even get my google home to play music consistently.
Personally, I find the biggest problem is the lack of a neutral wire in most older homes. It forces me to use hue bulbs plus a Lutron aurora in the 80 percent of locations where that actually works but I have to find a really expensive electrician for every other location.
Plus most people who use hue aren’t even aware of the Lutron aurora.
37 comments
[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 65.6 ms ] threadThe automatic cat feeder works well. So does the roomba. I like my automated blinds but will stick with manual light switches. I consolidated my home theatre remotes. Note how they’re all seperate problems.
The smart home is here. It’s just that it was never a use case for a singular smart home platform. It was always 1000 seperate problems to solve that in no way ever belonged together and the experience was always worse when trying to combine it.
Then I remembered that I have to make shortcuts to bridge two products, it fails half the time, my ikea bridge has to be restarted every 30 minutes, and my smart garage door opener takes 30 seconds to respond now.
So on second thought, yeah, this all sucks.
arguing with an AI that is intentionaly obtuse, is not what anyone wants when its time to try enjoying your home. noone needs to have a conversation with thier lightswitch, its for turning light on or off not pretending to be your pal and trying to exploit emotional reflexes.
i have a broken record for this, "stop wasting time and effort trying to pretend to be human, and get to work building something that does what its told to do."
My garage remote is in a PIN number lock box next to the garage. Open lock box, press remote, close lock box.
That’s smart.
The useful things I do use it for are:
-heating control to take advantage of cheaper electric rates (I’m on 15 min spot pricing)
-automatically setting EV charging times to optimized cost
-a remote to start and stop a water pump to water plants in the garden, optionally with a timer
-a remote to consolidate a couple of lights that I want to turn on and off simultaneously to watch movies.
That’s it. Controlling my pool heater would be good but unfortunately it has a safety that trips if the power is interrupted. I’ve been using this system for years and simply cannot think of much else I want to automate.
Instead of that I'm choosing to vote with my wallet and mostly stay away until this is resolved. Skyrocketing inflation is not doing anything to change my mind either.
That's good. I don't want a single company to control everything in my house. Having multiple vendors with different implementations is healthy for the industry.
The real problem is there's nothing "smart" about those "smart home devices" to begin with. They are just remotely controlled devices. Technically, someone or something still has to control them because these devices can't really make decisions on their own. And then, to make those decisions remotely (either in the cloud or in a home local controller), every home installation needs to be highly customized. There are several light switches in my house that I never need to touch -- their states are automatically shifted based on like ~15 conditions: time of day, light conditions, occupancy, human activities(iOS focus modes). Non technical people can't do that.
I would want those devices to make simple decisions on their own (I have a few "dumb" light switches with motion+light sensors and they are pretty good already), and for complex decisions, they expose some APIs for other devices/controllers to call. Matter seems to be the right direction, but it is still controlled by a handful powerful players.
Imagine that every vendor would have different implementation of TCP/IP stack.
This feels like "I am not seeing ads anymore therefore it doesnt exist"
There's been generation after generation of lighting control. There was a 1950s/1960s thing of putting everything on relays with 24V control signals and panels full of rocker switches. There was x10 in the 1980s. There were "smart" light bulbs in the 2010s. It's just not all that useful.
I mentioned this a few years ago, after I came back from an "Internet of Things" meeting in Dogpatch, in San Francisco. The Samsung guy pitched a refrigerator with a tablet mounted in the door. It didn't really have any more functionality than a refrigerator plus a tablet, but cost more. I asked him why, and he told me because there's a fraction of the population that likes to show off their kitchens, and it would be marketed to them. There were a few other IoT things pitched, all forgettable.
What struck me at the time was that we were in a room that really needed intelligent control. It was an office/meeting space, about 5000 square feet, in an old industrial building. Openable windows looked out on the bay, and there was a manual system with a shaft with a chain fall and a rack and pinion system to open the windows. A similar mechanical setup controlled windows in an openable skylight. The room also had a modern HVAC system, ceiling fans, and lighting.
None of this was coordinated. What should have been happening was that, as people came in and the CO2 level went up, the bay side windows and skylight windows should have opened, to get the CO2 level down and cool the room a bit. As the sun set and the outside temperature dropped, the bay side windows should have mostly closed, the ceiling fans should have started in the upward direction, and the skylight windows should have stayed open, to prevent the room from cooling too much while keeping the CO2 level down. Lighting should have increased as darkness fell. As it got later, and people started to leave, the bay side windows could close completely and the fan RPMs could drop. When everybody left, as noticed by motion detectors, the system should have dimmed the lights and done a quick fresh air purge - skylights open, bay windows open, fans to max in the downward direction. Temperature would drop, but unless it went below 60F, no need to turn on heat on an empty room. Then everything seals up tight for the night. Very little energy consumption. Tomorrow is another day, and the room should continue to react to the people load.
But no. You rarely see that kind of control. Except in hotel function rooms. Hotels put in systems like that because they have big rooms with widely varying people load, and customers who complain if a conference room is stuffy or hot or cold. Hotels have significant HVAC costs, and it's worth it to have the HVAC systems adapt to room usage. Honeywell and Johnson Controls sell systems for this for commercial buildings. They have both inside and outside sensors, and can operate fans, dampers, and HVAC separately.
Few verticals outside of video storage could support a monthly subscription putting negative pressure on supporting a shipped product.
Most smart home products are anti-social and had a low k-factor. You don’t want to share access to your scale to more than a handful (2?) people. This makes market adoption slower than a social networking app.
Touched on in the video but median shelf life for these $200 products is 8 years. Thats very “bad” relative to most other consumer hardware. Especially say a $1500 smartphone that’s replaced every 2 years.
Actuation rates on many categories are abysmal. Your smart smoke detector may go years without sending you a message. Compare to say screentime for ChatGPT on mobile averaging hours per day.
Interestingly a lot of those floundering smart home products became thriving businesses when pivoting to smart office focus. Subscriptions go up, user counts go up, utility goes up.
Ideally my house should have 3 phase power, but I'm not yet inconvenienced enough to go through the headache of getting this organized. This means that at any time my maximum power draw can be 13.8 kW (60A at 230V).
Generally this is enough, but I have on occasion tripped my mains due to drawing too much at a particular moment, I have the following significant power draw items:
- 4x underfloor heating circuits at 3kW each.
- 2x electric geyser at 2.5kw each.
- Electric oven and induction stove, not sure on amount but I think they can collectively pull 6kW easily.
- Pool pump at 0.6kW.
- Inverter re-charging batteries at night (I only have 10kWh of storage and want backup power at night in case of a power outage), I can configure maximum draw here, but could probably pull up to 8kW if I wanted.
- PHEV at 3kW.
When we had regular load shedding here (South Africa) it was very easy for the power to trip if I didn't manage things, particularly if I left underfloor turned on in the winter at night. What would happen is that power would have been off for ~2 hours, then comes back and everything on a thermostat would turn on AND the inverter would start charging its battery.
If I proactively turned the floors off then I wouldn't generally have an issue.
Even without a power outage, it is possible to trip things when using stove/oven with underfloor heating turned on or if both the geysers happened turn on their elements at an inopportune moment.
IoT can allow this to all be managed, it can have rules like:
- Don't run ALL the underfloor heating circuits at the same moment, alternate between them.
- If the stove/oven is in use, don't turn on the element for either of the geysers, it can wait.
- Temporarily stop charging the PHEV or inverter's batteries until there is less power demand.
- Temporarily turn off the pool pump if it would help.
It can also create other opportunities around solar energy production, you can do things like have only "excess" energy go into your (PH)EV provided it has a minimum charge level.
Other automations which I wouldn't mind:
- Exterior lights on a schedule based sunrise/sunset.
- When I'm away it would be nice to be able to remotely turn on/off particular interior lights and open/close curtains at particular times of the day.
What I actually have automated:
- My alarm system has (not great) app, I have wired it up to my garage door so I can remotely let in the armed response security company in the event of the alarm going off and I'm not at the house.
- I use the Tuya ecosystem to automatically turn my geyser and pool pump off on a schedule and if there is a power outage or load shedding. This allows me to heat the geyser still even if there is a power outage and it's the middle of the day with lots of sun on my solar panels.
HA is something I want to look at one day (when I have more time), meanwhile the Tuya ecosystem is very useful considering its minimal amount of time investment required.
My one issue, while building a custom HA controller is... There's no standard for discovering the HA controller and have it join WiFi... So that will require an app. Just to do mDNS and TLS bootstrapping. Maybe I'll use a cloud relay and Web Bluetooth for it. Would relieve both issues and provisioning could happen in any browser supporting Bluetooth.
It may have it's place in the consumer market, but with product financing from major adtech firms it is clear the ultimate incentives are different than that of the licensed Z-Wave revenue model.
Apple has this reasonable offer:
Since its Apple, they have to make sure there are downsides, too (beside price): I see a market for a company which builds on home-assistant. You can tell the nerds: If "corporate" does sth you dont like, you can always go back to home-assistant. And for everybody else, you can offer a support, a list of compatible/certified devices, an extendable, open API, a vetted applications/script market place, a secure remote connection, ...[1] It has been a few years, but last time I checked, CO2 Levels still can only be reported as labeled Levels ("high/low/.."), with the actually ppm Value hidden in some auxiliary value. No way around it, Apple needed to put CO2{ type: integer, range: 0-10000} in some json some where, and they did not come around to do it for like half a decade, at which point I stopped caring.
Tech Enthusiasts: Everything in my house is wired to the Internet of Things! I control it all from my smartphone! My smart-house is bluetooth enabled and I can give it voice commands via alexa! I love the future!
Programmers / Engineers: The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise.
Plus most people who use hue aren’t even aware of the Lutron aurora.