I am failing to see the interest in having tons of IOT devices to manage, connect, segment, etc… Why would someone want to do it? To be clear, I have friends deep in it but… I still don’t understand. Can anyone try to explain the magic I am failing to see?
For me, things were pretty easy/quick to set up, and the benefit? Lower electric bills. More convenience.
Well, it’s a hobby/passion. Simple as that. I’m a nerd, i love such things. And home automation is thing I’ve dreamt of since the first automatic door in star trek. Automatic lights, alarm-system, cameras, a smart AI (locally, no stupid alexa et al),a tablet at the door which tells us everything we want to know on a quick glance (weather, shopping-list, fuel-prices, status of all machines etc). And all that with some many thousand lines of code and triple redundancy 😍
When i visit other people I actually find it “retro” to use light-switches 😁
My wife is nearly home. System alerts me. I quickly tidy my day’s mess. She doesn’t need that after a big day.
She arrives. Gate opens for her automatically.
As she approaches the door, the light turns on for her.
Her night time play lists starts on low volume, overriding mine.
A leopard approaches the house. The house robot with bolt on subscriptions, (the expensive “hunt and defend” add on), wreaks carnage on said leopard, only to find it was a child trick or treating. Lawyers for subscription bot are arranging payment to child’s family for their lost family member.
All in all, it’s really useful.
Well, I’m sold now!
That was an interesting twist
For a lot of people it’s just a hobby and they use their home as a digital playground.
I have smart radiator valves I use to reduce heating cost. During weekdays the morning when the heating comes on, I know the main living room isn’t going to be used, so the rads turn themselves off, coming on late afternoon, just before the kids get home.
Smart bulbs are only really used while we are away on holiday, to simulate people being in.
I have solar panels, batteries and am on sn agile electricity tariff that changes every 30 minutes with 24 notice. Automations make sure the batteries are charged up ahead of any peak rate. Occasionally energy prices go negative if there is an excess of wind power on the grid. At that point my immersion heater starts heating water in my hot water tank, saving gas and making me money.
This does sounds useful!
Please tell me more about these radiator valves.
Here you go https://www.evehome.com/en/eve-thermo
The most useful automations I personally have are rules to control the AC. It basically only kicks in if it’s too hot or too cold, and I set it to turn off if I leave the house or at night. Basically saves money, and removes the need to use the remote control.
There’s more stuff I’d like to do (like controlling lights and house fans), but that’s definitely less urgent to me.
It’s fun, like most other people said. And for some things, it’s nice.
I have two of my doors with network compatible smart locks with fingerprint readers so I don’t need a key to get into my own house, and I have a remote garage door opener that I can fire off with my phone to let somebody in if need be.
All of the entrances to my house have video cameras over them that alert my phone if they detect any movement, and some of my lights are on schedules to let me know when to go to bed because I have problems with that anyway.
Other than that it’s kind of nice to be able to turn on all of the lights in my house with a few clicks, although many of my lights are on motion detectors so I don’t have to try to find the light switches, mostly in hallways and closets.
The one thing I have left to set up of the stuff that I have bought is a sensor for my front door.
Once it is set up, I will set it so that when I open my front door it will turn on the main light in the living room so I don’t have to try to reach around and find a switch.
Finally, it’s nice having the peace of mind to know that if I’m away from my house I can double check and make sure all of the lights are out, adjust my air conditioning so that I’m not heating an empty building, and once I’m done with that I intend on setting up a smart watering system so if I’m away from the house during the summer I can make sure that my plants receive enough water.
It’s just handy stuff. Makes my life easier, gives me something fun to do, and it can be really cool to watch my house take care of itself without me having to lift a finger.
Because it’s cool.
That’s kinda it really
I do it mostly because I’m forgetful. So I automate what I forget. For example I always forget I’ve put the washing on so I get repeating alerts to hang it out. The alerts stop once I’ve scanned the NFC tag on the washing machine.
I have still resisted any smart devices to this day, but I would absolutely love the option of a no strings attached way of getting a text/notification when the laundry is done
I put a Shelly smart plug in my washing machine outlet. If it detects the machine using power for 30 seconds and then stop using power for 5 minutes, then it sends a signal to Home Assistant, and HA send a notification to my phone. It’s easy.
I’ll look into this, thanks.
I use it to control some of the lights in my house. WiFi enabled plugs and switches are more convenient than having to go to each one and manually reprogram them. In my bedroom, I have one set to turn on every day at 7am and again at 9am in case I turn it off and go back to bed. It’s basically a silent alarm clock.
I also have WiFi control for the mini-split (AC and heat) in my workshop. I can view the set temperature vs the actual temperature from my phone and I can adjust the temperature remotely if I want.
Same as others, convenience. You can entirely live without it, but after some learning curve it’s not much to maintain.
I’ve got opening sensors on all doors and windows so my heating turns off if something is open for a few minutes.
I’ve got a dark hallway with some movement sensors and smart bulbs so the lights can turn on when someone walks there, with the lights being dimmed if it’s late at night or not turning on if it’s super late or the luminosity sensor considers it already usable (e.g. on sunny days when there’s enough light bleeding in)
I’ve got smart bulbs in most rooms we use a lot which change the color temperature from warm to cold to warm over the course of the day depending on the sun position/time (it’s a dark country, we often need lights even during the day, especially during winter)
All in all, for me it was definitely worth the price and the investment, I’d not want to go back to not having them but I imagine for someone who hasn’t experienced it, it might seem superfluous or gimmicky.
What luminosity sensors are you using? I’m interested in automatic daylight harvesting but need a good sensor to provide the sunlight input.
I’ve got https://www.philips-hue.com/en-gb/p/hue-hue-motion-sensor/8719514342125 these for motion sensors and they happen to have luminosity. They get fairly inaccurate once it’s relatively dark, plus the fact they’re primarily motion sensors
I’m bedridden and home automation allows me to control the heating without getting up. I hate the app I have to use and would rather have an open solution, but it’s better than nothing.
You should give Home Assistant a go! It’s an open-source Home automation platform, managing all your smart home device from a single place. Being open source, it supports almost everything out there, and anything that is not supported out of the box is provided by the community.
It’s a hobby. Some people like automating things. Some people are overdoing it. And some like to have a central control on their phone for everything. It’s nerd heaven. I am some people, but not overly excessive. And I want everything to still be usable by guests.
I personally have a few smart devices mostly because I keep forgetting to do things. Window sensors and thermostats that work together. When I open the windows, they turn down. The windows remind me to close them after 10 minutes. When I leave home, the heating turns down.
Light automations are for when you want to be lazy, like me. When I’m away or when the sun comes up, light turn off. When I arrive, hallway light turns on. When the sun goes down, some lights in the living room turn on. I don’t have any motion sensor stuff because it doesn’t work the way I want (we all know the horrors of motion controlled bathroom lights at the office). The only reasonable sensor I could imagine is actual presence detection, which just recently became a thing but I will wait at least until there exists one by a privacy focused company like Eve.
I would like to get something for my curtains but it’s all getting a bit too expensive.
The trick is to not use any smart devices that run in the cloud. Not only because of privacy but also because you don’t want to be freezing or sit in the dark just because the internet is out or the whole company shuts down. This is what people are always joking about over smart homes, but it doesn’t have to be this way. Keep everything in your own network. You can still access it from outside through the hub but that’s optional.
Home Assistant has a really good badic presence detection: wifi. If you phone is connected to your home wifi network, then you’re home. Else you’re away. Simple. Works. Local only. No extra sensors.
I mean presence in a specific room/area, not in general. Homekit knows if I’m at home, that’s not a problem. Otherwise I wouldn’t be able to set automations to turn down the heating when I leave, wouldn’t I?
That’s harder, but perhaps the new wifi 7 sensing can help in the near future.
In short, enlightened laziness.
I can turn the bedroom lights on and off, from my bed.
I can turn the bathroom light off, after my young daughter left it on, in the middle of the night.
My livingroom lights colour shift, to keep my family’s sleep cycle in vague check.
I can turn my heating down room by room, if it’s not needed. Conversely, I can preheat the house, on the way home.
While the setup took a bit of prep work, it’s now highly reliable, and makes my life a lot easier.
Agreed, a little home automation can be nice. I like being able to turn my lights weird colours on a whim, it’s pretty. With the exception of edge cases and people who have a disability I really don’t understand smart large appliances and smart locks. I really hope there’s a reliable smart lock for them and people in the edge cases. I haven’t looked into it at all so I’ll just leave it there.
I have a Yale front door lock tied in to Home Assistant through Zigbee. It’s completely controlled locally.
I own a bed and breakfast. The day a guest arrives, I have homemade apps that get the last 4 digits of their phone numbers and program them into the lock. The day they leave those numbers are deleted from the lock. The lock also runs on schedules. It locks at 10pm and unlocks at 7:30am, unless we have no guests where it just always stays locked.
It’s so so nice. It’s also pretty secure.
Unfortunately, a lot of appliances have jumped on the IoT bandwagon, but have missed the wood for the trees. They all want you to use their own proprietary app to control it. This cripples the biggest advantage of IoT, synergies.
A tumble dryer that you can turn on and off from an app is fairly useless. A tumble dryer that can sync its load with the other appliances, and the current solar panel output is a different story. Even with simpler setups there are synergies. Having a light pulse when the washing is done could be extremely useful to some people. Particularly if the appliance is in another part of the house.
As for smart locks… The less said about them, the better. Unfortunately, the “S” in IoT stands for security. That’s fine for a lightbulb etc, but not for a critical door lock. It’s frustrating. I would love a decent smart, well made, door lock, with a viable open protocol. They just don’t exist yet.
As for why a smart lock would be good? Dynamic access control. With a normal lock, if you give someone a key, they have full access, whenever. They can also copy your key, and so taking it back isn’t always reliable. A smart lock lets you authorise and de-authorise people on the fly. E.g. it works normally for you, but your mother in law’s login (keycard, dongle, app, fingerprint etc) sets off a warning on your phone. You might also want to let a delivery driver open the door, while watching them through a camera. Your package is now secured, and even the driver can’t get back to it.
My favorite automation is adding a door sensor and motion sensor in the bathroom and replaced the bathroom light and exhaust switch with a ZigBee switch. Now we don’t have to worry about bathroom light anymore. I haven’t touched the bathroom light switch for months now. It’s automatically turned on when the door opened, stay on if the bathroom is occupied, and turned off if the bathroom is empty (15 minutes of no movements, lower than that you’ll start gettinh the light turned off when you’re sitting on the throne).
I prefer to do things properly once rather than do it again every day.
For example, I have an automation that I can trigger from my phone with a single button that does all these things:
- Lowers all my blinds in the living room
- Turns on all lights in the living room and dims them a little bit
- Powers up the smart plugs for my projector, receiver and player(s)
- Sets the correct volume and source on the receiver
- Starts playing random music in my living room
The alternative would be to do each of these steps manually, every day I get home. I’m lazy, probably wouldn’t do it all or just leave stuff running.
IoT devices (the non-shitty ones that don’t connect to the internet) become useful together when they are automated.
