> If IoT wants to move away from the current status as expensive, unreliable gimmicks, companies need to stop focusing on the idea of separate smart things and start thinking in terms of smart homes
Why would they do that? They do want to offer you a smart home, but a home that's entirely under their control, using either their own gadgets or compatible ones (so that they could charge other companies for the compatibility stickers).
There are plenty of protocols, and plenty of apps that support a protocol or two, but not every. Home Assistant and this project from Mozilla attempt to bridge that gap. I don't understand what Mozilla sees in an attempt to fight an established open source project like Home Assistant, but they probably have a reason or two. Such reasons are not yet obvious to me, so I'm going to continue using Home Assistant for my purposes. Every device I've purchased works locally, so I have one device that hosts the server, one interface that controls it (Progressive Web App, to be more precise), and NFC tags plastered over my apartment that trigger stuff without the need to even look at that one interface.
That's the sweet spot for me and it really feels like the future is already here. My choice of gadgets is rather limited (since I refuse to purchase any IoT device that can't be made to work locally), but so far I've yet to face a problem that I'm unable to find a solution for.
That reads like what you really want is a regular physical button or switch.
I think a lot of devices suffer because they try to fit the IoT label instead of just being a smart device without internet or even phone connectivity.
One of the NFC tags on my work desk triggers "focus mode". Lights change to bright white, a (non-local) radio station starts playing in the background, and the volume gets auto-adjusted to something bearable. That saves me like 20 clicks or so on two remotes.
It's all about those small victories that save me a few minutes each day, all without a need to route cables throughout the apartment. When I want to re-purpose an NFC tag, it takes me maybe 30 seconds to do so (instead of having to re-route the cables throughout my home). Physical buttons can do one task and one task only. NFC tags can trigger as many tasks on as many devices as I want them to.
If my Internet goes down, things still work. If I don't want to use my phone, I don't have to (I can achieve the same things from my laptop). I don't have to worry about turning shit off when I leave my home, Home Assistant does that for me (if an nmap scan doesn't detect any trusted device on my network). If a company whose gadget I'm using goes bankrupt, things are still perfectly usable.
I know about it. I have it. I've used it as a trigger before. I've replaced it with NFCs because they are less of a hassle to repurpose. The dimmer still serves its original purpose, while NFC tags are used for everything else.
A timer also can't tell me if my AC is actually on, may fail in the case of a power outage or I may forget to set it, as such using a timer doesn't provide a meaningful improvement over just turning on the AC when I get home and tolerating the heat for half and hour or so.
In the end, a timer has no feedback, so a closed loop system will always be better. I've been burned numerous times by open-loop systems in home automation, so I don't do that anymore. That's the second reason why I spend a lot more effort and money on sensors rather than actuators (the first reason being that graphs are fun).
Given that the load is likely removing peak daytime heat, then sustaining a less-challenging night-time temperature, the net impact is probably even less.
It's not horrible, but that's like half a space heater and most people spring for something bigger.
First hour use may approach peak, but again, most of that is incurred regardless.
5 kWh is $0.50 - $1.00, which is the cost of running an hour long for a day, the worst-case scenario. You'd spend a lot more on IoT kit (the Turris Omnia alone is $300) for minimising that cost.
Timers are cheap.
Where IoT really comes into it's own is either doing stuff automatically or doing stuff without requiring my presence (remotely). By far my favorite application of this so far has been the ability to turn my air conditioning on or off remotely, that way I can turn it on about an hour or two before coming home to a comfortably cool room. This increases my quality of life without increasing my electricity bill too much. Other things like opening the blinds in the morning a bit before my alarm and either disabling or lowering the volume of my doorbell are pretty good too. Other useful for me applications (that I'm in the process of implementing) would include monitoring water levels, flow, temperature and pressure to control pumps, heaters (I don't use hot water during the day so turning off the heater would make sense until I'm ready to go to bed, for example), detecting leaks and maybe automatically shutting the water/gas supply. Things like automatically watering the garden if needed, smart reminders (remind me to do something only if I forgot about it, keep silent if I already did it), home security (doors, cameras, alarms), etc. are also things that would benefit from IoT integration.
The problem I have right now with most things IoT is that a lot of them are doing their own thing, connecting to their own servers, using their own apps, have different behaviors in the event of power outage and who knows if they'll continue working after the company moves on to newer products, goes bankrupt or gets sold. A lot of modern things you can buy are also pretty trivial in their functionality and don't offer much their regular, manual counterparts. This results in a lot of expensive hardware that's tedious to interact with for little benefit. Someone who actually wants to get a lot out of their smart things (like me), in the current world, can't really go buy off the shelf solutions or even pay someone else to design a solution for them, they have to be technically competent so they can hack existing stuff together, make their own smart things, fix stuff that breaks or stops working, etc. Smart homes are still pretty much the realm of the DIY hobbyist, there's little on the market today that can compete with what a halfway competent hobbyist with some time and money on their hands can cobble together for themselves, particularly with the prevalence of cheap and easy to use hardware platforms (NodeMCU, Arduino, RPi), open source projects in the sphere, cheap and widely available sensors and actuators, good community support, etc.
If IoT wants to move away from the current status as expensive, unreliable gimmicks, companies need to stop focusing on the idea of separate smart things and start thinking in terms of smart homes (like the kind we used to see in old sci-fi talking about the futuristic year 2000). There has always been a push in that direction, but it's never been too successful. What needs to happen is that people need to drop the idea of smart things as hardware and start thinking of them as peripherals. Just like your house now has a breaker panel, a hypothetical smart home should have a house computer, running a "House OS" to which all kinds of sensors, actuators and devices can connect through a universal house bus, pretty much the same way you connect a mouse or a camera to your computer today. This would let device makers focus on their devices and the "House OS" maker focus on other issues like remote access, scriptability, security, etc. When I buy a mouse I'm not worried about it working with my computer, I'm not worried that it'll stop working if Logitech goes out of business, I don't need to worry about it catching malware and DDoSing some website or phoning home with all my mousing data. Why should it be any different if I buy a smart light bulb or a smart air conditioner?
There are numerous projects working in that direction like this one from Mozilla, HomeKit and whatever else, and DIY solutions almost always have a centralized home server for all that stuff too, so I think we will eventually get there, but for now the modern smart home feels very similar to the way the earliest micro computers were in the late 70s and early 80s.