Starting pre-heat before you get home. Monitoring temperature away from home. Leaving a dish in the oven and starting it at a specific time, say an hour or two before you leave the office and head home for the day. Checking if you left the oven on after you left home.
> or washing machine
Notifications for the end of the cycle. Status of detergent levels if equipped ("Do I need fabric softener?" whilst at the store). Starting a load (similarly to the oven above) while you are on your way home so you don't end up with wet clothes sitting all day, so they're ready for the dryer when you walk through the door.
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I get your popular cynicism, but c'mon now. None of the stuff I'm outlining there was researched, it was all off the cuff and I live in an apartment with "dumb" appliances from 1996.
I'm a new dad and when we both are busy with work, chores and the baby I find myself wishing I had IoT devices to automate a couple of stuff home.
First, there's a way to do sous vide cooking without one of those big circulators like the one I use. They sell a device that is a little bluetooth thermometer; you can put it in a pot of water, and the induction range can keep the water at a precise temperature. No circulation, but more than good enough imo.
Then you can use the wifi to operate it remotely. So as a case scenario, one could fill a pot with ice and water and a sous vide bagged steak, then turn it on remotely, say an hour or so before getting home. Or one could conceivably leave an uncooked cake in the oven?
I will probably never bother to enable any of this, but yeah, there are uses. I don't want it, but I get it.
But then again, if you’d asked me 4-5 years ago if I could see the usefulness of smart radiator thermostats, I’d probably have said no. The ability to remotely turn on/off heating is not that big a deal (to me).
It’s only when coupled with AI to optimize savings it becomes a great thing. Since installing the smart thermostats, I save on average 30% on my heating bill, and save the environment from 30% of my CO2 emissions from heating.
The AI part learns about how much the house heats up from a given amount of sunshine, coupled with outside temperature and heat loss, and controls the thermostats accordingly. If the indoor temperature is 1C below the target at 6am, but it’s expected to be sunshine, it simply won’t turn on the heat.
Other appliances, e.g. our washing machine, tell me already how long they'll take. So I can set an alarm to not forget to care for them later. And if my fridge would alarm me because its door is not properly closed, I'd rather prefer a loud alarm over a small notification which I might overlook because a mobile device is someehere else.
These days i just use a Ubiquiti Dream Machine Pro. The base version works just fine as well, the pro just fit better on the shelf, and i didn't need an additional AP.
I own/use exactly 4 “IoT technologies”.
I have smart radiator thermostats that turn on/off the heat based on family presence, as well as “predict” the heating needs based on weather forecast, sunshine hours, etc.
I have a heat pump in my vacation house that is remote controlled by the internet. Not strictly needed, but very convenient in the winter.
To keep an eye on my vacation house I also have a camera that uses HomeKit Secure Video. Requires no infrastructure on my end except network.
And finally, like a lot of people I have Hue.
I control it all through HomeKit. I also keep everything on a couple of IoT VLANs, one for “trusted” devices (AirPlay, media, PlayStation, etc), and one for “everything else” with client isolation, filtered dns, IDS/IPS. No upnp/nat-pmp, no tunneling (if detectable), and no other dns servers but mine (until dns over https becomes a thing with IoT)
In the future however it might become more or less impossible to avoid. Our neighbors recently purchased a new oven, which of course comes with internet connectivity. Their new washing machine also has internet connectivity.
In the very near future everything will be connected under the pretense of providing useful feature, when in reality it’s all about pushing adds and gathering telemetry data.