I approach it like this. As you go through the next week, try and see if you can identify something that you do every day, almost like a habit, and think if automation could remove that task from your life. A few of my favorite examples:

1. Checking front/backdoor is locked every single night, now I have an automation that turns on the front hall light and sends my phone a notification that the door is unlocked.

2. The "did I close the garage thoughts", just being able to check your phone from the airport or wherever you are and see "yep its closed" is "nice" but not necessary of course

3. Everytime I open the garage door, the light turns on with a timer and some logic so that I never touch that light switch

4. auto turn off air purifier in bedroom in the morning (and on at night too)

5. Anytime the doorbell rings and I am not home, I get a phone notification with a picture of who is at the door. Helpful when worried about missing packages, deliveries, etc. Doesn't necessarily "help" solve the problem, but does do something mentally

6. Recently I added one that nudges the volume on the tv up a few clicks and down a few clicks based on the HVAC turning on/off, it was something I found myself doing habitually and now that it works it is extremely seamless and has been great

I have way more complicated scenarios of course, all of which I find compelling, but I really like the automations where you dont know they are doing something necessarily, your brain just forgets they are even automations.

What's kept me from trying this stuff out is a few interrelated factors:

1) There's no possible way setting up and managing this stuff manually is going to be worth it if it only controls a couple things.

2) Doing enough to overcome point 1 seems to begin with "step 1: spend lots of money and time to replace tons of stuff that already works completely OK" and/or a bunch of research (I've used enough AirBnB IoT "actuate the existing deadbolt" add-ons to know that a bunch of them are time-wasting crap that barely works, plus I've never seen one that didn't look bad)

3) Taking a "just do it as you replace things" approach still results in spending more money (IoT will be more expensive than dumb, just about every time), plus lots of things will probably never need to be replaced while I own this house, plus that means potentially years before I hit any kind of reasonable pay-off period.

4) I have a feeling I could solve several of the problems faster and cheaper with a dumb approach of low-voltage LEDs hooked to the right things and run to the right places, or outlet timers, or whatever, if I were so inclined—which I'm clearly not, because I haven't.

Every time I get the urge, I think back to that automation effort/payoff chart from XKCD and then... don't, because I can't see how I'll ever get on the good side of the line. Doubly so if any part of it can't go years without any kind of attention or maintenance related to the IoT aspect of it.

[EDIT] The calculation would change if I enjoyed that kind of thing as a hobby, of course.

Your math checks out. For me I came to different sums for each bullet point primarily starting at the place of "I do/did enjoy setting it up as a hobby". I also really liked maturing my solutions from a this is fun to hack together, to things my partner actually has said "wow this is actually pretty nice I like it".

I have also been very impressed with some of the infrastructure/solutions that the open source community has available, it is a pretty rich infrastructure that is not unbearably-brittle if you know what you are doing, but definitely is not user friendly enough to be easy to recommend to everyone.

Thanks for the ideas - I think that's how I would have to approach it as well in that I would really want to further explore the possibilities of IoT. I've done some in the past for home energy systems but past energy I haven't seen a lot of high value opportunities. Certainly some things that could be smoother (like your projects).

Yeah, I totally get that it works out differently for different people. Maybe I'm just getting old enough that I can smell when I'm looking at something that's gonna become an excuse to spend money, more than anything else ("well now that I have an X, if I just had an Y...") But if I truly enjoyed it as a hobby, different story.

I concur. I take a Battlestar Galactica inspired approach to appliances in my house. It's fine if they have computers in them, I just don't want them to be able to communicate.

So say we all.

Yeah, I've installed a bunch of PIR controlled LED strips around the apartment to light up as people walk into rooms automatically, and aside from that there really isn't anything else I see I would need.

The "smart" approach would be having all of them wifi enabled, and then being able to change colour, intensity, duration, etc. via web or app. You know what also works just as well for that though? One or two push buttons on each detector lol.

The starter for me was that my solar inverter (Fronious) wanted $199 per year for more than three days history, but exposed a very readable JSON over http interface. I had low watt PC handy (HP Microserver G7) doing nothing, so installed Home Assistant for long term tracking instead. After that, it kind of just snowballed.

I can't believe they would charge that amount for data. I was was pulling solar data in the past as well - pretty straightforward. To be fair it probably took you more time to set up but now that the work is done and maintenance is probably pretty low it should pay off after a couple of years.

What other projects did you look into?

Replying to this twelve days later, but anyway...

$199 was a bit steep. If it was a one off, may be I just would have paid it, but since it's an annual fee, it's totally worth it.

Honestly, most of the solar / power tracking, graphing etc for home-assistant now works out the box[0][1]. I literally installed a plugin, and changed a few check boxes in the config. Not saying it's trivial for anybody, but for me it was. The real time data has proven invaluable in reducing power bills by knowing when we're importing or exporting power (1:3 price ratio here), and used that to load shift the expensive power users.

Since then I've added some temperature & humidity tracking to work out which rooms are letting the heat/cold in and out, done some basic automation to know when the washing machines and dryer out in the garage have finished, and a sensor to tell me when the garage door is opened or closed. I used a combination of BLE sensors and ZWave.

[0] https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2021/08/04/home-energy-ma... [1] https://demo.home-assistant.io/#/energy

I wanted to be able to install water leak sensors in the bathrooms/kitchen and get rid of the external security monitoring company by having direct access to my home (and what’s happening there when I’m away).

I started small with the basic stuff and went into more home automation thingies…