I think a big missing piece for the whole thing is the Just Works factor. You're either stuck with cloud garbage (some of which does, kinda, Just Work, until it doesn't), or a bunch of DIY. Meanwhile, with traditional dumb fixtures, switches, outlets, et c., I don't even pay attention to which brand I'm buying. They all work the same, and you hook them all up the same way, then forget about them until/unless they physically break.

Why is DIY considered bad? I mean, aren't existing "dumb" electricals also DIY in the sense that you have to install it, wire it in, etc?

I have a "DIY" setup in my current property with Shelly modules behind light switches and everything connected to Home Assistant. It's been rock-solid for a year now and the occasional maintenance I do (updates, etc) is more out of a hobby than anything (I could air-gap the entire system onto a separate network with no internet access and forget all the security updates). Yes, it took some skill to install and configure, but that's no different from installing all the electrics (or plumbing or heating) in the first place.

A "dumb" home needs maintenance as well. Maybe people just have an unrealistic expectation from smart devices?

There's a big difference between wiring up a new outlet that'll likely last for decades without further effort and will very likely require an identical or near-identical process to replace even 30 years from now, and care and feeding of fully-local "smart home" networks & interfaces.

Most plumbing or electrical work I do will last decades. If I move, the same skills will transfer perfectly to the plumbing and wiring already installed in the new house. The last big innovation in any of that was PEX piping, which takes about five minutes to get completely competent with, and has been around for years already. People who can come out and fix any of that, if I don't feel like dealing with it, can be found anywhere and often work pretty damn cheap (unless you're getting ripped off). Almost all the maintenance is "buy part, replace part", which is fine because (in the scheme of things) most of the parts are very cheap.

Add "smart" devices to any of that, and they're instantly the most finicky and needy part of the whole system.

My design Philosophy around my smart home things has been a model of enhancement. Meaning everything has to work with out the "smart" part, the smarts just add convenience, and and wow factor, but I should not HAVE to use the smart controller to turn on a light, I may need the controller to dim it, or change the color but it should turn on with out it.

Alot of smart Switches will work (turn the circuit on and off) with out the controller.

This is like progressive enhancement: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_enhancement

But any decent smart switch works as a normal switch by default, without any care or feeding. Sure, controlling them remotely and adding them to automation takes additional work, but that's stuff that is just impossible with the dumb switches, and not a requirement to control the light fixtures.

The problem with remotely controlled switches is that they can be (and will be) placed in very inconvenient places. So when the remote part breaks, one cannot just continue to use them because it can be difficult to reach them (like behind refrigerator that has to be moved to use the switch or on a wall in another room).

I've never had this problem. All of my remotely-controllable switches are just in spots that people would place normal switches, but they're additionally remotely controllable.

That is how smarthome retrofits usually happen, but not new builds.

Well, that seems like a builder problem, no some inherent problem with smarthome equipment.

In what area of the world are you finding cheap plumbers? Little kids can hook up smart devices, but I’d never let a little kid do my plumbing.

This is a similar argument with other HN discussions "why go AWS when you can just host yourself". Yeah, everything is doable and nothing is difficult to learn, but just a bit of this and a bit of that and connect all together and suddenly you face hours and hours of smart home maintenance you wouldn't need at all otherwise. Because every bit of smart maintenance comes on top of dumb maintenance. Of course if DIY is your hobby then it doesn't count as work, but I have other hobbies so a smart home is not a priority for me - until it either works plug-and-play or becomes so standardized (and cheap) that I can call a technician to do it for me.

It isn’t bad for people who like to do that but the scarcity of those people and their preferences for open solutions means it’s tough to make a lot of money there.

The reason DIY is "bad" is the time investment that comes with it, and the fact that all good systems required a lot of bespoke work, which means there's a skill gap too.

Home automation, when it works, is great. If you don't have the time & skill to do it yourself, the cost of having somebody do it well for you is prohibitive unless you're in a fairly high income demographic.

And that's the problem with DIY - it's an indicator of a niche audience, not an inherent "badness".

And you might be able to DIY right now but once you've had one accident that reduces mobility or, let's say, gumption to tinker, all this can become a burden.

I have this image of the Father in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, harping on his friends not taking care of their BMW motorcycle, letting it heat too much and not checking on it at every stop, while he's watching his Japanese model like a hawk, looking at temperature, doing mechanics on the road and so on. He's quite flustered, and condescending, saying they're not comfortable with the technology and the technological world, that they could live with a leaky faucet and not care because they can't fix it themselves. He's calling them 'romantic' and even when saying he understands how they see the world, still comes of a bit 'this is a bad state of affairs'. I used to agree with him.

I'm a tinkerer, I love gadgets, I can handle imperfect, I'm not afraid to drive my e-cargo with finicky not-fully-working brakes and 'you need to use it just right' stuff instead of bringing them to the shop or doing the big repair. I can repair but I usually also understand enough to know it can wait. That's me. Same in the house, I manage, I repair, I workaround while waiting for the thing to really break (money is tight, etc) and can live with imperfect stuff and have patience when things break down.

Then my spouse broke her knee. I had to handle my 3yo twin girls alone. The house. Twice the chores. The triple workload, while still doing productive work and trying to handle the first lockdown... The disabled partner in need of help for everything, and every hour or two every night in need of ice or pain relief. Utterly tired, sleepwalking...

My tinkering life stopped right there. I need stuff to work even when the world is falling down, I'm dead tired. No firmware update in the middle of anything, no crash while bathing the kids, no fucking reboot during a wash cycle that I needed to finish and set to dry before going to sleep at 4am to wake up at 6. You need things that absolutely work 100% of the time, just in case you're not able anymore.

So, like one other commenter said: something augmenting basically working stuff is the bare minimum. Mechanical switch is the most robust, have it working even if the system is ripped out. Electromechanical switches under your hand and display on the dashboard, in cars and not the damn crashing 17inch flat screen. No fucking software between me and the essential life support stuff. Have fun over that but make it fall back on 'what we had before' without my intervention.

While I was pregnant with my son: woo, got my Baby Buddy instance spun up, now to integrate it with Home Assistant and my idea for a Mycroft-driven baby monitor!

After he was born, through now as a toddler: Baby Buddy ensured that I really was waking him up to feed every four hours as a newborn and helped us keep tabs on fevers vs. diaper signs, because my brain is broken. Raspberry Pi 4 is just running PiHole, with IoT gear sitting in Aspiration Cabinet. I am relearning Kubernetes and Terraform. Thank God Germany has really strong parental employee protections.

DIY is not bad (speaking as someone who does a lot of DIY). But it costs time. Not everybody has time.

If you work with devices that adhere to some sort of common standard things are usually much easier, less gotchas, less weird hacks that depend on specific versions or intricates of some commercial product etc.

I've found the Lutron Caseta line perfect so far. I won't buy anything that requires external servers etc (like Nest). But Lutron only makes a limited range of devices.

Seconded. Lutron's devices connected via apple's homekit work well for us. No problems so far, the setup is pretty much set-and-forget and apple handles the security. You can disable access to the internet for lutron's bridge so no data leaves our home network.

Pretty good solution.

Agreed, Caseta are worth their price premium IMO.

The only downside is that they aren't available in the UK, but that's not uncommon for non-mainstream smart home products.

I'm sure you could find someone to reship product to you... And then you'd just need a stepdown transformer in your wall, and to import US spec everything else to go with it. Totally simple ;)

I think the best part about Lutron Caseta is that it still solves my problems without the internet connected hub. The internet connection only adds additional features, and nothing else breaks if that goes down.

Ex. I used a lutron caseta smart switch with and a pico remote to add three way switching for my kitchen and dining room. Where they used to only have one inconveniently located switch.

For a new build or serious renovation with complete rewiring, this is mostly a solved problem.

The Shelly pro 4pm installs in the electric wiring cabinet. It speaks MQTT standard messaging across wired ethernet, but it can also integrate with Shelly's cloud thingies. It's a smart, standards based drop in replacement for ordinary "dumb" AC teleruptor/impulse relay star topology wiring.

> I don't even pay attention to which brand I'm buying.

My mil has purchased some seriously sketchy outlets off Amazon to install because she wanted to modern style but didn't want to pay the Leviton/Legrand premium from the home center duopoly.

If you're purchasing in-wall electrical, I strongly encourage you to buy a name brand from a reputable source. Also spend the extra half dollar for nylon plates that won't crack or shatter.

Hahaha, I guess I've avoided that because I rarely purchase anything that involves electricity from Amazon. I don't trust them not to burn down my house.

> The reason these companies keep faltering is that they push cloud-based and/or locked in product ecosystems.

I agree. It's a shame because Insteon products were pretty good for their time, for the most part. Granted, I never used their cloud stuff at all -- only local control (via ISY99 and later also Home Assistant). Though I'd say this was a long time coming; it had been nearly a decade since any new products came out.

Early on, their power-line-only stuff was sketchy and had issues, but my later experience with the dual-band stuff was great. I had many devices in my last house (sold with the house). I bought all new zwave stuff for this house, because of the lack of anything new and I figured Insteon was a dying brand. Glad I did that.

My biggest frustration is there's still no equivalent for the Insteon KeypadLinc. There's products that come close, and even have some additional features (that Insteon probably could have added via firmware), but nothing that stands out as overall better.

The other thing that is still unmatched is the local linking. Zwave kind of has this ability with groups, but it's so much more complicated to setup and still less powerful (eg: I don't think you can set on-level or ramp-rate).

It would be interesting to have more insight from Insteon as to what went wrong. Why did they stop innovating?

I almost wonder if they bet big on cloud then sales didn't match their expectations. I'd be interesting to know what sales of Universal Devices ISY99 (and other similar 3rd party control products) were vs their own cloud-based controls -- I get the impression there were probably as many, if not more, ISY99 users than Insteon Cloud users.

> no equivalent for Insteon KeypadLinc

there are a variety of HomeKit buttons that are sold as e.g. dimmers or multi-bulb, but in fact can trigger arbitrary homekit devices, scenes, automations, etc. i’m guessing these fall in the category you say “comes close”?

an example of what i mean is “Philips Hue v2 Smart Dimmer Switch and Remote” which is actually 4 arbitrary device, scene, or automation buttons that magneticallly stays on wall or comes off to be a remote. there are also a few beautiful button sets made with wood, fabric, etc., launched on kickstarter. by working with homekit, you can be sure they will not require their proprietary cloud to stay functional.

that said, i’m a fan of ipad touch wallmount, like this in white:

https://www.amazon.com/VidaMount-Wall-iPod-5th-Mount/dp/B01N...

with this you get arbitrary button sets for arbitrary systems, and price is competitive with locked-in options — remember the very early days “Philips ProntoPro” universal remote with arbitrarily programmable LCD screens that could emulate any physical button layout?

or if you want something that does that for limited scenes, plus AV remote any house guest can pick up and use without instruction, there’s the interesting LogiTech Harmony Hub with the “Companion All-in-One” remote that doesn’t have a screen but does have buttons for scenes, super useful if you’re in the Alexa or Hue systems. i use the on-remote buttons for the lights of the room the remote lives in.

Unfortunately Logitech has discontinued the Harmony line. I would be very wary about starting off fresh with them, because they are reliant on Logitech's servers being available.

That being said, you can pry my Harmony Ultimate from my cold, dead hands. I'm not looking forward to the day I have to get rid of it, because there's really nothing out there to replace it with.

For some context, here's one of my old keypads [1]: controlling outside lights, garage door (status plus control), and scene control (Welcome = several lights on the main floor; All off = very slow fade off of everything). The other one I really miss was in the kitchen and had "Bright", "Dim" and "Off" and controlled lights over the island + sink + under-cabinets + range-hood + some accent LED strips.

Honestly I'm not a huge fan of the "weird looking button on the wall" approach of some of those devices. I have to replace wall switches anyway to get stuff to work, and I don't like "No, don't use THAT switch, press that little button thing next to it".

The closest thing I found was a Zooz ZEN32 [2] which is what I'm trying now.

Leviton makes one [3] which looks nothing like their z-wave dimmers. Lutron Caseta has some stuff that might work but I didn't want to go down that proprietary path (non-zwave). Inovelli is supposed to be making a 5-button controller [4], and their dimmers look great -- but the keypad is vaporware so far, and the rest of their switches have been out of stock everywhere for months.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/jLmGpdT.png

[2] https://www.getzooz.com/zooz-zen32-scene-controller/

[3] https://www.leviton.com/en/products/VRCS4-M0Z

[4] https://community.inovelli.com/t/z-wave-5-button-scene-contr...

Agree with you about preferring real switches.

If I recall, I tried that Leviton and actually chose that Lutron Caseta one instead:

[5] https://www.lutron.com/en-US/Products/Pages/SingleRoomContro...

It did scenes, but also worked for normals wanting to press normal switches.

I forget the name of the thing I used to translate, it was the popular competing home hub in late 201Xs.

Consider one of these: https://shelly.cloud/shelly-plus-i4/ - or alternatively, if you have a lighting circuit wired to that switch, any other of their modules that also double as a relay.

> The reason these companies keep faltering is that they push cloud-based and/or locked in product ecosystems.

There is a bigger reason - what problem do they solve? How much money and/or time will using their products save me? The one area where there might be worthwhile savings is smart thermostats, but could 90% of those savings be accomplished with an offline thermostat with a timer?

I played with HomeAssistant for a while, and I kind of liked tinkering around with things, but it was still a huge pain in the ass, and I have no delusions that it was saving me money or time. For someone going into this with the expectation of tinkering, it's fine. For a commercial venture, I don't see current 'smart home' products/services as very viable. I've already switched my light bulbs to LEDs; how much am I actually going to save by having them turn off automatically after a preset delay? Not much.

One of my DIY projects was a couple smart plugs and a temperature sensor; at the peak of summer heat, when the house was hot but it cooled off at night, I automated ventilating our house. It had a great impact on our comfort without using air conditioning (which we didn't have). That is a decent use for this kind of stuff, but it's far too much effort for most people to go through.

I have learned that almost any effort is far too much for people to go through.

I feel slightly the same. But I still see some value in some actors but not really for smart solutions. I don’t need a central tablet to control the lighting in the house or play a music in every room at the same time etc. These are nice applications but the burden to pay and set it up and then actually using it would be to much. I got me some Shelly Relays to retrofit some light and Rollo sockets. The only “automation” I programmed is to open all Rollos in the morning at 8am. I really hated it to go from room to room and press the button next to the window. Classical first world problem. I also programmed my Harmony Remote to control the blinds/Rollos and the lights. Nothing smart just a button that does the same action the button in the wall can do. Ok the blinds can now be controlled in percentages which is nice. But and here comes the but. The setup is so custom and involves 3 software pieces that I lost a lot of interest while setting this simple system up. The harmony bridge to a custom piece of software found on GitHub which talks to openHAB hangs constantly ( something with harmony hub losing Wi-Fi access every few days). The setup and management of the Shelly plugs is also not ideal. One can flash them with a custom firmware but I wanted to start with the stock firmware first to feel the water. All in all I kind of like the topic of home automation but I’m just to lazy to play zookeeper for a bunch of devices. And the mentioned providers with their vendor lock and cloud only solution will not get into my house.

There are plenty of useful/interesting things, e.g. reactive lights, more proactive climate control, controlling ventilation on demand, presence based interactions etc. Some of this can be achieved with dumb solutions, e.g. humidity controlled switch etc. But when you start integrating devices together they can coordinate to do much more complicated and "smart" things.

Does everybody want to do that? No. How far do modern systems go towards achieving any of that? Ehh, IMO not very far unless you put a lot of effort into it. Do the UIs of modern systems really make setting up these sorts of complex interactions up accessible for the average person? Nope. Are there glaring privacy and security concerns? Yep. There are lots of perfectly valid criticisms, especially of "smart" homes as they are, but there are certainly lots of possibilities.

Central anything + smart home = miserable experience. If my router is having a sketchy connection I should never be blocked from turning my lights on, or have one random light in a scene fail to turn on. Someone needs to take the plunge and make the smart home a resilient mesh network that will work even in a zombie apocalypse.

Yet as long as mobile is THE channel consumer live with, there is no other real option but go with cloud. Last example is use your phone to unlock Tesla's car door, remember? lol

Cloud is inevitable when everybody wants to use mobile phone to control their home. Reminds me the Tesla car unlock from mobile phone incident.

However, cloud is not the problem, the control and lock in of the cloud is. The future will lie in personal cloud for everything. This again is the resurrection of centralization vs. decentralization of everything on internet, the original promise of internet.

A couple of us are working on exactly this, just a side project for now. Essentially pairing open (as in protocol, data control) standards based cloud control and data collection with open hardware that could be repurposed or used elsewhere.

If there are any features that would really make this enticing let me know here or in an email.

Insteon isn't closed - it had an open and documented protocol and was supported by various software. It did not require "the cloud" either. The problem with Insteon is it was low quality hardware, not a very reliable protocol and there was a lack of good software.

100% agree

> I'm not sure Matter is going to solve this because it doesn't do away with this business model. Zigbee and Zwave

Matter, Zigbee, Zwave…

https://xkcd.com/927/