- I want to know everything about you and who you talk to
- I will control and change things without your say-so
- You can't leave me easily
- no you can’t know what you need to know to self host when I leave. How dare you think of other vendors that’s basically cheating on me
All of my lights, outlets, and dozens of other niche things, never connect to the internet, and everything is fully functional when there's no internet connection.
Home Assistant with Zigbee devices is fantastic for avoiding vendor lock-in[0]. EspHome and Tasmota fill in nicely for if/when you want wifi devices.
I’m using openHAB instead of HA for the tinkerability, but the new versions are pretty power user friendly
My battery powered Zigbee devices last at least a year without needing a recharge/replacement, which was a huge selling point (door/vibration sensors, temperature, etc), although zwave is similar if I understand correctly. Most of mine are on year 3 now and probably need new batteries soon.
My order of preference would be Matter, Zigbee, Wifi, and Bluetooth being a last resort option. Z-wave isn't on the list only because I decided against getting a controller for it.
I love that we have options like this.
They're all plugged into wall power all the time, and powerline Ethernet works fine.
What am I missing?
When I have humidity/temperature, light, motion, etc in every single room how many freaking power points am I meant to have in my house, aha. Maybe American houses have walls absolutely studded with power points but most other places don't.
Most of the remotes switches, sensors, and some others are all battery powered and last at least a year without needing to be changed.
In fact, they would be largely useless or cumbersome if they needed a wire.
I could make all this computer controlled over a home server if I wanted to, but what's the point?
My wife said the same thing as you at first, and originally had no desire for any of it.
Instead of buying dimmer switches to replace the on/off wall switches, I got dimmers that go in the gang box behind the existing switches. I did this for her, because she preferred a real switch and now we can on/off with a real switch or control brightness/on/off with voice, app, or zigbee remotes.
Since I did this on all our wall switches, my wife went from using the real switches 100% of the time to now around 0-5% of the time. When we're away from home she always makes a comment on how annoying it is to NOT have it.
Asking for a brightness change while watching a movie or cooking with dirty hands, automatically tuning the lights to something warmer at night and brighter during the day, forgot to turn something off and you're already in bed, automatically turn on the lights inside the front door when we open it with an arm full of stuff, having energy monitoring, virtual 3-way switches without any re-wiring, adding additional lights to switches that don't have real switches, controlling the TV without a remote, the list goes on.
(At least, I think I'm only doing that: I suppose it's possible the software that talks to them via BT got them on my WiFi without my permission? Doubtful but hmmm...)
Anyway at some point there was a software update to the controller app and it couldn't find them. After much back and forth, I uninstalled that app, and the iPhone's iHome or whatever app then recognized two of them, but not the third. That one started freaking out and randomly turning itself on and off.
Now it's mostly off, but comes on for a bit about once a week. Yes, I'm lazy about changing lightbulbs.
All this drama for... freakin' lightbulbs that can change color. Doesn't make me want to further smartify my home.
I figure some simple fake LED candles are my future mood lighting. I'd spring for a Mathmos Lava Lamp[0] if they didn't look like sex toys.
[0]: https://mathmos.com/lava-lamps/lava-lamps-for-children-and-a...
I used to have an Ecobee thermostat. A good idea, but it wouldn't work at all without a connection to their server. Their server uptime was a complete joke which made my thermostat useless.
I also had a few smart plugs for lamps.
I spent way too much time fiddling with all this garbage, so I trashed it all.
All these "smart" devices are anything but.
We have a heat pump, so we change the temperature roughly twice a year: heating temperature in winter, air conditioning temperature in summer.
But my Ecobee reports the temperature in three rooms (and occupancy, which I tie into automating lights), outside temperature, outside and inside humidity, fan/heat/cool start/stop times, and some other more obscure metrics up to the mothership, and the excellent third-party website Beestat[1] tracks all of those using Ecobee's well-documented API. It lets me spot anomalies, and helps me understand if I've got the resistive heating configured to come on at the best time.
If we had time-of-day rates for electricity, it would optimize for those, but we don't have time-of-day-rates.
(If I had gas heat, or if I didn't work from home, I'd at least schedule temperature changes to set things cooler at night or when we're away -- maybe driven by the occupancy sensors! -- but apparently that's not effective with heat pumps.
I find a mix of DIY and premade devices to be pretty good. I have all of my lights on Lutron Caseta (completely local, works when Internet is down) and can control them from my workstation, the wall, physical remotes, Apple devices, and Siri. I have Home Assistant bridged to Home Assistant, so can do things like control my workstation's LEDs from the Home app or Siri. Home Assistant has kind of interesting integrations, like something that reads the humidity sensor in my bathroom and the outdoor humidity to suggest how long the window needs to be opened to properly ventilate it after a shower.
I think the smart home is pretty OK. It gives you a single pane of glass to control all controllable devices, which ends up being quite worthwhile. (On a video call and need more light? Just switch them on from your computer. Too cold? Turn down the AC. No corporate tracking, just convenience.)
The worst thing that came from "the internet of things" is that people now assume that having great home automation equates to having to use cloud-connected devices that aren't really under your control. It just isn't so.
But then there's a lot of stuff that our governments could solve but they never will.
This is true of anything these days...hell even as someone who's into electronics/firmware development stuff and whatnot, I wouldn't even bother trying to fix a $20-50 (or even more) device, let alone the average person. Stuff is complicated enough these days that you pretty much have to become the expert on any device in order to fix it.
The Xiaomi zigbee stuff is pretty good/standard, amongst others. IoT can be great, I find the most useful thing is using cheap Xiaomi motion sensors with wifi led lights so that lights turn on/off based on presence in the room.
I do not, nor will I ever use, any "smart" device. "Smart" devices are
- unnecessarily complicated
- privacy destroying
- overpriced
- vendor lock-in
- often infected with online ads you can't get rid of
- likely to stop working if the vendor goes bust, their business model changes, or they just feel like it
IMO, it is rarely or never a smart decision to get a "smart" device.