17 ms·

How do you move out of a smarthome?

191 points by edent 9y ago

dennyis 9y ago
When I installed smart stuff in my home I kept the originals. When I sold earlier this year I switched everything back out before I listed it. It was worth the hassle to me. No one pays extra because the Nest thermostat is installed vs $30 basic. And I’m going to want to install another Nest in the next home so... I haven’t installed any smart outlets but I would consider doing the same. Most of these jobs are super easy, and if you can’t handle it a $20/hr handyman certainly can.
nathantotten 9y ago
I recently moved and took everything with me. This included replacing z-wave light switches and outlets with normal ones. I swapped everything out before we listed the house. The reality is that most people will just be confused by this sort of stuff and you aren’t going to get any extra money when you sell your house. It’s a pain, but assuming you don’t move very often it’s worth it. Now I have all the things in my new house and it’s setup just the way I like.
- ashleyn 9y ago
  The not adding value to the house bit is important. Nobody really knows about or cares enough about home automation to justify an added expense on the cost of the home. Maybe this will change when the "iPhone of home automation" finally comes out. Also Z-wave stuff is EXPENSIVE! so if it's not going to up the value of the house then I'm basically giving that stuff away for free.
  - Silhouette 9y ago
    The not adding value to the house bit is important. Nobody really knows about or cares enough about home automation to justify an added expense on the cost of the home. I'd actually go further. I do care about home automation, because it is almost certainly a negative and possibly a deal-breaker for me to put any offer in to buy a place. If it has anything installed that has any form of off-site access or any dependency on a remote service then I am going to require the existing owner to remove it and make good at their own expense as a condition of any offer (other than possibly a suitably approved alarm system with clearly detailed monitoring arrangements and contacts). Likewise if there is anything installed that relies on any sort of sensors or "smart" control systems, I am going to require credible written guarantees about the security, privacy, safety and longevity of that system, or far more likely it is again going to have to be removed and made good at the current owner's expense as a condition.
    - commandar 9y ago
      The interesting legacy corollary here is that it's completely bog standard for home security systems to be left in place when a house is sold. I say this because the systems that ADT, etc sell these days are largely made up of white labeled COTS Z-Wave sensors with the security panel just being a hub and interface to the Z-Wave network. The house I moved into this past year is covered by sensors for an old ADT system that are useless to me, and I've been slowly removing them and replacing them with equivalent Z-Wave e.g., door and motion sensors as I get to it. Whenever I move, I'll take the hub with me. Any sensors that get left behind would be almost entirely equivalent to an old security system being left in the house except for the fact that they'd be pairable with any system the new owner decides to put in place since they're actually standards based.
      - mcguire 9y ago
        Do you have any links to information about standards based products? I haven't run across any casually, which is why i haven't looked.
        commandar 9y ago
        Most whitelabel home automation stuff runs on the Z-Wave protocol. Zigbee is also fairly popular for some applications; it's what e.g., Philips Hue runs on. Devices using either of these will generally pair with any hub with the appropriate radios like Smart Things. There's additionally a class of home automation stuff that runs over WiFi; they more generally have proprietary communication protocols and I personally avoid them for the most part.
      - enobrev 9y ago
        Just as well, if you plan to sign up with ADT, they insist upon new equipment. I just went through this. We bought our house in February. ADT was sending crap almost daily so I called to see what they were offering. They absolutely would not use the 3-year old equipment in the house. Installation would come with new equipment. I didn't care either way, but thought that was notable. No matter; I wasn't interested, and I was happy to get rid of all the their signs and stickers.
  - hkmurakami 9y ago
    There are people like me who actively avoid home automation too. Seeing a nest at an open house is a negative.
    - lukejduncan 9y ago
      As a home buyer, why is it a negative? It seems like it would represent such a small % of the purchase price and could be easily included in the negotiation as needing to be removed by the owner before you move in.
      - hkmurakami 9y ago
        Yeah I agree. But I still get a negative psychological reaction since I dislike any and all smarthome products, which colors my impression of the property. Illogical I know, but it's a reality for me and other home buyers / home sellers. It's like staging a home right? None of this furniture comes with the house but how it's staged absolutely influences your impression of the home.
        andrewem 9y ago
        I get that psychological aspect - it makes you think the current owners have poor judgment, and so what else did they mess up? That's also why you should do simple maintenance and cleaning when trying to sell a house, because if a person neglected to eg rake the leaves, who knows what else was necessary which they didn't do.
- jasonkostempski 9y ago
  I would consider it to devalue the home. I don't ever want that kind of thing in my house but, even if I did, I'm not going to trust anyone to properly transfer whatever cloud access they have to things in my home, so it will all have to be removed anyway.
  - heartbreak 9y ago
    Who said anything about the cloud? I know what you mean though; if I had to use a cloud service, I definitely wouldn't want it in my house. In my experience it's easier to set this stuff up without the crummy proprietary cloud services anyway.
    - leereeves 9y ago
      But even if you do set it up without the cloud services, can you prove that to a buyer who isn't experienced with the technology?
  - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    If your house uses good standard local communication protocols, like Z-Wave, ZigBee, or Insteon, you can take your cloud devices, and a new owner can just buy a new hub device with their own cloud account and connect the devices to it. Doesn't matter what the other person has in their account at that juncture. That being said, if I was ever to leave home automation hardware behind, it'd be a "if you want to pay x on top of the already agreed upon price for the property, I'll leave it", where x is the cost for me to just buy new modules for my new place.
    - pavel_lishin 9y ago
      > you can take your cloud devices, and a new owner can just buy a new hub device with their own cloud account and connect the devices to it. That sounds like a pain in the ass. > if I was ever to leave home automation hardware behind, it'd be a "if you want to pay x on top of the already agreed upon price for the property, I'll leave it I don't want to buy new crap to deal with the crap you left behind. I'd argue that you ought to pay me for dealing with some arbitrary hardware that I've now inherited. This is the equivalent of leaving some finicky boiler system whose spare parts can only be ordered from a single factory in Germany.
- ashark 9y ago
  We may be listing ours soon, and if we do I'm even swapping the LED bulbs for whatever's cheapest at the store. They're only about a year old and the house will sell for zero more dollars if I leave them up.
  - pavel_lishin 9y ago
    How much are the LED bulbs? I don't think I'd bother taking the time to save fifty bucks on a house move.
    - ashark 9y ago
      Heh, it'll be less than 1% of the total time I spend doing touch-ups and such. Maybe three minutes to save, yeah, $50-75. A tiny extra amount of effort on the actual packing and move, but time saved buying new bulbs when the ones in the next house start burning out makes up for that. Besides, I've got most of 'em in in-socket splitters (makes one bulb socked into two) in crappy basement fixtures which I'm pretty sure will make an inspector look twice, so probably worth taking down ahead of time anyway.
      - lucaspiller 9y ago
        Three minutes to change all the bulbs?
        stronglikedan 9y ago
        Sure, if you have nine people helping you.
        ashark 9y ago
        A half-dozen lightbulbs, and that long for taking the new ones out of the box and moving the ladder around.
    - Zpalmtree 9y ago
      At least in the UK some packs of LED bulbs go up to something like £50 for 3.
- thearn4 9y ago
  I added z-wave switches to my house, but honestly they function enough like normal switches that I would just leave them if I sold the house (but take the controller with me). I never used any cloud services though.
joekrill 9y ago
Is this really a huge problem? How is this any different then, say, disconnecting your utilities? What's the big deal with factory resetting everything you're leaving behind?
- tantalor 9y ago
  > do I want to spend the first day looking up manuals online I don't see how this is different than learning how your 10-year-old garage door opener or 20-year-old furnace works.
  - mikeash 9y ago
    The garage door opener works when you push a button. The furnace works when you change the little numbers on the thermostat. If it doesn't work, you call a garage door or HVAC company and they fix it. I think most people are barely aware that these things even have manuals, let alone actually sit down and read them.
    - jimktrains2 9y ago
      No, that's how you use them. We I moved into my house I spent a good week or more tracing out where vents, pipes, and wires went. I spent time learning the parts of the furnace and built in humidifier and the different switches and knobs on them and what they do and how they do what they do. I'm no expert, buts it's helped several times already to have such an understanding.
      - mikeash 9y ago
        Most people don't do this at all. Using them is all they know how to do. If it breaks, they'll have someone fix it. The fact that you do this has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. You and I are not representative for this.
    - khedoros1 9y ago
      > The garage door opener works when you push a button. What button? I've got a detached garage, so it doesn't make sense to have a button inside. And when the previous residents were (apparently) evicted, they took various keys, remotes, etc with them. I most certainly had to buy a remote and find my garage door opener's manual to get it working. Damned if I was going to pay a garage door repairman to come out and hit a few buttons for me.
Klathmon 9y ago
This is why I set a few "ground rules" before I started adding home automation stuff to my house. 1. Everything must be reversible, preferably within a short period of time. If I replace the doorbell or locks with smart ones, I keep the old ones in storage. If I replace light switches, I make sure to document the way the wiring worked before I touched it, and keep everything so I can put it back if/when I move. I had a house with 14 light switches, 2 door locks, a garage door opener, 3 cameras, 7 door and window sensors, like 4 or 5 outlet controllers, and a thermostat all upgraded to "smart devices" in my house, and it took me about 5 hours to set everything back to the way it was before i added anything. 2. Everything should work exactly the same as it did before being "smart-ified", and should never stop working because of a network being down, or a power outage reset it. This means light switches still need to look and act like light switches, in 100% of cases. A thermostat should still work without WiFi, the TV remote should always be able to control the TV, the door should be able to be opened with a key, etc... When my nephew comes over and likes to switch the lights on and off really fast when he can sneak over to it, I shouldn't need to "reset" anything or have it be in a weird state because of that. 3. Rely on external servers as little as possible. If the internet is down, but my local network is up, my whole system should run at least 90% as well as it does with the internet. Following those few ground rules meant that it cost more to do the whole system, and there were some things I could not upgrade to "smart devices", but it made the whole process much more fullproof, and it was significantly easier when we went to leave (just had to mention that the smart home stuff was not included in the sale of the house). Light switches were "automated" by putting small z-wave switches in the electrical box of each switch (leaving the original switch showing and acting the same way it always did), z-wave plugs and power strips were used to turn on/off various things if needed, smart lightbulbs were avoided at all costs, the thermostat was reliant on a 3rd party network for the remote switching, but still worked 100% of the time by adjusting it on the wall. Door locks, garage door controllers, doorbell, etc... They all worked completely on their own, and then had the extra "smart" functionality layered on top. I hear the sentiment that all IoT stuff is garbage, and I have to completely disagree. The cheapest item in the category is probably garbage, but that's common with just about every other area. If you spend the money, if you actually do a little research, there are many options out there which are secure, reliable, and actually built to last.
- 9y ago
mcculley 9y ago
I am dealing with this right now. I am fixing up my house to sell. I moved out of it into a new home a month ago. I disconnected the Internet connection at the house I am trying to sell. I have a Wink Relay there and I deleted my account from it before disconnecting the Internet. Now I can't use the physical switches to control the lights they are connected to. The designers of these devices are not thinking at all about the long term use cases.
- maxerickson 9y ago
  Counterpoint is that buyers aren't either. I think the underlying issue is that people don't see a huge amount of value in a little bit of automation and balk at the prices, so the market consists mostly of buyers that really want to be able to do various automations.
- gwbas1c 9y ago
  That's why I haven't bought smart switches. I bought one "smart" lamp timer, and my experience is so bad that I'll never buy another one.
- djrogers 9y ago
  I've installed some smart switches from both Lutron and Leviton, and both work just fine without an Internet connection. My hue switches also control their hue lights just fine without any internet - although they do need the hue hub to be powered up.
jrs95 9y ago
Use lots of thermite to ensure any local data has been deleted ;)
- megaman22 9y ago
  I was going to say burn it down, and make it look like an electrical thing...
  - jasonkostempski 9y ago
    Rig the Nest smoke alarms to start the fire for maximum irony.
erikb 9y ago
Answer: Open suitcase. Insert 5 t-shirts, 2 trousers, 7 units of underwear of preference, 7 pairs of socks. Close suitcase. Repeat the same with laptop into backpack. Open door. Move out. Done.
- huhtenberg 9y ago
  You should try getting a cloud-connected suitcase and some underware with its own app, then we'll talk.
  - erikb 9y ago
    Answer: Don't do that.
gwbas1c 9y ago
I recently sold my home. I didn't take the plunge with smart switches, but I had Nest thermostats and Nest smoke alarms. I wish I either removed everything before putting my house on the market, or excluded them all from the sale. The buyer was confused, and the Nest smoke alarms needed to be replaced prior to closing. The Nest smoke alarms were fine, but due to local fire codes, I needed to have wifi running at inspection time and all of my smoke alarms had to be Nest. I was replacing one a year and still had a few "dumb" smoke alarms in the mix. Unfortunately, my realtor advised me poorly in this situation when I told him my plan was to take the smoke alarms and thermostats with me.
- junkcollector 9y ago
  Fire code requires that fire alarms be networked to alert people in all rooms in the event of a fire. Older un-networked units are grandfathers until you begin replacement. Wifi networking is allowed by the code, but for obvious reasons, the inspector has to verify that it works and is set up correctly which requires running wifi. Personally I would not purchase a home that was configured with nest or other home automation equipment for several reasons. 1) It's a huge security risk. When you buy a home the first thing you do is change the locks because you don't know who the previous owner may have once loaned keys out to. Now you have a bunch of computers in your house giving remote access that may or may not be giving other people access and you can't tell. 2) Most consumer home automation systems have incredibly bad failure states. Those wirelessly networked alarms? When you cheap Chinese wifi router catches fire from a faulty power supply the failure mode is that you die. That's a pretty big oversight. Remember when NEST pushed an untested software update remotely and caused dozens of houses in the Northern Midwest to lose heat in the middle of winter and then be destroyed by broken pipes? 3) Vendor lock in. I don't want the previous owner to lock me into a line of products. Period. I'm sure everyone here remembers when Phillips decided that their smart light sockets would embrace DRM and only accept Phillips brand LED bulbs. They backed down but it is bound to come up again. Not to mention simple incompatibility between competing products and stacks. 4) It's just a damn pain to use most of the time for gain that can be measured almost entirely in novelty factor.
  - 9y ago
wyldfire 9y ago
> do we hand over all the cloud passwords as well? Or do we factory reset everything and let them go through the dull process of setting up new accounts? Wow, I hope this is rhetorical. No, you never give anyone your password for anything. Yes, you absolutely let them go through the dull process of setting up new accounts. > When I move into a house, do I want to spend the first day looking up manuals online to try and work out which buttons to hold down in order to claim the devices as my own? shrug, yeah, why not? That's the kind of stuff I would do anyways. Moving into a new home requires all kinds of "oh, ok, that's how that works" kind of discoveries. "Hmm, the breaker panel says '#5: kitchen' but that one also apparently has the garage lights. But not the garage door opener, for some reason." > not be able to easily set the heating until they've moved in ... the epitome of "first-world problems" I will concede that this is truly a PITA and a drawback of modern life. Computers are so cheap that we can "afford" to put them everywhere. Hopefully the next generation of these devices will have sane fallback/factory reset modes that behave like their ancestor devices until they've been setup/enabled.
- TallGuyShort 9y ago
  > Wow, I hope this is rhetorical. No, you never give anyone your password for anything. Well assuming it's a unique password, not connected to other accounts and you've deleted any sensitive data, why is this so obviously not even an option to you? Sometimes deleting an account is a ginormous pain and it saves some trouble for the buyer.
  - esra 9y ago
    Or you could just change the password.
  - sailfast 9y ago
    ...because they would have access to data that is not theirs. I know we get so used to leaving our trail everywhere so folks don't care, but if you think about it, the Nest thermostat probably knows every time you've walked by it for the past few years, when you've interacted with the thermostat, settings / preferences, and a host of other data. Left to the new owner, maybe "who cares!" but one should really try to get rid of data they no longer need / use wherever possible.
z3t4 9y ago
You want both dumb and smart, or better automated systems.
cliftoncburton 9y ago
Whether you're moving out of a smart home or moving into one there a few things you'll want to keep in mind to ensure it's a smooth transition.
strictnein 9y ago
Some property disclosure forms are now requiring that these items are documented. Example: http://transitionrealty.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/RE-Property-Disclosures.pdf http://transitionrealty.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/RE-Pr... Line 183-184 "Are there any items or systems on the property connected or controlled wirelessly, via internet protocol (“IP”), to a router or gateway or directly to the cloud?"
friism 9y ago
I have IKEA Trådfri (which is ZigBee-based). While the hub does connect to the internet for software updates (using ethernet - no WiFi, and no WiFi password to update), there's no "cloud" component. You can't create an "IKEA account", even if you wanted. If IKEA went out of business tomorrow, my switches and bulbs would keep working. I like that approach a lot. It would be perfectly feasible to leave the IKEA hardware in the house if we were to move.
- lucaspiller 9y ago
  IKEA are one of the outliers in this space unfortunately. Last year I bought some Osram Lightify bulbs, as here in Europe they are compatible with the Hue hub (which like Tradfri also works offline). I also got their own hub to update the bulbs, and it is absolutely useless. It says it is connected locally, but still it takes seconds for the bulbs to change state, and usually in a group only some of them change. The same bulbs paired with the Hue hub work perfectly. It is WiFi only, and I‘ve had it randomly lose the connection and need to be reset. I haven’t tried it offline, but I imagine it’s not going to work. I only got smart bulbs as I wanted to be able to change the colour temperature and brightness, they are just connected to dumb switches. Tradfri seems superior for this now, as their controllers don’t even need a hub to control lights.
- shostack 9y ago
  How do you like the IKEA stuff? I've seen their lights that can shift through daylight/evening hues and brightnesses and was tempted.
  - friism 9y ago
    Works great so far. The iOS app was janky at first (it would forget about the hub it was connected to) but seems better now. I don't really use the app though - a recent update added Alexa support, and that works great. I've mounted the remote control on the wall and either use that or Alexa to turn the lights on and off. I don't want purple or green lights in my living room, so the fact that IKEA bulbs are limited to warmth and brightness is fine for me (I like to just keep them on "warm").
gnu8 9y ago
Do the next resident a favor and burn it to the ground.
bingobob 9y ago
Google's Weave has ideas of ownership & security on a devices unsure where its. we could see a day where a house of infrastructure devices gets handed over as part of the sale with this type of system. Andrew Warren video talking about these features https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thUJARumXWE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thUJARumXWE
pjc50 9y ago
I suspect that eventually this kind of thing will start being specified in the conveyancing, and the lawyers will take the accounts through their custody just as they do the keys and deeds.
timthorn 9y ago
The Quentin in the comments is the chap behind the Trojan Room Coffee Pot, for those up on their Internet history.
creep 9y ago
This might be a little tangential, but as interesting as the idea of a smarthome is, I'm not sure I'll ever buy into it. I've never tried it, so can't speak to the benefits, but on this topic I'm always reminded of how my mom decided on buying a 2004 Honda Civic in 2008. She wanted manual locks and windows, to minimize the possible failure scenarios, and I can understand why. Sure, it's a pain in the ass to manually roll the window down, but she'll never have to worry about it going wrong. Moving out of a smarthome seems like a pain. I can imagine in the future that smarthome companies will roll out better authentication and setup processes, but in my paranoia I can imagine too many security issues that will arise. I don't want my home to be a gateway for breach in another dimension. I'm okay to turn the light on myself when I enter a room, set the thermostat, and water my own plants. I don't see a need for improvement there.
j45 9y ago
I am setting everything in my home up with it's own email account and gear. Additionally - use something like a raspberry pi or an appliance that will remain with the home. If I decide to rent it out, or leave it behind, its not tied to me, but is still manageable.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
sowbug 9y ago
Another modern-technology problem: how do you pass on your cryptocurrency wealth when you die? Wills, trusts, estate law, and legal force are meaningless if you've forgotten to provide your private keys to next of kin.
- WorldMaker 9y ago
  You can print out private keys (and passwords, etc) and put them in Trust. If you are feeling paranoid that you can't trust your Trustees, you can use something like Shamir's Secret Sharing algorithm [1] to give individual Trustees only a portion of the private keys (or passwords, etc). I explored at one point if there was a market for an app to automate that last part, but so far such noodling keeps winding up at a less generally useful Keybase. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_Secret_Sharing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_Secret_Sharing
  - sowbug 9y ago
    Trust is only part of the problem. It's also competence on the part of the recipients to combine the Shamir parts, correctly pick Segwit vs Legacy chains, not send BCH to a BTC address, not email their private keys to the Geek Squad, and then not get it all swiped on their malware-infested PC.
    - WorldMaker 9y ago
      The joke answer is "At that point, what do you care, you're dead?" The long answer is that's all part of setting up a Trust for your estate, picking Trustees that can execute your Trust responsibly/competently when the time comes, and picking recipient heirs as well that can benefit from your property. All of that is a long conversation to have between you and your lawyer and your heirs. (In that way, Shamir's Secret Sharing is simply a modern technical/mathematical equivalent to bequeathing your heirs a puzzle box with a safety deposit key in it. If your heirs can't solve the puzzle box, do they deserve the contents of that safety deposit box?) That said, there probably is a role for some of the cryptocurrency exchanges to play as possible Trustees in an estate, just as banks large and small play into many estates for the transfer of wealth. It could be a feature the exchanges could offer whereby they help liquidate a cryptocurrency as a part of executing a Trust. (I would also not be surprised if there was at least one person building a Rube Goldberg machine in Ethereum smart contracts where on proof of their death the contracts execute transactions to an exchange sell order with forwarding instructions to Western Union telegraph the money to a loved one's postal address.)
fuzzieozzie 9y ago
All internet connected devices in our home are identified by a special "home" email, and info. No personally identified info -- just house identified info (of course not with the house address!) I wonder how many license agreements I did not follow by doing this?
- poppop22 9y ago
  What do you mean? How do you do this?
  - fuzzieozzie 9y ago
    All devices/services have their own "identity" that belongs to the house (basically the house has its own email address). When we move we simply need to hand over that identity to the new home owner.
trisimix 9y ago
Why are you leaving your shit?
igloofoo 9y ago
As fast as possible
growt 9y ago
1. Say: “open the (pod-)door hal!“ ?
Mister_Snuggles 9y ago
This is one thing that worries me as well. Fortunately, none of my smart home stuff is cloud connected. Most smart home problems that tend to be solved by using a cloud service could be solved just as well by using a VPN. I do this with my Hue and my Wifi cameras, both with great success. The challenge with a VPN is setting it up. Router manufacturers generally either offer OpenVPN, which requires a 3rd party app, or PPTP, which is horribly insecure. A router that could generate a secure IPSec configuration and push out a profile for the smartphones would make it a lot more usable. Even then, it's still probably going to be more work than using a cloud service. Maybe IPv6 will solve the problem as all of these things can have publically routable addresses. What could possibly go wrong?
hutzlibu 9y ago
Hui, I really hope, that once I will buy a house, the whole automation thing/IoT will be standardized. And I controll everything with one app, tied to the (small) house server. And the new owner just gets control over the system and controll everything. No cloud/account nightmare like described here ...
woolvalley 9y ago
You move out by changing the passwords & account email addresss, leaving the hubs and giving them the hubs. And tell them to change their passwords. It's like giving the keys to the house and suggesting they change the locks after they move in. I know what this guy described is a more involved process, but most smarthome cloud accounts are about as simple as an email & password change. Most smart home stuff should work fine if there was no hub controlling them, like with light switches and electric shades.
myrandomcomment 9y ago
The issue here is the fragmentation in the authors system. While not as feature rich as the flavor of the day automation toy, I did my full house with Insteon. If I move, I would just change the email on the account to the new user and hand them the password and leave the $100 controller hub with them. Simple.
titzer 9y ago
I just. don't. get. it. All of this home automation and internet of things hype is going to end in tears. Computers are just. not. secure. They're not even necessary in these applications. I don't want tech that includes massive amounts of software doing the job of simple things. It just is not necessary. I'll walk over to the lightswitch and turn the lights on. I'll set the thermostat and use its old-school timers to save energy. I don't need it internet-enabled (and hackable). I don't need WiFi-enabled smoke alarms--especially if they have a damn microphone inside! (and yes, Nest smoke alarms have a microphone built-in for self-testing!?) I don't want to talk to Google or Amazon and ask them questions. I just don't need their services, and I sure as hell don't want them listening all the time. We seem to be in some kind of insane tech bubble where we need to put gluttonous software literally everywhere, often for nebulous gains. And if you aren't scared by pervasive surveillance, fine. Just imagine Russian script kiddies chuckling over your miserable sex lives. Or imagine how well your stupid internet-enabled doors and teddy bears will work in a cyberwar with Russia. I leave my smartphone at home these days. Partly because I know what it is doing, and partly because I don't know what it is doing. Partly because I just want my old life back. I take walks and see cool things without needing to tweet about it or even take pictures. I am trying to get away from this madness. (But here I am on hackernews, being a Luddite, oi.) [edit: maybe my fears of downvoting were overblown.]
- kaffeemitsahne 9y ago
  I don't see why having a smartphone should prevent you from taking a walk and seeing cool things.
  - algaexe 9y ago
    Prevention is not the issue. It is the development of reactive thought patterns that result in being distracted too frequently. It's hard to think when you're used to not thinking at all.
  - titzer 9y ago
    It doesn't, really. It's just a background sense of being connected with an umbilical. Without a smartphone, no one can reach me, I don't have a map, a camera, music, distractions. Geez, to think people used to be always like that! If something goes "wrong" I might have to improvise--scary! Interact with people, take responsibility. And there is the fact they are tracking the shit out of you, and lying about it.
crankylinuxuser 9y ago
Well, you make it a stupidhome. Switch outlets with $1.80 switches. Yank out pretty lights and put in simple cheap hanger cans. Keep your dumb honeywell thermostat and reinstall the 4 wires. Buy dumb smoke alarms and litter them everywhere (they're cheap). Yank out special outlets and put in el-cheapo outlets. In other words, yank out and substitute the smart stuff back to cheap dumb stuff that just works. This isn't hard. It's a few hours to do this swap. And most of the mains stuff can be picked up at Walmart or similar for cheap.
- SnowingXIV 9y ago
  Yep. It's no different than my studio which I swapped out bunch of lights for Phillips hue lights. They had some plug ones that I went to Home Depot and spent like 1.50 on each adapter or something to make it work. When I leave, I'm taking my bulbs with me and replacing them with basic ones. Same with a nest thermo. Swap out for a honeywell done. These things are pretty much low cost and minimal time commitment.
elihu 9y ago
I remember in one of Vernor Vinge's science fiction novels, whenever one space-faring civilization managed to capture a warship of another unfriendly civilization, they usually just melted it down for scrap metal because there was no way to trust all the embedded automation.
jbb67 9y ago
I am slowly making my home "smarter" but only installing things that don't use the internet or require or use an external service or account. Secondly for everything i install I write a document on how it works, how to override it or bypass it if it breaks, and how to remove it when I move out.

191 points by edent 9y ago

When I installed smart stuff in my home I kept the originals. When I sold earlier this year I switched everything back out before I listed it. It was worth the hassle to me. No one pays extra because the Nest thermostat is installed vs $30 basic. And I’m going to want to install another Nest in the next home so... I haven’t installed any smart outlets but I would consider doing the same. Most of these jobs are super easy, and if you can’t handle it a $20/hr handyman certainly can.

nathantotten 9y ago

I recently moved and took everything with me. This included replacing z-wave light switches and outlets with normal ones. I swapped everything out before we listed the house. The reality is that most people will just be confused by this sort of stuff and you aren’t going to get any extra money when you sell your house. It’s a pain, but assuming you don’t move very often it’s worth it. Now I have all the things in my new house and it’s setup just the way I like.

ashleyn 9y ago
The not adding value to the house bit is important. Nobody really knows about or cares enough about home automation to justify an added expense on the cost of the home. Maybe this will change when the "iPhone of home automation" finally comes out. Also Z-wave stuff is EXPENSIVE! so if it's not going to up the value of the house then I'm basically giving that stuff away for free.
- Silhouette 9y ago
  The not adding value to the house bit is important. Nobody really knows about or cares enough about home automation to justify an added expense on the cost of the home. I'd actually go further. I do care about home automation, because it is almost certainly a negative and possibly a deal-breaker for me to put any offer in to buy a place. If it has anything installed that has any form of off-site access or any dependency on a remote service then I am going to require the existing owner to remove it and make good at their own expense as a condition of any offer (other than possibly a suitably approved alarm system with clearly detailed monitoring arrangements and contacts). Likewise if there is anything installed that relies on any sort of sensors or "smart" control systems, I am going to require credible written guarantees about the security, privacy, safety and longevity of that system, or far more likely it is again going to have to be removed and made good at the current owner's expense as a condition.
  - commandar 9y ago
    The interesting legacy corollary here is that it's completely bog standard for home security systems to be left in place when a house is sold. I say this because the systems that ADT, etc sell these days are largely made up of white labeled COTS Z-Wave sensors with the security panel just being a hub and interface to the Z-Wave network. The house I moved into this past year is covered by sensors for an old ADT system that are useless to me, and I've been slowly removing them and replacing them with equivalent Z-Wave e.g., door and motion sensors as I get to it. Whenever I move, I'll take the hub with me. Any sensors that get left behind would be almost entirely equivalent to an old security system being left in the house except for the fact that they'd be pairable with any system the new owner decides to put in place since they're actually standards based.
    - mcguire 9y ago
      Do you have any links to information about standards based products? I haven't run across any casually, which is why i haven't looked.
      - commandar 9y ago
        Most whitelabel home automation stuff runs on the Z-Wave protocol. Zigbee is also fairly popular for some applications; it's what e.g., Philips Hue runs on. Devices using either of these will generally pair with any hub with the appropriate radios like Smart Things. There's additionally a class of home automation stuff that runs over WiFi; they more generally have proprietary communication protocols and I personally avoid them for the most part.
    - enobrev 9y ago
      Just as well, if you plan to sign up with ADT, they insist upon new equipment. I just went through this. We bought our house in February. ADT was sending crap almost daily so I called to see what they were offering. They absolutely would not use the 3-year old equipment in the house. Installation would come with new equipment. I didn't care either way, but thought that was notable. No matter; I wasn't interested, and I was happy to get rid of all the their signs and stickers.
- hkmurakami 9y ago
  There are people like me who actively avoid home automation too. Seeing a nest at an open house is a negative.
  - lukejduncan 9y ago
    As a home buyer, why is it a negative? It seems like it would represent such a small % of the purchase price and could be easily included in the negotiation as needing to be removed by the owner before you move in.
    - hkmurakami 9y ago
      Yeah I agree. But I still get a negative psychological reaction since I dislike any and all smarthome products, which colors my impression of the property. Illogical I know, but it's a reality for me and other home buyers / home sellers. It's like staging a home right? None of this furniture comes with the house but how it's staged absolutely influences your impression of the home.
      - andrewem 9y ago
        I get that psychological aspect - it makes you think the current owners have poor judgment, and so what else did they mess up? That's also why you should do simple maintenance and cleaning when trying to sell a house, because if a person neglected to eg rake the leaves, who knows what else was necessary which they didn't do.
jasonkostempski 9y ago
I would consider it to devalue the home. I don't ever want that kind of thing in my house but, even if I did, I'm not going to trust anyone to properly transfer whatever cloud access they have to things in my home, so it will all have to be removed anyway.
- heartbreak 9y ago
  Who said anything about the cloud? I know what you mean though; if I had to use a cloud service, I definitely wouldn't want it in my house. In my experience it's easier to set this stuff up without the crummy proprietary cloud services anyway.
  - leereeves 9y ago
    But even if you do set it up without the cloud services, can you prove that to a buyer who isn't experienced with the technology?
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  If your house uses good standard local communication protocols, like Z-Wave, ZigBee, or Insteon, you can take your cloud devices, and a new owner can just buy a new hub device with their own cloud account and connect the devices to it. Doesn't matter what the other person has in their account at that juncture. That being said, if I was ever to leave home automation hardware behind, it'd be a "if you want to pay x on top of the already agreed upon price for the property, I'll leave it", where x is the cost for me to just buy new modules for my new place.
  - pavel_lishin 9y ago
    > you can take your cloud devices, and a new owner can just buy a new hub device with their own cloud account and connect the devices to it. That sounds like a pain in the ass. > if I was ever to leave home automation hardware behind, it'd be a "if you want to pay x on top of the already agreed upon price for the property, I'll leave it I don't want to buy new crap to deal with the crap you left behind. I'd argue that you ought to pay me for dealing with some arbitrary hardware that I've now inherited. This is the equivalent of leaving some finicky boiler system whose spare parts can only be ordered from a single factory in Germany.
ashark 9y ago
We may be listing ours soon, and if we do I'm even swapping the LED bulbs for whatever's cheapest at the store. They're only about a year old and the house will sell for zero more dollars if I leave them up.
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  How much are the LED bulbs? I don't think I'd bother taking the time to save fifty bucks on a house move.
  - ashark 9y ago
    Heh, it'll be less than 1% of the total time I spend doing touch-ups and such. Maybe three minutes to save, yeah, $50-75. A tiny extra amount of effort on the actual packing and move, but time saved buying new bulbs when the ones in the next house start burning out makes up for that. Besides, I've got most of 'em in in-socket splitters (makes one bulb socked into two) in crappy basement fixtures which I'm pretty sure will make an inspector look twice, so probably worth taking down ahead of time anyway.
    - lucaspiller 9y ago
      Three minutes to change all the bulbs?
      - stronglikedan 9y ago
        Sure, if you have nine people helping you.
      - ashark 9y ago
        A half-dozen lightbulbs, and that long for taking the new ones out of the box and moving the ladder around.
  - Zpalmtree 9y ago
    At least in the UK some packs of LED bulbs go up to something like £50 for 3.
thearn4 9y ago
I added z-wave switches to my house, but honestly they function enough like normal switches that I would just leave them if I sold the house (but take the controller with me). I never used any cloud services though.

joekrill 9y ago

Is this really a huge problem? How is this any different then, say, disconnecting your utilities? What's the big deal with factory resetting everything you're leaving behind?

tantalor 9y ago
> do I want to spend the first day looking up manuals online I don't see how this is different than learning how your 10-year-old garage door opener or 20-year-old furnace works.
- mikeash 9y ago
  The garage door opener works when you push a button. The furnace works when you change the little numbers on the thermostat. If it doesn't work, you call a garage door or HVAC company and they fix it. I think most people are barely aware that these things even have manuals, let alone actually sit down and read them.
  - jimktrains2 9y ago
    No, that's how you use them. We I moved into my house I spent a good week or more tracing out where vents, pipes, and wires went. I spent time learning the parts of the furnace and built in humidifier and the different switches and knobs on them and what they do and how they do what they do. I'm no expert, buts it's helped several times already to have such an understanding.
    - mikeash 9y ago
      Most people don't do this at all. Using them is all they know how to do. If it breaks, they'll have someone fix it. The fact that you do this has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. You and I are not representative for this.
  - khedoros1 9y ago
    > The garage door opener works when you push a button. What button? I've got a detached garage, so it doesn't make sense to have a button inside. And when the previous residents were (apparently) evicted, they took various keys, remotes, etc with them. I most certainly had to buy a remote and find my garage door opener's manual to get it working. Damned if I was going to pay a garage door repairman to come out and hit a few buttons for me.

Klathmon 9y ago

This is why I set a few "ground rules" before I started adding home automation stuff to my house. 1. Everything must be reversible, preferably within a short period of time. If I replace the doorbell or locks with smart ones, I keep the old ones in storage. If I replace light switches, I make sure to document the way the wiring worked before I touched it, and keep everything so I can put it back if/when I move. I had a house with 14 light switches, 2 door locks, a garage door opener, 3 cameras, 7 door and window sensors, like 4 or 5 outlet controllers, and a thermostat all upgraded to "smart devices" in my house, and it took me about 5 hours to set everything back to the way it was before i added anything. 2. Everything should work exactly the same as it did before being "smart-ified", and should never stop working because of a network being down, or a power outage reset it. This means light switches still need to look and act like light switches, in 100% of cases. A thermostat should still work without WiFi, the TV remote should always be able to control the TV, the door should be able to be opened with a key, etc... When my nephew comes over and likes to switch the lights on and off really fast when he can sneak over to it, I shouldn't need to "reset" anything or have it be in a weird state because of that. 3. Rely on external servers as little as possible. If the internet is down, but my local network is up, my whole system should run at least 90% as well as it does with the internet. Following those few ground rules meant that it cost more to do the whole system, and there were some things I could not upgrade to "smart devices", but it made the whole process much more fullproof, and it was significantly easier when we went to leave (just had to mention that the smart home stuff was not included in the sale of the house). Light switches were "automated" by putting small z-wave switches in the electrical box of each switch (leaving the original switch showing and acting the same way it always did), z-wave plugs and power strips were used to turn on/off various things if needed, smart lightbulbs were avoided at all costs, the thermostat was reliant on a 3rd party network for the remote switching, but still worked 100% of the time by adjusting it on the wall. Door locks, garage door controllers, doorbell, etc... They all worked completely on their own, and then had the extra "smart" functionality layered on top. I hear the sentiment that all IoT stuff is garbage, and I have to completely disagree. The cheapest item in the category is probably garbage, but that's common with just about every other area. If you spend the money, if you actually do a little research, there are many options out there which are secure, reliable, and actually built to last.

9y ago

mcculley 9y ago

I am dealing with this right now. I am fixing up my house to sell. I moved out of it into a new home a month ago. I disconnected the Internet connection at the house I am trying to sell. I have a Wink Relay there and I deleted my account from it before disconnecting the Internet. Now I can't use the physical switches to control the lights they are connected to. The designers of these devices are not thinking at all about the long term use cases.

maxerickson 9y ago
Counterpoint is that buyers aren't either. I think the underlying issue is that people don't see a huge amount of value in a little bit of automation and balk at the prices, so the market consists mostly of buyers that really want to be able to do various automations.
gwbas1c 9y ago
That's why I haven't bought smart switches. I bought one "smart" lamp timer, and my experience is so bad that I'll never buy another one.
djrogers 9y ago
I've installed some smart switches from both Lutron and Leviton, and both work just fine without an Internet connection. My hue switches also control their hue lights just fine without any internet - although they do need the hue hub to be powered up.

jrs95 9y ago

Use lots of thermite to ensure any local data has been deleted ;)

megaman22 9y ago
I was going to say burn it down, and make it look like an electrical thing...
- jasonkostempski 9y ago
  Rig the Nest smoke alarms to start the fire for maximum irony.

erikb 9y ago

Answer: Open suitcase. Insert 5 t-shirts, 2 trousers, 7 units of underwear of preference, 7 pairs of socks. Close suitcase. Repeat the same with laptop into backpack. Open door. Move out. Done.

huhtenberg 9y ago
You should try getting a cloud-connected suitcase and some underware with its own app, then we'll talk.
- erikb 9y ago
  Answer: Don't do that.

gwbas1c 9y ago

I recently sold my home. I didn't take the plunge with smart switches, but I had Nest thermostats and Nest smoke alarms. I wish I either removed everything before putting my house on the market, or excluded them all from the sale. The buyer was confused, and the Nest smoke alarms needed to be replaced prior to closing. The Nest smoke alarms were fine, but due to local fire codes, I needed to have wifi running at inspection time and all of my smoke alarms had to be Nest. I was replacing one a year and still had a few "dumb" smoke alarms in the mix. Unfortunately, my realtor advised me poorly in this situation when I told him my plan was to take the smoke alarms and thermostats with me.

junkcollector 9y ago
Fire code requires that fire alarms be networked to alert people in all rooms in the event of a fire. Older un-networked units are grandfathers until you begin replacement. Wifi networking is allowed by the code, but for obvious reasons, the inspector has to verify that it works and is set up correctly which requires running wifi. Personally I would not purchase a home that was configured with nest or other home automation equipment for several reasons. 1) It's a huge security risk. When you buy a home the first thing you do is change the locks because you don't know who the previous owner may have once loaned keys out to. Now you have a bunch of computers in your house giving remote access that may or may not be giving other people access and you can't tell. 2) Most consumer home automation systems have incredibly bad failure states. Those wirelessly networked alarms? When you cheap Chinese wifi router catches fire from a faulty power supply the failure mode is that you die. That's a pretty big oversight. Remember when NEST pushed an untested software update remotely and caused dozens of houses in the Northern Midwest to lose heat in the middle of winter and then be destroyed by broken pipes? 3) Vendor lock in. I don't want the previous owner to lock me into a line of products. Period. I'm sure everyone here remembers when Phillips decided that their smart light sockets would embrace DRM and only accept Phillips brand LED bulbs. They backed down but it is bound to come up again. Not to mention simple incompatibility between competing products and stacks. 4) It's just a damn pain to use most of the time for gain that can be measured almost entirely in novelty factor.
- 9y ago

wyldfire 9y ago

> do we hand over all the cloud passwords as well? Or do we factory reset everything and let them go through the dull process of setting up new accounts? Wow, I hope this is rhetorical. No, you never give anyone your password for anything. Yes, you absolutely let them go through the dull process of setting up new accounts. > When I move into a house, do I want to spend the first day looking up manuals online to try and work out which buttons to hold down in order to claim the devices as my own? shrug, yeah, why not? That's the kind of stuff I would do anyways. Moving into a new home requires all kinds of "oh, ok, that's how that works" kind of discoveries. "Hmm, the breaker panel says '#5: kitchen' but that one also apparently has the garage lights. But not the garage door opener, for some reason." > not be able to easily set the heating until they've moved in ... the epitome of "first-world problems" I will concede that this is truly a PITA and a drawback of modern life. Computers are so cheap that we can "afford" to put them everywhere. Hopefully the next generation of these devices will have sane fallback/factory reset modes that behave like their ancestor devices until they've been setup/enabled.

TallGuyShort 9y ago
> Wow, I hope this is rhetorical. No, you never give anyone your password for anything. Well assuming it's a unique password, not connected to other accounts and you've deleted any sensitive data, why is this so obviously not even an option to you? Sometimes deleting an account is a ginormous pain and it saves some trouble for the buyer.
- esra 9y ago
  Or you could just change the password.
- sailfast 9y ago
  ...because they would have access to data that is not theirs. I know we get so used to leaving our trail everywhere so folks don't care, but if you think about it, the Nest thermostat probably knows every time you've walked by it for the past few years, when you've interacted with the thermostat, settings / preferences, and a host of other data. Left to the new owner, maybe "who cares!" but one should really try to get rid of data they no longer need / use wherever possible.

z3t4 9y ago

You want both dumb and smart, or better automated systems.

cliftoncburton 9y ago

Whether you're moving out of a smart home or moving into one there a few things you'll want to keep in mind to ensure it's a smooth transition.

strictnein 9y ago

Some property disclosure forms are now requiring that these items are documented. Example: http://transitionrealty.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/RE-Property-Disclosures.pdf http://transitionrealty.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/RE-Pr... Line 183-184 "Are there any items or systems on the property connected or controlled wirelessly, via internet protocol (“IP”), to a router or gateway or directly to the cloud?"

friism 9y ago

I have IKEA Trådfri (which is ZigBee-based). While the hub does connect to the internet for software updates (using ethernet - no WiFi, and no WiFi password to update), there's no "cloud" component. You can't create an "IKEA account", even if you wanted. If IKEA went out of business tomorrow, my switches and bulbs would keep working. I like that approach a lot. It would be perfectly feasible to leave the IKEA hardware in the house if we were to move.

lucaspiller 9y ago
IKEA are one of the outliers in this space unfortunately. Last year I bought some Osram Lightify bulbs, as here in Europe they are compatible with the Hue hub (which like Tradfri also works offline). I also got their own hub to update the bulbs, and it is absolutely useless. It says it is connected locally, but still it takes seconds for the bulbs to change state, and usually in a group only some of them change. The same bulbs paired with the Hue hub work perfectly. It is WiFi only, and I‘ve had it randomly lose the connection and need to be reset. I haven’t tried it offline, but I imagine it’s not going to work. I only got smart bulbs as I wanted to be able to change the colour temperature and brightness, they are just connected to dumb switches. Tradfri seems superior for this now, as their controllers don’t even need a hub to control lights.
shostack 9y ago
How do you like the IKEA stuff? I've seen their lights that can shift through daylight/evening hues and brightnesses and was tempted.
- friism 9y ago
  Works great so far. The iOS app was janky at first (it would forget about the hub it was connected to) but seems better now. I don't really use the app though - a recent update added Alexa support, and that works great. I've mounted the remote control on the wall and either use that or Alexa to turn the lights on and off. I don't want purple or green lights in my living room, so the fact that IKEA bulbs are limited to warmth and brightness is fine for me (I like to just keep them on "warm").

gnu8 9y ago

Do the next resident a favor and burn it to the ground.

bingobob 9y ago

Google's Weave has ideas of ownership & security on a devices unsure where its. we could see a day where a house of infrastructure devices gets handed over as part of the sale with this type of system. Andrew Warren video talking about these features https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thUJARumXWE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thUJARumXWE

pjc50 9y ago

I suspect that eventually this kind of thing will start being specified in the conveyancing, and the lawyers will take the accounts through their custody just as they do the keys and deeds.

timthorn 9y ago

The Quentin in the comments is the chap behind the Trojan Room Coffee Pot, for those up on their Internet history.

creep 9y ago

This might be a little tangential, but as interesting as the idea of a smarthome is, I'm not sure I'll ever buy into it. I've never tried it, so can't speak to the benefits, but on this topic I'm always reminded of how my mom decided on buying a 2004 Honda Civic in 2008. She wanted manual locks and windows, to minimize the possible failure scenarios, and I can understand why. Sure, it's a pain in the ass to manually roll the window down, but she'll never have to worry about it going wrong. Moving out of a smarthome seems like a pain. I can imagine in the future that smarthome companies will roll out better authentication and setup processes, but in my paranoia I can imagine too many security issues that will arise. I don't want my home to be a gateway for breach in another dimension. I'm okay to turn the light on myself when I enter a room, set the thermostat, and water my own plants. I don't see a need for improvement there.

j45 9y ago

I am setting everything in my home up with it's own email account and gear. Additionally - use something like a raspberry pi or an appliance that will remain with the home. If I decide to rent it out, or leave it behind, its not tied to me, but is still manageable.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

sowbug 9y ago

Another modern-technology problem: how do you pass on your cryptocurrency wealth when you die? Wills, trusts, estate law, and legal force are meaningless if you've forgotten to provide your private keys to next of kin.

WorldMaker 9y ago
You can print out private keys (and passwords, etc) and put them in Trust. If you are feeling paranoid that you can't trust your Trustees, you can use something like Shamir's Secret Sharing algorithm [1] to give individual Trustees only a portion of the private keys (or passwords, etc). I explored at one point if there was a market for an app to automate that last part, but so far such noodling keeps winding up at a less generally useful Keybase. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_Secret_Sharing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_Secret_Sharing
- sowbug 9y ago
  Trust is only part of the problem. It's also competence on the part of the recipients to combine the Shamir parts, correctly pick Segwit vs Legacy chains, not send BCH to a BTC address, not email their private keys to the Geek Squad, and then not get it all swiped on their malware-infested PC.
  - WorldMaker 9y ago
    The joke answer is "At that point, what do you care, you're dead?" The long answer is that's all part of setting up a Trust for your estate, picking Trustees that can execute your Trust responsibly/competently when the time comes, and picking recipient heirs as well that can benefit from your property. All of that is a long conversation to have between you and your lawyer and your heirs. (In that way, Shamir's Secret Sharing is simply a modern technical/mathematical equivalent to bequeathing your heirs a puzzle box with a safety deposit key in it. If your heirs can't solve the puzzle box, do they deserve the contents of that safety deposit box?) That said, there probably is a role for some of the cryptocurrency exchanges to play as possible Trustees in an estate, just as banks large and small play into many estates for the transfer of wealth. It could be a feature the exchanges could offer whereby they help liquidate a cryptocurrency as a part of executing a Trust. (I would also not be surprised if there was at least one person building a Rube Goldberg machine in Ethereum smart contracts where on proof of their death the contracts execute transactions to an exchange sell order with forwarding instructions to Western Union telegraph the money to a loved one's postal address.)

fuzzieozzie 9y ago

All internet connected devices in our home are identified by a special "home" email, and info. No personally identified info -- just house identified info (of course not with the house address!) I wonder how many license agreements I did not follow by doing this?

poppop22 9y ago
What do you mean? How do you do this?
- fuzzieozzie 9y ago
  All devices/services have their own "identity" that belongs to the house (basically the house has its own email address). When we move we simply need to hand over that identity to the new home owner.

trisimix 9y ago

Why are you leaving your shit?

igloofoo 9y ago

As fast as possible

growt 9y ago

1. Say: “open the (pod-)door hal!“ ?

Mister_Snuggles 9y ago

This is one thing that worries me as well. Fortunately, none of my smart home stuff is cloud connected. Most smart home problems that tend to be solved by using a cloud service could be solved just as well by using a VPN. I do this with my Hue and my Wifi cameras, both with great success. The challenge with a VPN is setting it up. Router manufacturers generally either offer OpenVPN, which requires a 3rd party app, or PPTP, which is horribly insecure. A router that could generate a secure IPSec configuration and push out a profile for the smartphones would make it a lot more usable. Even then, it's still probably going to be more work than using a cloud service. Maybe IPv6 will solve the problem as all of these things can have publically routable addresses. What could possibly go wrong?

hutzlibu 9y ago

Hui, I really hope, that once I will buy a house, the whole automation thing/IoT will be standardized. And I controll everything with one app, tied to the (small) house server. And the new owner just gets control over the system and controll everything. No cloud/account nightmare like described here ...

woolvalley 9y ago

You move out by changing the passwords & account email addresss, leaving the hubs and giving them the hubs. And tell them to change their passwords. It's like giving the keys to the house and suggesting they change the locks after they move in. I know what this guy described is a more involved process, but most smarthome cloud accounts are about as simple as an email & password change. Most smart home stuff should work fine if there was no hub controlling them, like with light switches and electric shades.

myrandomcomment 9y ago

The issue here is the fragmentation in the authors system. While not as feature rich as the flavor of the day automation toy, I did my full house with Insteon. If I move, I would just change the email on the account to the new user and hand them the password and leave the $100 controller hub with them. Simple.

titzer 9y ago

I just. don't. get. it. All of this home automation and internet of things hype is going to end in tears. Computers are just. not. secure. They're not even necessary in these applications. I don't want tech that includes massive amounts of software doing the job of simple things. It just is not necessary. I'll walk over to the lightswitch and turn the lights on. I'll set the thermostat and use its old-school timers to save energy. I don't need it internet-enabled (and hackable). I don't need WiFi-enabled smoke alarms--especially if they have a damn microphone inside! (and yes, Nest smoke alarms have a microphone built-in for self-testing!?) I don't want to talk to Google or Amazon and ask them questions. I just don't need their services, and I sure as hell don't want them listening all the time. We seem to be in some kind of insane tech bubble where we need to put gluttonous software literally everywhere, often for nebulous gains. And if you aren't scared by pervasive surveillance, fine. Just imagine Russian script kiddies chuckling over your miserable sex lives. Or imagine how well your stupid internet-enabled doors and teddy bears will work in a cyberwar with Russia. I leave my smartphone at home these days. Partly because I know what it is doing, and partly because I don't know what it is doing. Partly because I just want my old life back. I take walks and see cool things without needing to tweet about it or even take pictures. I am trying to get away from this madness. (But here I am on hackernews, being a Luddite, oi.) [edit: maybe my fears of downvoting were overblown.]

kaffeemitsahne 9y ago
I don't see why having a smartphone should prevent you from taking a walk and seeing cool things.
- algaexe 9y ago
  Prevention is not the issue. It is the development of reactive thought patterns that result in being distracted too frequently. It's hard to think when you're used to not thinking at all.
- titzer 9y ago
  It doesn't, really. It's just a background sense of being connected with an umbilical. Without a smartphone, no one can reach me, I don't have a map, a camera, music, distractions. Geez, to think people used to be always like that! If something goes "wrong" I might have to improvise--scary! Interact with people, take responsibility. And there is the fact they are tracking the shit out of you, and lying about it.

crankylinuxuser 9y ago

Well, you make it a stupidhome. Switch outlets with $1.80 switches. Yank out pretty lights and put in simple cheap hanger cans. Keep your dumb honeywell thermostat and reinstall the 4 wires. Buy dumb smoke alarms and litter them everywhere (they're cheap). Yank out special outlets and put in el-cheapo outlets. In other words, yank out and substitute the smart stuff back to cheap dumb stuff that just works. This isn't hard. It's a few hours to do this swap. And most of the mains stuff can be picked up at Walmart or similar for cheap.

SnowingXIV 9y ago
Yep. It's no different than my studio which I swapped out bunch of lights for Phillips hue lights. They had some plug ones that I went to Home Depot and spent like 1.50 on each adapter or something to make it work. When I leave, I'm taking my bulbs with me and replacing them with basic ones. Same with a nest thermo. Swap out for a honeywell done. These things are pretty much low cost and minimal time commitment.

elihu 9y ago

I remember in one of Vernor Vinge's science fiction novels, whenever one space-faring civilization managed to capture a warship of another unfriendly civilization, they usually just melted it down for scrap metal because there was no way to trust all the embedded automation.

jbb67 9y ago

I am slowly making my home "smarter" but only installing things that don't use the internet or require or use an external service or account. Secondly for everything i install I write a document on how it works, how to override it or bypass it if it breaks, and how to remove it when I move out.