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Not sure if I'm just getting older, but the less things/complications in my home, the more peace of mind I have. Been watching the youtube LTT channel on his

Not sure if I'm just getting older, but the less things/complications in my home, the more peace of mind I have. Been watching the youtube LTT channel on his smart home and I feel all the things going on would drive me crazy. This doesn't apply only to tech, but even for my next house (Looking into passive homes, least possible HVAC footprint, floorplan for minimal plumbing/electrical).

jonathankoren 5y ago
I get the geeky joy of monitoring and possibly automatically controlling things, but the added benefit feels marginal at best for a home. It’s less than marginal unless you go big into the automation. The other thing that jades me to automation is that in my experience with technology, you either get a easy to use, but limited, remotely brickable, subscriptionware, or you have to roll your own, and end up debugging your bathtub. Neither is very appealing.
amphitheatre 5y ago
I struggle with this too. Whilst there is a lot of opportunities for learning and fun when setting these systems up, you soon forget how things intermingle and monitoring, upgrading, or debugging things becomes a chore. Systems like this balloon in complexity with all of the different server hardware, IoT standards, subnets, cables, etc. For the average user, things that aren't easy or set-and-forget are probably too much. That sense of overwhelm is my personal experience, at least.
iamjackg 5y ago
For me, a lot of that came down to making sure every automation I add is usable with the least amount of mental effort. For the longest time I didn't automate much at all and often questioned whether I needed all this or not, then we had a baby. Now we have a button in his nursery that will dim the lights, start playing white noise on a Google Home speaker, mark the start of a new nap on our Babybuddy instance, then turn off the lights after 30 seconds. When I press it again, it turns off the noise and stops the sleep tracking. If we didn't have Home Assistant we'd have to do all these things manually multiple times a day. Instead it just takes a single button press. It's a small example, but things like this will keep popping up, and I'm looking forward to making them easier.
- jethro_tell 5y ago
  Heh, our kids have an Alexa and a couple smart plugs for lamps in their rooms. They set their own bed/wake routines which was really great because we kinda got the buy in from them on how they want to do it and it's the same every time. They like to come by ever now and then and update the routine, add a step or piece of information. It's fun to do with them and it's nice to have them do their own thing but also not need an adult for everything thing.
- NegativeLatency 5y ago
  There’s no law of nature that says you need to track your kids sleep and upload it to a could service.
  - hayleox 5y ago
    It looks like it's self-hosted: https://github.com/babybuddy/babybuddy https://github.com/babybuddy/babybuddy
    - iamjackg 5y ago
      It is indeed. It's an interesting open source project too, because its usefulness is very much inversely proportional to the time you spend using it! Contributors often start submitting changes, then their children grow up and they lose interest in the project. Sort of a built-in attention span limit.
  - iamjackg 5y ago
    Good thing it's not a cloud service then!
huhtenberg 5y ago
I feel that the vast majority home automation tech got the whole thing backwards. They start with "we can do this" and then "let's see what we can bolt it on". Instead, they should've started with small things like being able to toggle every existing switch from your phone. Let lazy people be lazy efficiently. Now that has a mass appeal and would've led to a better adoption. Once this is in place, then you can build on it - dimmers, hues, scheduled and presence lighting/heating, etc. Once this is done, accepted and integrated in everyday life, move to more advanced gadgetry.
- detaro 5y ago
  "Traditional" home automation tech does exactly that angle. Turns out "upgrade every existing switch" does not have the mass-appeal over a lot cheaper "replace one thing, do a bunch of things with thing" offerings. Most people need to have the latter before they get the appetite to invest in the former. As annoying as they are, "smart" plugs/bulbs are a lot easier and cheaper to deploy in many cases. It's an interesting balance IMHO. If you can control everything you can build a lot on top, but even just being able to control a few things might already provide you a lot of benefit.
- nouveaux 5y ago
  "toggle every existing switch from your phone" Home automation is not intuitive. It turns out that toggling every existing switch from your phone is not an ideal goal. Pulling out your phone to use your home automation gets annoying fast. The best home automation is a system that works without intervention. A good analogy is a digital thermostat vs a traditional analog one. A digital thermostat has the ability to change temperature targets depending on time of day and day of the week. The best type of switches are the ones that work without intervention. The most common is the sunset porch lights and the sunrise alarm clocks. Other good ones are humidity sensors that trigger bathroom fans, TV/stereo/console that turns on when you pick up your game controller, floor lights that trigger only at night when it senses movement, lights that change color temperature and lumens depending on time of day, etc.
  - Tyr42 5y ago
dsr_ 5y ago
Misquoted from the Internet: Tech enthusiasts have voice-controlled smart home hubs; sysadmins have a printer and a gun next to it to shoot the printer if it starts acting up.
ryanianian 5y ago
Sufficiently advanced home automation is indistinguishable from a haunting. Lighting controlled by home-assistant is endlessly frustrating. Especially if zwave. The networks are slow, the devices are awkward to configure, and when things go wrong debugging is difficult. Sometimes it takes my lights a good 60 seconds to respond during which time I'll try a few different button dances which all then get lifo queued... End result is light automation that works 95% of the time with the 5% remainder being enough to sour the whole experience. This isn't home-assistant's "fault," it's the zwave product space being a convoluted mess that HA tries to paper over. Other integrations are better but each integration is a separate plugin thing so quality depends on who wrote the plugin. My house got a 10% premium due to the home-assistant setup according to the realtor. Lights and music and blinds all easily controlled from an iPad mounted to a thing in the hall. I left all the equipment including the raspberry pi that ran HA, but I took the SD card for privacy reasons. 99% certainty that they don't even know what Z-wave is let alone how to rebuild the network... I'm sure that if I buy a "smart house" in the future it will be beyond my abilities.
- jaywalk 5y ago
  I don't know what your Z-wave setup looks like, but all I've got are GE smart switches and GE smart outlets, controlled with Home Assistant using an Aeotec Z-stick. It works flawlessly with zero noticeable delay, 100% of the time. It sounds like you've either got some bad interference or bad devices.
  - oldsj 5y ago
    Same setup here. Love using z-wave as a standard and then bridging everything over to Homekit for siri / phone control center access
  - asveikau 5y ago
    I've had a lot of issues with battery powered z-wave devices not waking up. Also, IIRC there is a bug in the zwave-js github issue tracker about the 700 series Z-sticks dropping commands. Sometimes I need to reboot for outgoing packets to reach devices from the Z-stick.
lm28469 5y ago
I can't imagine the state of these houses one or two generations down the line. I witnessed "smart" houses when my parents' blinders died in "down" position and had no manual override... or when the electricity was down and they couldn't start their wood stove because it needs electricity to work... I think some people are just so drawn to tech that they end up in these kind of rabbit holes. It reminds me of my nerd friends in uni who spent weeks configuring their linux distro from scratch just to start over a few months later, they were showing me their new shiny shells, how the trackpad finally worked with X and Y drivers, how their tiling window manager was better than macos'. I don't think the end goal for them is to have a useable thing, it's more about tinkering and probably some form of attention seeking.
- nouveaux 5y ago
  >I witnessed "smart" houses when my parents' blinders died in "down" position and had no manual override... or when the electricity was down and they couldn't start their wood stove because it needs electricity to work... Are you saying you have a stove that doesn't have an electronic starter? Are you on a digital or analog thermostat? Does your home heater work without electricity? New technology will always have an early adoption phase. Smart blinds suck now but there is no reason why they cant be as reliable as an automatic garage door. It's a motor with RF control. It's not a complex thing.
  - joe_the_user 5y ago
    Are you saying you have a stove that doesn't have an electronic starter? Are you on a digital or analog thermostat? Does your home heater work without electricity? Historically and mostly today, a wood stove is a cast iron container you fill with wood mostly to heat a house. There have been innovations in shape, airflow etc to make them more efficient but they generally haven't used an electric lighter. Electric-light gas stoves normally don't need electricity to function - in a outage you can light them with a match or sparker. There have been gas heaters that don't require electricity but not central gas heaters, this true. Eastern California, where I currently live, has experienced a half-dozen days-long electrical outages in the last year alone. A the time two months, when I spent four days snowed-in, with it 45-40 degrees inside my apartment, is notable. What does or doesn't work without electricity is an important question.
alistairSH 5y ago
I mostly agree. I have a few smart switches for main lighting (5 switches of 20+) with basic automations (turn off at bed time, turn on front step and foyer when I get close to home after dark, turn all on if motion sensor trips while I'm not home). Every time I think about expanding this, I remember what a PITA it was to setup the basic stuff. And I don't bother. I'll walk my lazy ass to the switch instead. Doesn't help that Smartthings is a dumpster fire of shitty UX that glitches regularly. Anything "better" like HomeAssistant is the rough equivalent of using Linux desktop in the late 90s/early 00s.
enobrev 5y ago
I generally agree with this, although I'm also a fan of home automation. I want all my switches to continue to work (they do), no internet connection between me and my automated devices, no complicated "scenes", and I don't want to mess around with some UI every day. Setup, sure, but that's it. So in the end I have lights that turn on in any room we're in and turn themselves off some time after we've left. My porch light adjusts itself according to time of day, and my laundry tells me when it's done, which is huge for us since it's in the basement. I keep it simple (one JS file controls the whole house), but it's still a life improvement. My toddler recently knocked over my poorly placed server which damaged the zwave dongle. Replacing it took a couple hours, but the week spent without the automations was noticable. There's something about every room lighting up as I walk through the house that makes it feel more welcoming. A bit warmer. Also, my son loves to turn off the dining room light and then try to run through the dining room as fast as he can without setting off the motion sensor. It turns on every time, but it's a joy to watch.
- nouveaux 5y ago
  How do you do motion detection and presence in your setup? How do you make sure the lights doesn't turn off if you're just sitting in the room?
  - enobrev 5y ago
    Long timers. I'd love to have some sort of presence detection that will work with multiple people (including a child) without embedding a chip into our necks, but haven't found anything that seems reliable, yet. Room assistant sounds pretty cool, but I haven't had the time to play with it - and I'm not "installing" bluetooth on my toddler. Early on I had 5-15 minute timers in most rooms, but my wife and I have ended up sitting in a dark bathroom, or worse cooking in a dark kitchen - flailing our arms to get the lights back on far too many times. So, I made the timers in most rooms 30 minutes (20 in the bathroom, 5 in closets). That worked well everywhere but the kitchen; I added a second motion sensor there, and it pretty much always gets it right now. Once in a while the light will shut off in the living room when we're still and zoned out on our phones or a movie, but that's rare enough that it's not a big deal. Also we get to laugh at ourselves for being perfectly still for an entire half hour. --- Edit --- I imagine presence detection is significantly easier with one occupant, and I've daydreamed about setting up a "one-person-home" mode that just turns on the light in whatever room last detected someone and off everywhere else. But honestly everything works so well as-is, that I don't think it's really worth the effort.

jonathankoren 5y ago

I get the geeky joy of monitoring and possibly automatically controlling things, but the added benefit feels marginal at best for a home. It’s less than marginal unless you go big into the automation. The other thing that jades me to automation is that in my experience with technology, you either get a easy to use, but limited, remotely brickable, subscriptionware, or you have to roll your own, and end up debugging your bathtub. Neither is very appealing.

amphitheatre 5y ago

I struggle with this too. Whilst there is a lot of opportunities for learning and fun when setting these systems up, you soon forget how things intermingle and monitoring, upgrading, or debugging things becomes a chore. Systems like this balloon in complexity with all of the different server hardware, IoT standards, subnets, cables, etc. For the average user, things that aren't easy or set-and-forget are probably too much. That sense of overwhelm is my personal experience, at least.

iamjackg 5y ago

For me, a lot of that came down to making sure every automation I add is usable with the least amount of mental effort. For the longest time I didn't automate much at all and often questioned whether I needed all this or not, then we had a baby. Now we have a button in his nursery that will dim the lights, start playing white noise on a Google Home speaker, mark the start of a new nap on our Babybuddy instance, then turn off the lights after 30 seconds. When I press it again, it turns off the noise and stops the sleep tracking. If we didn't have Home Assistant we'd have to do all these things manually multiple times a day. Instead it just takes a single button press. It's a small example, but things like this will keep popping up, and I'm looking forward to making them easier.

jethro_tell 5y ago
Heh, our kids have an Alexa and a couple smart plugs for lamps in their rooms. They set their own bed/wake routines which was really great because we kinda got the buy in from them on how they want to do it and it's the same every time. They like to come by ever now and then and update the routine, add a step or piece of information. It's fun to do with them and it's nice to have them do their own thing but also not need an adult for everything thing.
NegativeLatency 5y ago
There’s no law of nature that says you need to track your kids sleep and upload it to a could service.
- hayleox 5y ago
  It looks like it's self-hosted: https://github.com/babybuddy/babybuddy https://github.com/babybuddy/babybuddy
  - iamjackg 5y ago
    It is indeed. It's an interesting open source project too, because its usefulness is very much inversely proportional to the time you spend using it! Contributors often start submitting changes, then their children grow up and they lose interest in the project. Sort of a built-in attention span limit.
- iamjackg 5y ago
  Good thing it's not a cloud service then!

huhtenberg 5y ago

I feel that the vast majority home automation tech got the whole thing backwards. They start with "we can do this" and then "let's see what we can bolt it on". Instead, they should've started with small things like being able to toggle every existing switch from your phone. Let lazy people be lazy efficiently. Now that has a mass appeal and would've led to a better adoption. Once this is in place, then you can build on it - dimmers, hues, scheduled and presence lighting/heating, etc. Once this is done, accepted and integrated in everyday life, move to more advanced gadgetry.

detaro 5y ago
"Traditional" home automation tech does exactly that angle. Turns out "upgrade every existing switch" does not have the mass-appeal over a lot cheaper "replace one thing, do a bunch of things with thing" offerings. Most people need to have the latter before they get the appetite to invest in the former. As annoying as they are, "smart" plugs/bulbs are a lot easier and cheaper to deploy in many cases. It's an interesting balance IMHO. If you can control everything you can build a lot on top, but even just being able to control a few things might already provide you a lot of benefit.
nouveaux 5y ago
"toggle every existing switch from your phone" Home automation is not intuitive. It turns out that toggling every existing switch from your phone is not an ideal goal. Pulling out your phone to use your home automation gets annoying fast. The best home automation is a system that works without intervention. A good analogy is a digital thermostat vs a traditional analog one. A digital thermostat has the ability to change temperature targets depending on time of day and day of the week. The best type of switches are the ones that work without intervention. The most common is the sunset porch lights and the sunrise alarm clocks. Other good ones are humidity sensors that trigger bathroom fans, TV/stereo/console that turns on when you pick up your game controller, floor lights that trigger only at night when it senses movement, lights that change color temperature and lumens depending on time of day, etc.
- Tyr42 5y ago

dsr_ 5y ago

Misquoted from the Internet: Tech enthusiasts have voice-controlled smart home hubs; sysadmins have a printer and a gun next to it to shoot the printer if it starts acting up.

ryanianian 5y ago

Sufficiently advanced home automation is indistinguishable from a haunting. Lighting controlled by home-assistant is endlessly frustrating. Especially if zwave. The networks are slow, the devices are awkward to configure, and when things go wrong debugging is difficult. Sometimes it takes my lights a good 60 seconds to respond during which time I'll try a few different button dances which all then get lifo queued... End result is light automation that works 95% of the time with the 5% remainder being enough to sour the whole experience. This isn't home-assistant's "fault," it's the zwave product space being a convoluted mess that HA tries to paper over. Other integrations are better but each integration is a separate plugin thing so quality depends on who wrote the plugin. My house got a 10% premium due to the home-assistant setup according to the realtor. Lights and music and blinds all easily controlled from an iPad mounted to a thing in the hall. I left all the equipment including the raspberry pi that ran HA, but I took the SD card for privacy reasons. 99% certainty that they don't even know what Z-wave is let alone how to rebuild the network... I'm sure that if I buy a "smart house" in the future it will be beyond my abilities.

jaywalk 5y ago
I don't know what your Z-wave setup looks like, but all I've got are GE smart switches and GE smart outlets, controlled with Home Assistant using an Aeotec Z-stick. It works flawlessly with zero noticeable delay, 100% of the time. It sounds like you've either got some bad interference or bad devices.
- oldsj 5y ago
  Same setup here. Love using z-wave as a standard and then bridging everything over to Homekit for siri / phone control center access
- asveikau 5y ago
  I've had a lot of issues with battery powered z-wave devices not waking up. Also, IIRC there is a bug in the zwave-js github issue tracker about the 700 series Z-sticks dropping commands. Sometimes I need to reboot for outgoing packets to reach devices from the Z-stick.

lm28469 5y ago

I can't imagine the state of these houses one or two generations down the line. I witnessed "smart" houses when my parents' blinders died in "down" position and had no manual override... or when the electricity was down and they couldn't start their wood stove because it needs electricity to work... I think some people are just so drawn to tech that they end up in these kind of rabbit holes. It reminds me of my nerd friends in uni who spent weeks configuring their linux distro from scratch just to start over a few months later, they were showing me their new shiny shells, how the trackpad finally worked with X and Y drivers, how their tiling window manager was better than macos'. I don't think the end goal for them is to have a useable thing, it's more about tinkering and probably some form of attention seeking.

nouveaux 5y ago
>I witnessed "smart" houses when my parents' blinders died in "down" position and had no manual override... or when the electricity was down and they couldn't start their wood stove because it needs electricity to work... Are you saying you have a stove that doesn't have an electronic starter? Are you on a digital or analog thermostat? Does your home heater work without electricity? New technology will always have an early adoption phase. Smart blinds suck now but there is no reason why they cant be as reliable as an automatic garage door. It's a motor with RF control. It's not a complex thing.
- joe_the_user 5y ago
  Are you saying you have a stove that doesn't have an electronic starter? Are you on a digital or analog thermostat? Does your home heater work without electricity? Historically and mostly today, a wood stove is a cast iron container you fill with wood mostly to heat a house. There have been innovations in shape, airflow etc to make them more efficient but they generally haven't used an electric lighter. Electric-light gas stoves normally don't need electricity to function - in a outage you can light them with a match or sparker. There have been gas heaters that don't require electricity but not central gas heaters, this true. Eastern California, where I currently live, has experienced a half-dozen days-long electrical outages in the last year alone. A the time two months, when I spent four days snowed-in, with it 45-40 degrees inside my apartment, is notable. What does or doesn't work without electricity is an important question.

alistairSH 5y ago

I mostly agree. I have a few smart switches for main lighting (5 switches of 20+) with basic automations (turn off at bed time, turn on front step and foyer when I get close to home after dark, turn all on if motion sensor trips while I'm not home). Every time I think about expanding this, I remember what a PITA it was to setup the basic stuff. And I don't bother. I'll walk my lazy ass to the switch instead. Doesn't help that Smartthings is a dumpster fire of shitty UX that glitches regularly. Anything "better" like HomeAssistant is the rough equivalent of using Linux desktop in the late 90s/early 00s.

enobrev 5y ago

I generally agree with this, although I'm also a fan of home automation. I want all my switches to continue to work (they do), no internet connection between me and my automated devices, no complicated "scenes", and I don't want to mess around with some UI every day. Setup, sure, but that's it. So in the end I have lights that turn on in any room we're in and turn themselves off some time after we've left. My porch light adjusts itself according to time of day, and my laundry tells me when it's done, which is huge for us since it's in the basement. I keep it simple (one JS file controls the whole house), but it's still a life improvement. My toddler recently knocked over my poorly placed server which damaged the zwave dongle. Replacing it took a couple hours, but the week spent without the automations was noticable. There's something about every room lighting up as I walk through the house that makes it feel more welcoming. A bit warmer. Also, my son loves to turn off the dining room light and then try to run through the dining room as fast as he can without setting off the motion sensor. It turns on every time, but it's a joy to watch.

nouveaux 5y ago
How do you do motion detection and presence in your setup? How do you make sure the lights doesn't turn off if you're just sitting in the room?
- enobrev 5y ago
  Long timers. I'd love to have some sort of presence detection that will work with multiple people (including a child) without embedding a chip into our necks, but haven't found anything that seems reliable, yet. Room assistant sounds pretty cool, but I haven't had the time to play with it - and I'm not "installing" bluetooth on my toddler. Early on I had 5-15 minute timers in most rooms, but my wife and I have ended up sitting in a dark bathroom, or worse cooking in a dark kitchen - flailing our arms to get the lights back on far too many times. So, I made the timers in most rooms 30 minutes (20 in the bathroom, 5 in closets). That worked well everywhere but the kitchen; I added a second motion sensor there, and it pretty much always gets it right now. Once in a while the light will shut off in the living room when we're still and zoned out on our phones or a movie, but that's rare enough that it's not a big deal. Also we get to laugh at ourselves for being perfectly still for an entire half hour. --- Edit --- I imagine presence detection is significantly easier with one occupant, and I've daydreamed about setting up a "one-person-home" mode that just turns on the light in whatever room last detected someone and off everywhere else. But honestly everything works so well as-is, that I don't think it's really worth the effort.