Well, What Do You Know? The Atlantic Confirms My Suspicions: Home Automation

Hardware
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There is something satisfying about having one’s suspicions confirmed. I have always doubted the real-world efficiency of home automation.

“I’m no Luddite. I run a software company! I see the allure of high-tech gadgets and have fallen for their promises before. When my wife and I built a house more than a decade ago, we opted for all kinds of automated systems: low-voltage controls, mechanized blinds, irrigation systems that measure rain so the sprinklers come on only when you need them. We regretted it almost immediately. What we discovered is that this stuff requires setup, which can take more time than just doing things manually, and is maddeningly glitchy, forcing you to pay someone handsomely by the visit or the hour to fix your appliances for you.

Tech makes many things better, but you shouldn’t have to learn how to use a house. You shouldn’t need a tech tour and an app (or five) to turn the heat down or clean the dishes. You shouldn’t have to worry that pressing the wrong button will set off a chain of events you don’t know how to undo. All these powerful processors and thousands of lines of code have succeeded in making everyday things slower, harder to use, and less reliable than they used to be.

”

Excerpt From

“Smart Homes Are Terrible”

Jason Fried

The Atlantic

This material may be protected by copyright.

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For anyone paywalled, this looks like he cleaned up a blog post for The Atlantic.

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One counter point, if only against the general sentiment.

We just installed mini-splits in a house with hot water radiator heating. Clever programming hack. Set the mini-splits directly above the radiators to push air horizontally across the ceiling. Set the mini-split opposite the radiator to project air flow downwards. These are forced convection loops that improve the uniformity of the heat distribution in a given room. Tie the set configurations on the mini-splits to two button clicks on the app on your smart phone, one button to turn on/off the two upstairs units and one button for the two downstairs units.

Then sit back and be amazed at how much more uniform the temperature feels in the rooms when the radiators kick on and you click two buttons on your smart phone to direct the air flow (rather than running around to four different rooms with a hand-held remote playing with button presses to guess whether you have the right settings).

Now if I could only get the mini-splits to recognize that the radiators are on and turn themselves on, I’d be even happier.

To skew a common phrase: Efficiency is in the eye of the programmer.

Otherwise, the example shows where automation was so over-the-top excessive and so poorly designed for its basic use that only its programming master likely could control it (if even that).

–
JJW

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As someone that works in the industry, this is music to my ears.

As I see it, there are two classes of smart homes, the hobbyist tinkerer forever person, and the “just make it work flawlessly” luxury market.

The hobbyist/DIY market is booming because cheap products from Asia have taken over and the market is like the early years of ham radio - users are amazed it even worked at all and love forever tinkering and tweaking to keep things working and their stable of gadgets growing.

Expectations on reliabiity are low and users tolerate poorly designed hardware and software far more than their phones, computers, and laptops.

That’s why, IMHO, Home Assistant has become so popular in the last few years.

The luxury market will always exist, as it mixes technology with design and aesthetics. Truth be told, there is more money to be made in the design side of things.

For example, the ideal luxury client spends at most 10 minutes discusssing the tech and features of smart lighting and then 2 hours trying to choose the color, appearance, and metallic finish of the lighting they want installed.

Luxury clients don’t question why a smart dimmer can sell for $500 when you can also buy one at a hardware store for $50 or less.

In fairness, the luxury smart home market is like any luxury market. You can drive to work and run errands in a Kia, VW, BMW, Mercedes, or a Ferrari. The buyer of a Ferrari doesn’t question why it costs so much more than a Kia.

They buyer of a high-end product also expects to pay for every aspect of the process - sales, support, maintenance, replacement parts, etc.

Hobbyists, on the other hand, question every cost, both legitimate and not, and balk about fees to pay for back-end services needed to keep thing runnings or front-end equipment for fully local operation that is not sold as a loss-leader for subscriptions/cloud services.

(We are now seeing a stream of early smart home product companies adding subscription fees, shutting down services, or going out of business because they never calculated the true cost of keeping their devices running.)

Just a few thoughts, not intended to judge any specific buyers or manufacturers.

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Another aspect: We get more lazy when sitting on the couch and controlling more and more with “smart home”. We have two legs, two arms (and a brain!) and should use this to go to the kitchen turning on the coffee machine, or open windows or switching on the light.

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I didn’t mind the price, it’s paying for the support and service that bothers me. :joy:

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Is that the thought regarding AI as well? We should actually do our work and not have AI do part or all of what we are getting paid to do?

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Thanks for the non-paywall version.

FWIW I despise home automation. We don’t even have an automatic dishwasher at all, or a dryer. First is because of too many heirloom dishes that cannot be washed in a dishwasher and a perfectly good husband who does an excellent job. Second is no need, low humidity and a wooden drying rack work fine.

The only home automation-like stuff I do like and use a lot is a large population of various security camera, IR, thermal, visual some with pan, tilt and zoom all available on my phone. Reason is 24/7 surveillance of the sheep pens so we have documentation of predator issues. I’m fully expecting to have a wolf problem someday, and if I then shoot the offending critter I need the security camera footage to prove it was attacking my sheep and therefore I am allowed to kill it. Ballot box biology never works and the wolf disaster in Colorado is a prime example.

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Having Alexa tell the Ecobee to raise/lower the temperature setting or turn the AC on/off is convenient, especially when I’m a couple of floors away from the Ecobee. Alexa and the Hue hub control fixed on/off times for lights. When we go to bed, we tell Alexa to turn off all the lights. These conveniences have done nothing to diminish our quality of life, and, frankly, have added little to our joy. They’re just small conveniences.

None of this has caused us to forget “how to use a house”. There’s no “chain of events [we] don’t know how to undo”.

More clickbait.

Katie

And no, my wife and I are not afraid of Alexa knowing about our patterns. Our daily lives are so ordinary and mundane that the data about our patterns are never going to present a threat.

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For some things automation is nice. Having the lights on when you come home and turn off when you leave. Controlling brightness and turning lights off and on from another room is nice. I haven’t had too many issues with my set up, but it’s pretty simple.

You could argue we do the same thing with productivity. Make things needlessly complex when they could be incredibly simple.

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I don’t consider the article clickbait. Besides, walking is good for us.:man_walking: It is good for me to walk up and down the stairs, get out of the recliner to adjust the thermostat, turn on the lights, and more. :wink::slightly_smiling_face: I think it is wonderful that it gives you joy, and I’m sure that is true for others; but it would create frustration for me anytime I had to “fix” the automation. :slightly_smiling_face:

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There are lots of convenience in the Smart Home.

But I still don’t believe it’s ready for primetime.

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A few things I have found good utility in:

  • turning on two cozy laps just before my morning alarm goes off, so I have just a little guiding light when stepping out of the bedroom during the dark season
  • outdoor lights follows sunset / sunrise timings
  • notifications from the washing machine that it has completed its cycle, same for the tumble dryer.
  • remotely adjusting the climate control from a significantly reduced “vacation” setting, back to normal on last day of the trip and returning to a normally heated home
  • have the front door automatically unlock when coming home, esp nice when carrying groceries or other items with both hands
  • lowering a bathroom curtain right before sunrise to avoid the intense sunlight when going for a night-time wee (summertime only when sunrise can be as early as 03:30 AM)

All our “smart” devices also have a physical control and we never talk to any “Siri / Alexa / Google” type of assistant to run actions.

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Great photo - awesome!

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I was hoping you would chime in! The presence of Control4 in the house suggested that luxury market model, where you have “a guy” to take care of your home automation just as you have a pool guy, GC, etc. Doesn’t mix well with all the random hobbyist stuff, let alone the whole unwanted extra tied to other features you want (most nice-looking fridges being smart, etc.)

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Yes, I also preach the sanity of always having physical controls in parallel to automatic operations.

The point I’m trying to make isn’t the utility of a perfectly functioning smart home, rather, even ignoring the cost of DIY versus luxury, in practial day-to-day operation, the smart home is still like the early days of PCs and Macs.

Power users and enthusiasts value the novelty and true empowerment when things work, and tolerate the problems that shouldn’t exist.

Much like my early days where I loved what I could do with my PC, that the twice a day blue-screen, fingers-crossed, will it reboot ok or will I have to spend a day rebuilding config.sys, or will the Mac beachball stop bouncing or need more drastic corrective action are thankfully long gone.

Smart homes are still in the blue-screen/bouncing beachball novelty days more than not. Early adopters love it, others prefer to sit things out a bit longer.

P.S. Although having physical smart home device controls are a great fallback, it is like when first using a word processor and admitting that you transcribe everything with paper and pen “just in case” the flaky hard drive fails and your lose several hours of creative composition typed only into a less than reliable word processor.

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Point well taken regarding this being the “early days”. Unfortunately, device manufacturers are still trying their hardest to lock us in to them as a single and only vendor. Probably why we don’t see a lot of adoption of more open standards like Threads / Matter, because then they’d have to compete on actual features, price and quality. Being able to mix and match devices across vendors / manufacturers would be a great thing for consumers and the whole IoT industry, I think. Competition drives development while lock-in is commonly step one of a multi-year enshittification plan…

Here I will respectfully disagree with you. Having the physical control right there is often much faster and convenient than pulling out a phone and starting an app. It is also a universally known interface so any family member or other guest can easily operate the devices.

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I totally agree with you. I think my point got lost in the larger discussion. I am a strong advocate of multiple ways of doing the same thing in a smart home. Not just for different users, but the same person may prefer a different approach at different times.

Sitting on the couch, a voice interface to change media or volume on a TV can be the most convenient. With. sleeping spouse or partner, voice control is the most intrusive method compared to using a physical button or even an app.

The point, I didn’t make successfuly, I think? We are in the early days of smart home systems still, so fallback options (like a physical control) are still plentiful because the primary method of operation is unreliable or fails just frequently enough, that it cannot be trusted as the only means of control.

If a modern computer or computing device (iphone, tablet, etc.) required multiple reboots a day to work we wouldn’t accept that as the trade-off for using the tech - we’d shout everywhere how the tech was failing, vote with our wallet (returning to point of purchase), and sitting out the market until it improved.

Unfortunately, from my perspective, the majority of smart home hobbyists and even less technical users, are tolerating too much mediocracy and poor quality while demanding ever lower prices, that the industry is not compelled to apply the same level of quality control and more thoughtful design as a lot of the the rest of the technology industry.

Too many discussions of smart home tech start with “It’s work great. I only have to reboot it a few times a month” or “I’ve only had to tear things down and rebuild my setup once or twice a year”.

Smartphones made cameras available to everyone without becoming a photography hobbyist or understanding all the arcane terminology (f/stop, shutter speed, ISO ratings, depth of field) that only a few wanted to know.

We are not there yet with smart home - Apple has been “meh” too with HomeKit/Apple Home. Better than some others, but not up to the standards they have set themselves with phones and computers.

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So you do have a dishwasher … :wink:

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Going 200 mph around a track is fun!