I’m a huge fan of smart homes, and there are a great many benefits I value greatly. One of the drawbacks of having been a relatively early adopter, however, is that there’s been a certain amount of trial and error involved.
Most of the things I’ve done I would do again in a new home, but there are a couple of exceptions …
There are many things I value
There are those who argue that a truly smart home only qualifies as such when it uses automation. I don’t quite agree with them: there are many aspects of my smart home which are manually controlled using a voice command that I would still consider smart.
However, I do subscribe to the idea that anything that can be automated should be automated, and the automations are some of my most valued features.
For example, every morning when it’s time to wake up, the bedroom blind automatically opens, letting in the daylight. I find that a very gentle way to wake. (I’m fortunate that there is only a very short period of the year in which I need to wake up before it gets light!) I also very much appreciate that my kitchen lights come on whenever I walk into it.
But I’m also a great fan of voice commands, especially when they trigger scenes. For example, the command living room relax switches on selected indirect lighting in the living room, set to a warm color temperature, while switching off unwanted lights. Technically, it might be possible to automate this with some combination of light and presence sensors, but that’s honestly more trouble than it’s worth, a point I’ll return to shortly.
But there are two things I now consider mistakes
Smart home technology might be considered to date all the way back to 1975 in the form of the X10 protocol. By that standard, I was a rather late adopter, kicking off my own smart home in 2013. All the same, I was still the first to do it among my friends, which includes quite a few techies.
While there were online communities of early adopters of smartphone-controlled smart home systems, it was very much a case of everybody experimenting. Overall, I consider my smart home setups across the years to be very successful. There are, though, two things that I consider to be mistakes – one of them an extremely expensive one.
Floor-to-ceiling smart window blinds
Just to be clear, I’m a huge fan of the smart blinds on my standard-sized windows. I’ve already mentioned the wake-up automation in the bedroom, and I really like the ability to just give open and close voice commands to the other blinds.
However, floor-to-ceiling windows are another matter! Two issues have arisen over the years, and I would now consider both of them mean that these smart blinds amounted to a mistake.
First, in my flat, as in many with floor-to-ceiling windows, the windows run the full width of the apartment. That requires multiple blinds, and in my case I have seven in total. Having them block all light means running them so that they are almost touching, and this led to the first problem.
Because each blind is relatively wide and has a very narrow clearance, it has not been uncommon for the edges to catch on each other. The width of them means that even a tiny difference in the rate of unwinding of the two sides of the blinds is enough to catch on the one next to it. That results in wonky blinds that require a manual reset. It’s not like this happens all the time, but it has been a sufficiently common occurrence to become annoying.
Second, with the battery-powered blinds that are the norm these days, the sheer weight of a floor-to-ceiling blind means that the motor has to work hard and the batteries are really taxed. When these blinds are raised and lowered twice a day, every day, even heavy-duty batteries only last a couple of months. That might not sound too bad, but when there are seven of them, it ended up feeling like I was constantly having to replace the batteries on unresponsive blinds.
Although I do have an aesthetic preference for blinds over curtains, I’ve now concluded that for full-width floor-to-ceiling windows, curtains are much more sensible – and I’ll in future stick to manual ones!
Overly-clever scenes
To me, scenes are one of the most powerful smart home technologies. A single voice command can control a whole bunch of devices simultaneously across multiple rooms.
I’ve already mentioned one of them above. Another example is a lights-out command when going to sleep. This not only switches off the bedroom lamps, but also switches off every other light in the home.
However, there have been times when I’ve got overly ambitious with these. For example, during times of the day when it’s just me in the home, it seemed logical to combine switching on lights in one room with switching them off in another, so I created separate ‘home alone’ scenes.
I have a home office, and when I activate the lighting in there, it seemingly made sense to switch off the lighting in the living room, and vice versa. For example, this was how that living room relax command looked for a time:
What I found over time, however, was that this would often prove to be a nuisance. If I wanted to use my MacBook Pro while I was in the living room, I would go and fetch it from the office. The smart light switch for the office also activates scenes rather than individual lights, so it would switch on the office lighting – and simultaneously switch off the living room lighting so that I’d have to switch it back on again when I returned just a few seconds later.
Pretty much every time I thought I was being clever/efficient by doing this sort of thing, it would eventually turn out to be more trouble than it was worth.
These days I mostly have scenes that control a single room and live with the shame of sometimes having to use two voice commands in succession …
What smart home setups have you tried before concluding they were a mistake? Please share in the comments.
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Photo by Francesco Ungaro on Unsplash