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.
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