I am failing to see the interest in having tons of IOT devices to manage, connect, segment, etc… Why would someone want to do it? To be clear, I have friends deep in it but… I still don’t understand. Can anyone try to explain the magic I am failing to see?
Edit: Thank you all for sharing your experiences! The ones I found more interesting are those that can easily translate in reducing or tracking consumption. The rest I hear but makes more sense when I look at it from an hobbyist perspective.
I personally don’t have any of that but here’s what I would like to use it for. When I go away for, say, two weeks, I’d like to be able to randomly flick lights and TV on and off in my apartment to seem like someone’s home. Currently I do it by plugging floor lamps into timered power socket controllers, but they aren’t internet enabled so all I can do is program them to come on and off at specified times during the day, which an observant burglar could figure out.
I would also like to save on gas bills and turn the heating off when I go away. But if it’s winter time and I go away for 2 weeks, I hate coming back to a cold flat that take ages to warm up to comfortable temperatures. I’d like to be able to turn the heating off when I leave, and then back on, say, a whole day before I come back.
That latter one can be accomplished by plenty of different WiFi thermostats. That’s become such an integral part of things that I hardly think of it as any kind of home automation anymore. Damned if I want to get up at night to go adjust the thermostat when it’s too hot or cold.
For me it’s a fun hobby, plain and simple. Some people like maintaining saltwater tanks, some people like miniature train sets, I like maintaining a smart home and automating repeat tasks.
In short, enlightened laziness.
I can turn the bedroom lights on and off, from my bed.
I can turn the bathroom light off, after my young daughter left it on, in the middle of the night.
My livingroom lights colour shift, to keep my family’s sleep cycle in vague check.
I can turn my heating down room by room, if it’s not needed. Conversely, I can preheat the house, on the way home.
While the setup took a bit of prep work, it’s now highly reliable, and makes my life a lot easier.
My favorite automation is adding a door sensor and motion sensor in the bathroom and replaced the bathroom light and exhaust switch with a ZigBee switch. Now we don’t have to worry about bathroom light anymore. I haven’t touched the bathroom light switch for months now. It’s automatically turned on when the door opened, stay on if the bathroom is occupied, and turned off if the bathroom is empty (15 minutes of no movements, lower than that you’ll start gettinh the light turned off when you’re sitting on the throne).
Agreed, a little home automation can be nice. I like being able to turn my lights weird colours on a whim, it’s pretty. With the exception of edge cases and people who have a disability I really don’t understand smart large appliances and smart locks. I really hope there’s a reliable smart lock for them and people in the edge cases. I haven’t looked into it at all so I’ll just leave it there.
Unfortunately, a lot of appliances have jumped on the IoT bandwagon, but have missed the wood for the trees. They all want you to use their own proprietary app to control it. This cripples the biggest advantage of IoT, synergies.
A tumble dryer that you can turn on and off from an app is fairly useless. A tumble dryer that can sync its load with the other appliances, and the current solar panel output is a different story. Even with simpler setups there are synergies. Having a light pulse when the washing is done could be extremely useful to some people. Particularly if the appliance is in another part of the house.
As for smart locks… The less said about them, the better. Unfortunately, the “S” in IoT stands for security. That’s fine for a lightbulb etc, but not for a critical door lock. It’s frustrating. I would love a decent smart, well made, door lock, with a viable open protocol. They just don’t exist yet.
As for why a smart lock would be good? Dynamic access control. With a normal lock, if you give someone a key, they have full access, whenever. They can also copy your key, and so taking it back isn’t always reliable. A smart lock lets you authorise and de-authorise people on the fly. E.g. it works normally for you, but your mother in law’s login (keycard, dongle, app, fingerprint etc) sets off a warning on your phone. You might also want to let a delivery driver open the door, while watching them through a camera. Your package is now secured, and even the driver can’t get back to it.
I have a Yale front door lock tied in to Home Assistant through Zigbee. It’s completely controlled locally.
I own a bed and breakfast. The day a guest arrives, I have homemade apps that get the last 4 digits of their phone numbers and program them into the lock. The day they leave those numbers are deleted from the lock. The lock also runs on schedules. It locks at 10pm and unlocks at 7:30am, unless we have no guests where it just always stays locked.
It’s so so nice. It’s also pretty secure.
As others said, fun and convenience.
For example: when I start a movie, the lights in my living room dim or turn off automatically. Sure, I could get up and do and set several lights manually, but I would probably not bother and watch a movie in a lit room. When I stop or pause the movie, lights go back to the normal setting.
If it’s dark when I get home and I open the front door, it starts the default lighting program. Sure I could fumble for the light switches in the dark, but it’s another convenience.
Various automations, conveniences, and efficiencies that can ultimately save a lot of time &/or money.
1 ) sleep hygiene = a) close the roller shutters or blackout blinds at night b) open them gradually at the same time every day, play the tron soundtrack, and start brewing my coffee. c) drop the temperature by x degrees 1 hour before bedtime.
2 ) house can start growing mould under certain conditions = run the dehumidifier after x amount of time above y average humidity.
3 ) energy efficiency = a) when weather is predicted to rise above 25c, close roller shutters on sunny side of house. b) when temperature is rises above x, or drops below y, turn on air con.
4 ) security = encrypt and upload security camera footage every 5 minutes.
Etc, etc, etc. None of the above should be difficult to set up, nor insecure… We shouldn’t need to go to great lengths to automate our lives for comfort and convenience without our privacy being invaded… but in the age of surveillance capitalism, where corporations are scrambling to monetise everything we say and do, and most hardware and software vendors are actively working against us, our only solution is to tinker, hack, and patch together a multitude of disparate software and systems. Problem solving can be fun, but I’d prefer home automation to be easy and effortless.
Having my lights turn off from a voice control is really useful when I want to take a nap but I found that it was weird having all this shit tied into a strangers cloud (google, amazon, apple, whatever). If its hosted at home its usually just fine. As long as ET doesn’t phone home.
I have only some smart lights, a Philips Hue system, and only use limited automation, but for me it is brilliant.
I live in Sweden so during the winters we have to wake up hours before the sunrise, waking up in darkness is dificult for me, so I have set up my Hue system to act as part of my alarm clock.
At 05:00 my alarm goes off, just before that my smart lights in my bedroom and hallway slowly turned on, so my eyes are already adjusted to the light, this also means that I am more alert and ready to get up. A few hours later the lights turn off.
During weekends the I don’t have an alarm, and the lights turn on at 07:00, meaning I wake up slowly to a lit room.
I have been thinking of adding automation for the lights for when I come home after work, but so far I am happy enough with manually turning on the lights just outside the door.
What I really want is a smart home that tells me that the stove is on and been unattended for over 20 minutes now.
And which can tell me which when I went to bed last night.
Obviously it would have to be offline not some crowd service lives streaming to the NSA.
Home Assistant can do that. Put a Shelly smart plug in the stove outlet to see if it’s using power (or do you have an old fasioned gas stove?). It can also track what time you turned off your lights last night.
I do it mostly because I’m forgetful. So I automate what I forget. For example I always forget I’ve put the washing on so I get repeating alerts to hang it out. The alerts stop once I’ve scanned the NFC tag on the washing machine.
I have still resisted any smart devices to this day, but I would absolutely love the option of a no strings attached way of getting a text/notification when the laundry is done
I put a Shelly smart plug in my washing machine outlet. If it detects the machine using power for 30 seconds and then stop using power for 5 minutes, then it sends a signal to Home Assistant, and HA send a notification to my phone. It’s easy.
I’ll look into this, thanks.
I have similar but with just a basic smart plug. Rental life.
My home automation setup includes:
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Texting me and/or my wife whenever the washer or dryer in the basement finishes a load of laundry, but only if we’re home. If neither is home then it waits until one of us is and only texts that person.
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Turns on exterior / driveway lights when one of us arrives home after dark.
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Turns off exterior / driveway lights when we have both left home.
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Sets our Ecobee thermostats to “away” when we have both left home, and to “home” when somebody arrives home.
I also have a “bedtime” button that ensures all lights are off, thermostats are set to their “sleep” profile, and doors are locked.
Those are the nicer things we use pretty much daily. We have others as well.
I am starting with home automation and I am always fascinated by some of the idea I read on the Internet. Did you come up with this yourself or is there a list of conditions and triggers with devices somewhere I can use with Home Assistant?
I came up with these myself over time, they started 10+ years ago using a Mac platform called Indigo, but since moving into our new house a year ago I’ve switched over to Home Assistant as well. I have a background that includes 10 years of software development & another 15 of IT, so these sorts of things come fairly easily to me when I think about it a bit.
My wife and I use iPhones and I found iCloud3, which is a great add-on that tracks locations based on those devices. I started out with the washer/dryer notification with the simple realization that we regularly forgot about laundry in our washer in the basement since we’d forget that we had started a load. So I figured out how to have HA send us alerts when the washer or dryer finished. But I quickly realized that wasn’t all that useful if one or both of us was at work, shopping, etc. I then realized I could set up a trigger based on a time schedule that checks if we’re home or not, and only sends the alert if we are. So I have a HA automation that is triggered every 10 minutes by a timer, but the timer is disabled by default. That automation uses iCloud3 to check if either of us are home. If we are then the automation calls a script to notify us. If we’re not home then the automation resets the timer for 10 minutes. When the washer completes it triggers an automation that just starts that timer running. That gives us a little time to park the car, bring in any groceries, etc. before being reminded that we have laundry waiting.
How do you do the “both away or home”?
If they’re using Home Assistant then it’s pretty straightforward. You can either have the devices report back their location and update based on a Geofence or you can check and see if everyone’s on the wifi or not
Since we’re an iPhone family I use iCloud3 in HomeAssistant to track our devices. After setting that up and associating the phones with people in HA it was just a matter of creating triggers based on us entering the home zone:
alias: Somebody Arrives Home trigger: - platform: zone entity_id: person.jack zone: zone.home event: enter - platform: zone entity_id: person.jill zone: zone.home event: enterWe live at the end of a dead-end, so I set up the home zone to extend down the road a bit. That gives iCloud3 enough time to figure out we’re home and trigger the automation in HA while we’re still approaching. I combine the above with a check to see if it’s roughly sunset to sunrise, and if it is then turn on the outdoor lights.
For doing things like turning off the lights when nobody is home, I have a similar trigger for everybody leaving the home zone, followed by a conditional that verifies everybody is away:
condition: - condition: or conditions: - condition: template value_template: >- {{ states('person.jack') != 'home' and states('person.jill') != 'home' }}
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A different take from a different person.
Accessibility for my disabilities, able to have the lights turned down when I have a migraine and can’t get up because of pain, as well as reminders and timers with just my voice. Automation helps with my disabilities too.
It is fun to do.
But for practical reasons the biggest thing for me has been easily connecting switches together.
For example my kitchen has two big lights. Each light has its own switch but they put the switches in the opposite side of the room, so if you want both on you need to turn on one walk across the kitchen to turn on the other and do the same thing to turn them off.
With automation/IOT I can now logically connect the switches together so turning on one switch will turn on the other.
When I wake up and leave my bedroom l, the lights at the backdoor turn on so I can see where I’m going. When I get back from walking the dog, the camera knows it’s me and triggers the heater in the bathroom so it’s toasty when I’m showering. When I’m done in the shower, and turn the heater off, the coffee machine turns on. By the time I’m dressed, my coffee is ready to go.
That’s just one routine I’ve got set up. I’ve got ones for both kids rooms for wake up and bedtime stuff.
It’s pretty nice.
It’s a hobby. Some people like automating things. Some people are overdoing it. And some like to have a central control on their phone for everything. It’s nerd heaven. I am some people, but not overly excessive. And I want everything to still be usable by guests.
I personally have a few smart devices mostly because I keep forgetting to do things. Window sensors and thermostats that work together. When I open the windows, they turn down. The windows remind me to close them after 10 minutes. When I leave home, the heating turns down.
Light automations are for when you want to be lazy, like me. When I’m away or when the sun comes up, light turn off. When I arrive, hallway light turns on. When the sun goes down, some lights in the living room turn on. I don’t have any motion sensor stuff because it doesn’t work the way I want (we all know the horrors of motion controlled bathroom lights at the office). The only reasonable sensor I could imagine is actual presence detection, which just recently became a thing but I will wait at least until there exists one by a privacy focused company like Eve.
I would like to get something for my curtains but it’s all getting a bit too expensive.
The trick is to not use any smart devices that run in the cloud. Not only because of privacy but also because you don’t want to be freezing or sit in the dark just because the internet is out or the whole company shuts down. This is what people are always joking about over smart homes, but it doesn’t have to be this way. Keep everything in your own network. You can still access it from outside through the hub but that’s optional.
Home Assistant has a really good basic presence detection: wifi. If you phone is connected to your home wifi network, then you’re home. Else you’re away. Simple. Works. Local only. No extra sensors.
I mean presence in a specific room/area, not in general. Homekit knows if I’m at home, that’s not a problem.
That’s harder, but perhaps the new wifi 7 sensing can help in the near future.
It is already possible but the only one available yet is from a Chinese company and it needs their app (and cloud) to work so that’s not an option https://www.aqara.com/us/product/presence-sensor-fp2/
In addition to all the automation everyone has talked about, some of us are also data nerds.
I enjoy knowing the temp, air quality, etc. in every room. How does this change throughout the day/season? Did leaving this door open or this fan on improve anything? What can I automate at what threshold to improve things?
You can also get a lot of data about energy usage too. And if you have solar and battery, it’s neat seeing how much it affects and how much you save.
Automation is useful, but in the end it’s just a hobby like many other things. It’s fine to be into it or not into it.
