Smart Home Journal: January 2018
Kind of like my language journals I'm writing roughly monthly on learning Japanese I figured I'd start writing about smart home in the same way. I tend to revisit a lot of these topics over time and instead of passing each one off as new, I might as well treat them as what they are; an evolution of my thoughts on the topic over time.
I didn't add anything new to my house this month. I still feel the situation is overly complicated with too many hubs and whatnot. But, of course, I only configure the hubs once so that doesn't matter so much.
Lights: I'm still happy with the purchases. I'm happiest with the Tradfri lights, but mostly because we've used them in rooms where the traditional light switches didn't actually control any lights and/or rooms we didn't start using really until after we had added the smart lights. In both cases we weren't breaking habits of using the traditional light switches and the smart switches are the only ones we use. I also helps of course that packs of the Ikea branded lights with switches are super cheap compared to the Hue ones.
Obviously, because there are no typical light switches to mess with in most of those cases, with those lights we never really hit a case where someone accidentally switches the light off for real. In fact, we've even gotten used to the situation in the living room. The problem lights are the 3-way lights. And there are two problems here, firstly, using smart switches means replacing 2 switches and that is more costly and none of the solutions seem to like this. In fact, Ikea uses the switches to break up the lights by "room". Ikea can't seem to comprehend the notion of multiple switches controlling the same lights.
Hue might support it. But everything is so stupidly expensive I'm not even willing to find out.
But, really, that means we have one light in our house presently with a smart bulb in which hits this problem. And, since we've discovered it, we simply made the decision to not use smart bulbs where we would have this problem. It is a non-issue. For us.
I leave the smart switches on the wall generally. Then, if it is inconvenient to get it, like turning the light off in the bedroom at night... I use my phone. Similarly, if I'm sitting in the family room and it gets dark, I use my phone. At night, when putting Cara to bed, instead of running through the house, I turn off non-essential lights from my phone. Add to it the ability to set the lights up to simulate our patterns when we're not home with some degree of randomness and you have a winning solution. I really like the smart lights. I'm not sure I care for the colored bulbs. We use them for Cara and we have 3 in the dining room.
As the for the smart lock... I'm still OK with it. As long as I reboot my phone every few days it is snappy at unlocking when I get home. The auto-locking is nice, and the ability to lock or unlock remotely is a nice little feature which I'm glad is there even if I never ending up needing it.
The Google Home Minis. I can't complain at $40. My wife definitely uses the one in the kitchen for creating grocery lists. I use the others at random for music, checking the time and setting alarms. Since the phone can do all of the smart stuff including the same voice controlled aspects they aren't exactly essential for that purpose. But they are slightly more convenient than having to pull out the phone every time. Had I paid full price for them, I might regret all but the kitchen speaker though.
And that is how I feel about the smart tech in my home that I'm using daily at the moment.
I didn't add anything new to my house this month. I still feel the situation is overly complicated with too many hubs and whatnot. But, of course, I only configure the hubs once so that doesn't matter so much.
Lights: I'm still happy with the purchases. I'm happiest with the Tradfri lights, but mostly because we've used them in rooms where the traditional light switches didn't actually control any lights and/or rooms we didn't start using really until after we had added the smart lights. In both cases we weren't breaking habits of using the traditional light switches and the smart switches are the only ones we use. I also helps of course that packs of the Ikea branded lights with switches are super cheap compared to the Hue ones.
Obviously, because there are no typical light switches to mess with in most of those cases, with those lights we never really hit a case where someone accidentally switches the light off for real. In fact, we've even gotten used to the situation in the living room. The problem lights are the 3-way lights. And there are two problems here, firstly, using smart switches means replacing 2 switches and that is more costly and none of the solutions seem to like this. In fact, Ikea uses the switches to break up the lights by "room". Ikea can't seem to comprehend the notion of multiple switches controlling the same lights.
Hue might support it. But everything is so stupidly expensive I'm not even willing to find out.
But, really, that means we have one light in our house presently with a smart bulb in which hits this problem. And, since we've discovered it, we simply made the decision to not use smart bulbs where we would have this problem. It is a non-issue. For us.
I leave the smart switches on the wall generally. Then, if it is inconvenient to get it, like turning the light off in the bedroom at night... I use my phone. Similarly, if I'm sitting in the family room and it gets dark, I use my phone. At night, when putting Cara to bed, instead of running through the house, I turn off non-essential lights from my phone. Add to it the ability to set the lights up to simulate our patterns when we're not home with some degree of randomness and you have a winning solution. I really like the smart lights. I'm not sure I care for the colored bulbs. We use them for Cara and we have 3 in the dining room.
As the for the smart lock... I'm still OK with it. As long as I reboot my phone every few days it is snappy at unlocking when I get home. The auto-locking is nice, and the ability to lock or unlock remotely is a nice little feature which I'm glad is there even if I never ending up needing it.
The Google Home Minis. I can't complain at $40. My wife definitely uses the one in the kitchen for creating grocery lists. I use the others at random for music, checking the time and setting alarms. Since the phone can do all of the smart stuff including the same voice controlled aspects they aren't exactly essential for that purpose. But they are slightly more convenient than having to pull out the phone every time. Had I paid full price for them, I might regret all but the kitchen speaker though.
And that is how I feel about the smart tech in my home that I'm using daily at the moment.
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