In terms of “smart” home appliances: the only stuff we have in our house are simple on/off switches and some dimmable lamps that are connected over Thread/Matter to our Apple TV.
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In terms of “smart” home appliances: the only stuff we have in our house are simple on/off switches and some dimmable lamps that are connected over Thread/Matter to our Apple TV.
It’s super convention, since the length of days fluctuates a fair bit up here, and we can just set it to turn on lights at sunset. But I’m like, super reluctant to get anything fancier than things like that.
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Legit wish that:
a) high quality non-smart appliances were the norm
b) there would not be any dedicated “smart” appliances with built-in controllers that quickly go out of date
c) to make an appliance “smart”, you can plug in a dedicated, optional controller that comes in some standard form-factor -
Idk, maybe it’s a pipe dream. But I find the idea appealing of having a core system which is separable from a secondary, optional networked extension.
The idea of smart home stuff is not entirely a bad one I think. Centralized digital controls are convenient. But not if that directly translates to enormous amounts of unserviceable e-waste.
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@yosh I don't know exactly the right balance, but I've leaned hard on zwave outlets and/or switches that are all driven by a Raspberry Pi running HomeAssistant. I think it has a good progressive enhancement story. Everything works as a physical switch even if I unplugged all the smart stuff. Home Assistant can run completely over my local network, so I don't have any hard cloud dependencies. But I also have it linked to Google Home so I can do stuff like say "Hey Google, turn off the lights."
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@yosh I've got a bunch of Philips Hue bulbs too, which I really like, but I find smart bulbs in general are less than ideal because they don't integrate with physical switches. I've solved this by 3d printing covers for the switches connected to the smart bulbs and I stick a remote on top of them. The switch stays on all the time and mostly we use the remote.
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@yosh If I were starting from scratch (like new construction), I think what I'd do is use smart outlets everywhere, and instead of switches for lights I'd wire them up to a zwave or zigbee relay (with a physical switch that lives somewhere out of sight for a manual override), and then put a bunch of zwave/zigbee remotes all over and have the mapping of switches to light circuits be completely software defined.
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@yosh Oh, also back on smart lights. In my experience they last far longer than the non-smart bulbs. We have 14 Hue lights and over the last 6 years only one has failed. On the other hand, the regular LED bulbs fail so often I wish I could replace them with incandescent bulbs.