State of (my) smart home 2020

I have a house. My house has small computers here and there. Those are inside the light bulbs, on electric sockets and in many other places. I’m on a journey towards finding out if “Smart Home” makes any sense. This is a really short introduction to what I currently think about it.

History lesson

In the beginning, 2016, I used to call this thing “Home Automation”, but I realized pretty quickly that there is no automation. So the next step was to call it “Home Monitoring”. But just being able to check on your phone how warm is it in your living room isn’t much of a value. Outside of filling the tinkering needs at least.

The current term for me is “Smart Home”. Even though I’ve been following this scene for years already, I’m still not sure in 2020 that this Smart Home makes much sense. For years already, most of the smart devices are lights and how people are using those is they use their mobile phones to control those. My experience is that turning on lights or accessories with an app is not magical, it’s annoying. Traditional light switches are usually where you assume them to be and are quite intuitive to use.

State of (my) Smart Home

For long I’ve hated maintaining Raspberry Pi’s that are running some “critical infrastructure” and eventually corrupting either the hardware or the SD card. Still, some weeks ago I jumped into a wagon called Home Assistant (HA). It’s an open source project for home automation and it’s the most promising I’ve seen so far. It has support for a wide variety of different devices and services and includes nicely functioning features for actual automation. I’ve taken the the first steps towards actual automation.

Now my rules tell the system to send me messages if I forget my fridge door open and turn on the kitchen lights when I enter the room. So there’s potential to do much more. The usual response I get when discussing about this kind of simple things is that “time switches do the same” or “twilight switches have existed since forever”. However, just having the possibility to control those with software is pretty awesome. With the current setup I could make a rule that would turn my office light red when someone opens our front door and I have my BT-headphones connected to my phone. I’d like to see an electrician do that!

Hardware

During the years I’ve acquired some hardware. I have quite many IKEA Trådfri light bulbs, switches and the gateway. Not for every light, but for the most used lights at least. In addition I have TELLDUS Tellstick ZNet Lite v2 with 433MHz and Z-wave radios that’s using some sensors and a few Z-wave sockets. I have a replacement Z-wave.me UZB waiting but more about that on another post. Then there’s two Google Home Minis as smart speakers and some Chromecasts on the televisions. The network is provided by UniFi UAP-AC-Lite, which is also supported by HA for some features. Finally there are some RuuviTags inside the fridge and and freezer.

So in total, the house has got devices using 433MHz radio, Bluetooth, Z-wave and Zigbee. It would make sense to use only one protocol, but being free from limitations is really nice and I enjoy learning the differences. And even though the current trend is to start talking about “Connected home”, I appreciate security and privacy enough to keep everything offline. Apart from sending notifications outside, naturally.

What next

The next immediate actions for me will be about configuring Home Assistant to include all the simple rules and automations. But the real question is to find out if Smart Home makes any sense. I currently think that the main keyword towards a really smart home is “anticipation”. In the point where the home makes a decision before you know you need it, that’s where I would start to believe in Smart Home. What that means in concrete, I’ll figure it out sooner or later.