Home Automation

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Home automation is the residential extension of building automation.

It is automation of the home, housework or household activity.

Home automation may include centralized control of lighting, HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning), appliances, security locks of gates and doors and other systems, to provide improved convenience, comfort, energy efficiency and security.

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Google Nest Protect, worth it? (alien.top)

submitted 11 months ago by questfor17@alien.top to c/homeautomation@selfhosted.forum

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Looking to upgrade the smoke detectors in a 1400 sq foot 3br house. I think I'll need 4 of them. I'd like something that is easy to silence when I'm cooking, and can alert me to problems when I'm not there.

Google Nest Protect is recommended, but at > $100 per each they are quite expensive.

Worth it?

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[–] BeachBarsBooze@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

They piss me off but I still purchased them. Only the detection portion of the device has a finite lifespan. So, if Nest, and now Google, actually cared about keeping electronic waste out of landfills they could have made the detection component modular and let us refresh just that part when it ages out, at perhaps $50 instead of tossing the whole thing. And, it will force you to toss it when it hits ten years, none of that old school smoke detector well it still seems to work stuff.

Second gripe is that while you can customize the alerts, you can only pick from their designated list of room names. In the app you can set your own desired name, but that's only useful in a non-fire situation if you want to see on the app which alarm is actually going off. If it is a fire situation, and you happen to have a bedroom on different sides of the house, well, who knows which one is going off. There's no playroom, theater, any type of hall other than "Hallway", etc. I have a home with a great room in the middle and hallways + bedrooms on each side, so the "hallway" or "bedroom" going off could mean very different things.

Anyway, besides that, I greatly appreciate being able to monitor them remotely, being able to initiate a test of all of them at once from the app rather than climbing up a ladder over and over, the anti false alarm features, the night time path motion illumination, even the green ring when the lights go out to tell you they're all still communicating with each other. That also is what lets me know the one in the home theater tends to lose communication every few weeks; need to contact Google about it one of these days.