this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2023
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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.
Warning: Working with electricity can result in injury, property damage, or even death if it is not done properly. Please keep this in mind while assisting others. If you are not sure about what you are doing, hire a licensed professional.
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Smart switches and local automations are the key, not smart bulbs in the cloud.
Every light in my house is smart in one way or another, but if HomeAssistant and my internet connection both went down, basically everything would still function totally normally. Light switches would still turn on lights, etc. They'd just lose their voice control and wouldn't be turned on by motion sensors, etc.
I do have some smart bulbs in the house, but they're in accent lighting (pendants, etc), they run 100% locally, and they're turned on and off by automations that are triggered by physical light switches. For example, you turn on the main kitchen lights with the smart switch, and that triggers the pendants to turn on. Its reliable enough that I've only seen the bulbs miss a trigger or get out of sync twice in two years, and toggling the light switch and extra time fixed it both times. If the bulbs ever had a network issue (which they haven't), they're accessible without a ladder or much fuss, and can be easily unscrewed/reseated for a power cycle.
My family doesn't share my interest in home automation, but as long as everything works reliably and in an intuitive way, they're fine with it.
This. Smart switches, dumb bulbs. Or smart switches and smart bulbs if lighting your house like a disco is important to you.
But since you have the bulbs already: As I understand, Home Assistant is working on support for Matter. (It's in beta) HA also has cloudless voice command functionality available. Something like a last-gen Raspberry Pi could get this up and running PDQ.
This is it !
I think the key to successful adoption of home automation is to make the complicated easier and what's already easy, invisible.
In other words, if you turn a light which previously was as simple as turning on a switch into an app or a different button or something, it's not going to work.
In our basement (old 1920s house) we had a bunch of independent string lights, so you'd have to run around and turn on 5 different lights separately. I made the only switch into the room a smart switch (it's not even connected to a light anymore) and it now triggers the five different lights automatically. So while there is the odd chance of not being able to turn on the lights in the event of a failure (don't do this type of solution in important locations) the overall ease/improvement outweighs the inconvenience should it go down.
The only time I have issues with my installation is when I try to "fix" what was already working perfectly fine. I've definitely learned to resist the urge to update software when I'm not home / traveling :)
Agreed. Once I added Shelly’s behind my switches my partner caught on because they could use the physical switch or the app. The app gets used when convenient but if walking by, they’ll pop the physical switch.
100% this.
OP is saying how it was a chore for his girlfriend to turn on a light and thought of putting a switch above the switch but not replacing the switch. A logical reason is that they're renting and can't replace switches easily; I feel like that's an important enough detail to include.
Unfortunately, Smart Bulbs only make sense in situations where the light isn't controlled by a switch.
Not true at all: ZigBee bulbs plus ZigBee wall switches (and then binding them together, of course) is the common, standard way of running whole-home circadian smart lighting