The smart home freak show stops here
thememo.com
thememo.com
If it were really smart, I'd have a toilet and shower that uses 1/4 of the amount water, my gas stove would not have a pilot light, and "dumb" motion sensors for light have been around quite a while - but not ubiquitous (more common the EU).
Commercial buildings have had computers driving heating and cooling systems for a couple of decades (without thermostats but with temp sensors) so you don't need internet for that either. And I've never seen a house with VAV's installed in the ducts to actively heat/cool only the occupied portions of the home. And the easiest of all before construction - just "rotate" the foundation towards the sun to take better advantage of passive heating and cooling, that's an easy 15% energy bill savings.
As well as that the bathroom had a bidet sprayer [0], so that's what I used for cleaning the floor and tub - it which was pretty much the same as using pressure washer. After I was done I just left it to dry which took an hour or so.
[0] http://brondell.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/500x...
My wife's family, in Iran, has a drain in the middle of the floor for this reason. She think it's very strange that this isn't common here in the US.
Hell, even just self-cleaning toilets and basins would be a start.
Despite a nice gas stove, the electric kettle is quicker to use. It also has some "brains" in that it shuts down after awhile if not turned off (say 3-5 minutes at desired temp).
I don't know how many times I've had things cooking on the stove and forgot about them due to work, etc.
Definitely! Starts a little under ±1000.
What I did find interesting is that it's not actually environmentally unfriendly, because the hot energy is stored in a very well insulated manner, and because it's near 100% efficient in the amount of water heated/used (whereas in a regular kettle you tend to overboil and boil too much water, and in an electric kettle there's often even a minimum fill that's larger than the needed water).
At least that's the story I've been reading on unaffiliated websites.
I don't know much about science, but there must be a reason the cheapest way to warm the average house is gas-powered boilers.
Having used both kettle technologies, my gut feeling is that heating a traditional kettle on gas just wastes a lot of the heat into the air by forcing the heat to penetrate an intermediary layer, whereas an electric kettle is insulated and puts heat directly into the water. This isn't a problem if you are boiling water to heat radiators because the lost heat is still helping heat the house. In that case you are saving the losses of converting heat to electricity (at the power plant) and then back to heat (in an electric heater).
Only if you've overfilled the kettle. They consume 3kW, but only for a short time. David MacKay FRS investigated the gas vs. electric question in detail: http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/sustainable/hotwater/
Fun additional fact: British tanks come with electric kettles enabling the crew to make tea in combat situations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_vessel
When the element on my neighbors electric stove failed, the heating coil found its way through the insulator and the steel jacket. The electric current bored a hole through the aluminum pot she was using.
I didn't say anything about a bare, uninsulated electric coil being immersed in water.
The point is that this assembly is immersed in water; all the heat which escapes from it goes into the water.
This is not true of a stove top heating.
I think electric kettles are pretty common in the US among tea drinkers, but houses where everyone drinks coffee won't typically have one. Since most of the US prefers coffee, you don't get a lot of electric kettles.
edit: searched using duckduckgo, not google
For a large quantity, the kettle wins. You could boil 4 l of water in a microwave oven, but it would take long. Over that time, a lot of heat would escape.
900W is weak for a microwave oven. You can get 1200W or more.
Doing some googling, it seems that around 1600W is still home use; 1800W and up is "commercial".
A gas water heater usually has an always on pilot light to avoid leaking unburned gas in case the main valve is stuck-open (or not fully closed). It's a failsafe, not a bug. (Which is why many heating systems refuse to turn back on automatically if they detect the pilot light goes off)
> Commercial buildings have had computers driving heating and cooling systems for a couple of decades
And they're expensive as fuck, and even today companies manage to mess up their setup (Berlin Airport cough).
They're only expensive "as fuck" because they're more like an overpriced SCADA system with multiple fail-overs and backups than the 12-20v system you have in your home. But that happens when you have 10 - 250 tons of heating and cooling for 500 - 30,000 people in a building.
For every over-engineered Berlin Airport (Siemens runs there, right? Arup won't make that make mistake) I can show you 10,000 buildings, factories, and warehouses done right. Or one Viipuri library (1935).
Depending on the technology used, not entirely true. If molten salt is used as heat exchange medium, it must be kept above its melting temperature at all times or you can scrap all the pipework.
We will have to endure the Internet of Stupid Things first, sigh.
We need the IoT bubble to happen so people realize you don't need everything controlled from a single device. I think its more of an uncanny valley of what is wanted and what is excessive. The Roomba, for example; doesn't need to be a wifi-enabled device, but can still have a computer inside it driving. People are adding wifi to it, but does it was successful without it.
I think as we mature in the IoT market, the sales and hardware will drop, but as of right now, we don't know what works and what doesn't, so we are trying everything.
This is not to say that Nest doesn't have problems, but there's no way I'd have allowed it in my home if an Internet outage meant freezing my family.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/14/fashion/nest-thermostat-gl...
It might not be any "better" of an excuse, but it's not the same thing as "not being able to call home"
Personally, I enjoy setting my house up "like a data center". But that is far beyond most home owners' abilities or desires for their network.
Firstly, how do you get your phone/server to talk to the IoT network? Some devices - like the Lifx - expect you to be in the same IP range in order to work properly.
Secondly, some IoT devices are wired into the network - specifically smart plugs which use powerline networking, and some HVAC stuff like Tado.
It's not an insurmountable problem, but requires careful configuration and accepting some loss of functionality.
Think z-wave and friends. Then have an interchangeable controller which can be firewalled to all hell if you want and can run locally if you want as well.
It's ridiculous that I've had to do this
Great to see we are fixing the gap by going in the opposite direction :)
- Bjarne Stroustrup
The same went for light switches, fridges, VCRs and whatever, each "new technology" had to mature, and so should computing but it hasn't yet.
I have a mercury thermostat upstairs set to my normal indoor temperature. It is connected across the heat demand leads through a software controlled switch. So no matter what the software does, the house can not get too hot or two cold. This means that I only have two set temperatures, but in practice that is enough. Setback occurs whenever the system detects that the alarm is set or when I set it before I go to bed.
The alarm panel is a traditional system in a box with a separate backup battery. It tells the automation when it is armed. It can be disarmed from the automation with a code, which the automation has to generate as a hash from an electronic key.
Fundamentally, I just want my TV to be a display - an amazing display. I don't even want or need it to have those shitty speakers TVs necessarily have - I already have a fantastic sound system. I want as close to 100% of my money going into the quality of the picture, not huge feature lists I have no need for.
I was given advice when shopping for a new screen to find the highest model range, as in the highest leading numbers, and then get the lowest number within that range as that usually trims out the "features". However, looking at LG's range of OLEDs, everything comes with "features", even the lowest model in the highest model range.
Every TV comes with enough bloatware to bring Watson to its knees. And the ones that manage to display a picture quickly despite that all extra processing start at $1,500, which is twice the price you would've paid 10 years ago.
Unfortunately you will almost always have to pay freight to wherever; you can't pick them up at a local store.
If you find a model # you like, you could always try your luck searching for it in auctions on Craigslist or EBay, as you would for office furniture.
http://www.newegg.com/Large-Format-Displays/SubCategory/ID-6...
or just big monitors:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=sr_hi_eb?rh=n%3A172282%2Cn%3A541...
The DELL E5515H looks nice though. Wish they made a 60" or 65" version.
These can be purchased individually, but unfortunately they tend to be more expensive than a "smart" TV.
And TV's are just a case in point.
[0]: http://knx.org/
- Heat control. OK but I have a non-network connected programmable thermostat that's really pretty effective.
- Vacuuming. OK. Roombas are a start in this direction although how effective they are depends a lot on your house layout.
- Clean up dirty dishes, wipe down counters, etc. Nope, unless you count my dishwasher.
- General food prep. Cutting/chopping. Nope, unless you count things like my food processor.
- Smarter light control. Eh. A few dimmers work pretty well.
- General dusting, bathroom cleaning, etc. Nope.
- Laundry. Nope (other than my dumb washer & dryer).
- Lawn cutting, general yard maintenance. Nope.
- Water plants. One can setup complicated systems but you still need to get water from a water source to individual pots without leaks.
The list goes on. The bottom line is that the tasks I'd like to eliminate or streamline are largely not things that I can buy devices to help with.
A dishwasher is a very specialized robot. I think it counts as home automation.
> Lawn cutting, general yard maintenance. Nope.
That's wrong. Robot lawnmowers exist, and they're made by several different companies:
>>Robot lawnmowers exist
They're expensive and limited. You generally need to setup a wire for the boundary. I looked into them a bit. They might make sense for a small fenced in yard but they certainly didn't make any sense in my case.
(The classic problem with kitchen labour-saving is devices that take longer to clean than the effort they save. Dishwashers help a lot, but your device has to be dishwashable.)
It doesn't even have to be low paid humans doing the precutting, it can be a big machine that only needs to be cleaned every 1000 potatoes or whatever.
Generally though, in the absence of additional home automation options that could save time and effort, the overall approach has been to do exactly as you say. Eliminate end user work in the manufacturing process and other places.
There are lots of examples in food. Modern clothing wrinkles less (and many people just don't care as much). Autopayments and online banking. Amazon.
Yeah, since I discovered having good knives and keeping them sharp, I've used things like my food processor a lot less. The chopping is more even and, for a couple vegetables, it's at least as fast.
I vaguely know someone who seems to use electric appliances in the kitchen for seemingly every task. When I discovered that her husband does all the cleanup, this made a lot more sense :-)
The programmable hose timers are very easy to use. They are essentially a "programmable thermostat that's really pretty effective" that controls the flow of water. In order to move water somewhere without leaks I use hoses without holes and hand tighten any connections.
My beefs with smart devices are numerous, but I think their most offensive component is software that seems to have been all designed by the same kind of moron.
When you connect your thermostat to the Internet then they're no longer entirely separate systems.
If you live in Alaska, you don't want your heater to switch off if something goes wrong.
If you are on holiday, you don't want the software watering your garden to "failsafe" by stopping doing anything at all a week before your return.
Perhaps better to leave fail state optional.
On the Alaskan situation I'd expect a frost sensor to put the heating on when it fell below 5deg C, or a settable temp, as a separate system to the normal thermostat.
I was reacting (a bit 'shoot from the hip') to the categorical statement that failing off is the better option. However, as you acknowledge for the heater, depending on the reason for failure, there may be other options.
For example, if the humidity sensor fails in a plant watering system, the system could fall back on an average regime instead of shutting down completely. If it has a clock, that regime might be adjusted for the season.
The designer of a system should design its failure modes, too.
The implication here is that like the other thermostat mentioned, it doesn't work. That's simply not true, the Nest still works albeit only from the device itself like a traditional thermostat.
I usually see industry tendencies (such as "big data" or "machine learning") skeptically, but this one I'm just plain pessimistic. I hope I'm wrong.
People who can afford it can get a well-integrated smart home that works and continues to work and isn't spying on them (to the extent that anyone with a home security system isn't being spied on). Just don't try to do it yourself. Sure, some people can, but it's in the same category as home-built airplanes. For every one that flies, there are 500 sitting partially assembled in teh garage.
I could fill a small book with reasons why IoT products are so bad, but the top reasons would have to be:
1. There is an intense pressure of delivering simply because everyone thinks the market is ripe for the taking and being first offers some kind of guarantee of winning it. Truth is, there is a very significant overlap between people who are interested in this whole IoT crap and people who involved in its development. Most products are so embarrassingly bad that no one in their right mind would want them.
2. Products could be better, but most of them are...
2a) ...developed without any kind of vision, because the management and product design teams don't really understand these things. The vision behind developing most smart home appliances is "we'll make a <insert company's top selling appliance here>, BUT ONLINE".
2b) ...developed by bad engineering teams, because projects are perceived to be too high-risk to be worth investing much into, so they're outsourced somewhere cheap (before you start yelling racism at me, please realize I was one of the cheap guys these were being outsourced to.)
2c) ...seen as little more than platforms for service and/or ads delivery. They see little investment, because management teams completely unfamiliar with hardware design believe the vehicle through which services and/or ads are delivered is pretty much irrelevant and/or can be easily fixed. They treat hardware platforms for delivering ads and services much like they treat web platforms, because that's all they ever built.
3. Standardization in this field is... exaggerated, at best. Even platforms that standardize things at the application layer (e.g. Z-Wave) routinely get it wrong. 90% of the "ground-breaking" gadgets that "open up the exciting world of <whatever> to everyone" only work with five or six phones, at best.
4. The main challenge of every marketing department in this field is coming up with reasons why someone would buy these things. Oftentimes that's done ad-hoc: a device already exists because someone with C in its title had a "strategic vision" and the device is already in beta, and now someone has to figure out how to sell it because the money have already been spent.
5. A lot of big names are in this game pro-actively, in case it actually turns out to be of some value. This is why you see big companies that should know better demoing embarrassing things (like LG's drunken robot). They need to be sure they have a foot in the door in case this actually takes off, but aren't willing to invest the funds needed to provide a serious, integrated system.
6. Testing is virtually non-existent and safety standards are embarrassingly lax. Half of the things that plug into a socket and do fancy Internet things are fire hazards.
7. Virtually every device that does fancy Internet things is a privacy and security hazard. Companies either lack management and development teams that realize how important these things are and know how to build them, or are actively disinterested in fixing them because it's detrimental to their business model.
The true "smart home" won't come until all these funky devices will be integrated in a single system. With everyone competing and raising walled gardens because they don't want to share profits from ads, that won't happen until a big enough player decides to invest the huge amount of money that's needed to create a comprehensive line of devices, that can cover everything from thermostats to sound system.
Until that happens, "smart" homes will be so incessantly dumb and annoying that no one who isn't paid to say they're awesome or build "smart" devices will want one.
Found this one particularly salient: 5. A lot of big names are in this game pro-actively, in case it actually turns out to be of some value. This is why you see big companies that should know better demoing embarrassing things (like LG's drunken robot). They need to be sure they have a foot in the door in case this actually takes off, but aren't willing to invest the funds needed to provide a serious, integrated system.
Many big companies are hedging their bets and playing catch up, which is downright dangerous when you're selling devices that scale up the threat vector for life-critical devices such as refrigerators, security cameras, door locks, thermostats, and cars.
I think Apple has the best shot at winning the connected home game due to their ownership of the iPhone ecosystem (used as a remote for the smarthome), tight product control, and their new marketing story of we are security - and they actually do implement the most rigorous key management and cryptography standards in the industry. I'm looking forward to their next hardware reveal - I think a Siri-integrated router (ala Amazon Echo) would complement their portfolio really well at the moment.
Have any numbers to back up this assertion as opposed to sales figures of iPhones, iPads, AppleTVs, Macbooks, AirPorts, etc. - all integral fixtures in the smarthome ecosystem?
> integrating the Echo with Plum's Lightpad is extremely easy
Amazon does not have tight enough control over its smart home ecosystem. While it may be easy for you to integrate your thoroughly designed and tested product, it's also easy for shady vendor x to integrate their cheap, disaster of a product, and Amazon will not expend the resources to vet it, but in the end the user will blame Amazon when that product catches fire because they branded it as OK to work with Amazon products.
Apple doesn't want an outside dev ecosystem building up around its products before its in a position to tightly vet and control what engineers create to enhance the ecosystem. Third party applications/devices are an integral part of the user experience, and by extension, the customer's feeling towards Apple as a brand.
Nope, just anecdata (based on being a startup in the IoT space).
> Amazon does not have tight enough control over its smart home ecosystem...
I don't know that for sure, TBH, though I think the more open and universal platform will win. Currently the Echo is that, it's not an app you have to launch from your phone (Revolv), you just talk to it, and it does things for you.
Echo's superbowl ad also catapulted it, we have emails from people left and right asking for Echo integration (not Apple TV integration).
Also, why would the customer blame Amazon if their bulbs cause a fire? The customer clearly bought the bulbs, then hooked Echo up to the bulb (in the case of Philips Hue), I'm not saying Echo is infallible but I do think your criticism is unfair.
The hip startups who sell web-enable smart watches or whatever is trendy nowadays won't come up with the first smart fridge that's actually useful, not because they lack vision or understanding but because they won't be able to build a fridge that doesn't suck in the first place. The SF get-something-through-the-door-quickly development model is fine for stuff that you patch in production, but it can barely produce a working thermostat, a device of barely sufficient complexity to be considered as an engineering diploma project.
I've seen at least five projects ran this way. All of them were utter failures. In some cases, by the time the umpteenth prototype had revealed the correct direction, the market had long moved on or the amount of money and time spent had long outweighed even optimistic sales provisions. In other cases, the first thing that lasted through a fifteen-minute demo without crashing was christened an MVP, but it later turned out to be not quite what was needed because no one bothered doing specifications and studies, so the devil in the details made it a nightmare to use. By the time this was realised, it was too late to change anything anymore and an almost-but-not-quite product got released.
Developing connected appliances is a complicated and expensive business and they require a great deal of interdisciplinary expertise that's very hard to find. It may not seem so, but a dishwasher or a refrigerator worth their money are a lot harder to design and build than the Pebble.
(I should stop eating chips over my keyboard. Half of my past tenses are wrong because I have bread crumbs uner my D key. Crap).
Keep in mind that in the 1990's it was rare for Windows uptime to exceed 24hrs and Microsoft demos of new features barely worked if at all. Not to mention that "security" was not yet on the PR agenda.
Gates' home, replete with low quality software a la Microsoft, sounded silly if not scary back then. But what do I know? Maybe it was all very stable and reliable.
There are a lot of other issues (security, phoning home, etc), but a lot of these wouldn't be as noticeable if they didn't follow the "simple" design.
What we call "smart" are simply TVs that have a general-purpose OS, indeed to run apps. That doesn't have anything to do with TV viewing, but with fragmentation of the delivery landscape: with the current appification, every video outlet considers your TV to be part of their "user experience" and wants to control and monetize your TV.
If it's that critical maybe you need to design in some network redundancy. That's not really a Nest issue.
Could this be due to relying on the broadband provider's box for Wi-Fi instead of your own Wi-Fi router for running your local network?
I can still reach my webserver or printer when broadband is down. Gee, why is that?
If someone's local Wi-Fi LAN dies when the broadband connection isn't up, they should buy their own Wi-Fi router and then get some fifth grader to set it up for them.