How do you move out of a smarthome?
shkspr.mobi
shkspr.mobi
All of this home automation and internet of things hype is going to end in tears. Computers are just. not. secure. They're not even necessary in these applications. I don't want tech that includes massive amounts of software doing the job of simple things. It just is not necessary. I'll walk over to the lightswitch and turn the lights on. I'll set the thermostat and use its old-school timers to save energy. I don't need it internet-enabled (and hackable). I don't need WiFi-enabled smoke alarms--especially if they have a damn microphone inside! (and yes, Nest smoke alarms have a microphone built-in for self-testing!?) I don't want to talk to Google or Amazon and ask them questions. I just don't need their services, and I sure as hell don't want them listening all the time. We seem to be in some kind of insane tech bubble where we need to put gluttonous software literally everywhere, often for nebulous gains. And if you aren't scared by pervasive surveillance, fine. Just imagine Russian script kiddies chuckling over your miserable sex lives. Or imagine how well your stupid internet-enabled doors and teddy bears will work in a cyberwar with Russia.
I leave my smartphone at home these days. Partly because I know what it is doing, and partly because I don't know what it is doing. Partly because I just want my old life back. I take walks and see cool things without needing to tweet about it or even take pictures. I am trying to get away from this madness.
(But here I am on hackernews, being a Luddite, oi.)
[edit: maybe my fears of downvoting were overblown.]
And there is the fact they are tracking the shit out of you, and lying about it.
Sure automatically tweeting my pics is cute, but does it improve my life or anyones lives?
We are simply chasing novelty.
However, like you, I wonder if trying to gain that additional 5% of optimisation is worth it. Modern Honeywell thermostats already offer enough settings (wake/leave/return/bedtime) that I don't see a Nest making my life significantly better.
Internet-connected smoke alarms, on the otherhand, I feel are useful. Just like I get an alert when my credit card is used, I'd like to know if something set off the alarm in my house. The microphone doesn't need to be in it, though.
* If your thermostat was really "smart" it wouldn't turn the compressor on 1 minute before the temp was scheduled to change (and turn it back off). * Your "smart" scheduling does more harm than good. And changing the schedule manually is a pain.
There are some good things:
* Retention of usage data is good. * Ability to change the thermostat from office/vacation/bed - pretty great I must say.
But I agree that the IoT thing is way out of control.
Just my ฿ 0.0002.
Edit: Just realized that the parent of the comment I'm replying to is the top comment on this post, so that's another piece of anecdotal evidence.
But I think the parent is talking about the habit of many who are about to post a counter-groupthink or controversial opinion to lead off with "I know I'm going to get downvoted for this, but...". My feeling there is that people generally view that as a sort of flippant disregard/dismissal of the community moderation process, so it basically _invites_ downvotes.
i want to have every even remotely conceivable automation and assistance at my whim. if there isn't a secure lan-only option, then let's (as a community) create either open source options or start a business focusing on this as a competitive advantage.
I don't need a lot of the connected features, but I want them because I can see their usefulness.
Just an example:
> I'll walk over to the lightswitch and turn the lights on.
What if you are someone who has trouble walking or has mobility issues. Can you imagine how convenient getting things done with voice could be? These sort of things can be life changing for some people.
Internet bandwidth and speed are increasing and cheaper which was the main reason for offline in the past.
There is also the fact that they don't have to support outdated or multiple versions of a server or distribute updates. The end devices like Google home, Echo and the video fire stick, Chromecast are basic input > send to server > output. That is cheaper to support. Plus you get all the data to improve your product.
When I was young I setup up my first Home Server. Much like an enterprise server. It had share folders, computers backup to it, print server. Though it was the future and in a decade every house would have one. Now a days they don't but they do have stuff like Google Drive and Google Cloud Print and many more options that give you those options in the cloud.
But with smart home devices, you have much finer control over what device you want to control. How can someone do something fine grained like "Switch on external lights" or "show me who is at the door (Alexa does this)" with a clapper?
Look at how hard Amazon has been pushing Alexa for years now, and the shopping experience on it is still terrible. For very specific use cases, it works kinda well (i.e. order more household supplies that I've ordered 100x before). For anything else, it's much easier and faster to use a phone or computer. Amazon is devoting hundreds of millions to solve a problem that literally doesn't exist.
But, I love the Echo so much, I recently upgraded from a single Dot to a full Echo and added two more Dots to the house.
Being able to ask Alexa for a weather forecast while getting dressed in the morning is great. Asking Alexa to play music or change songs/volume while I'm doing the dishes without drying my hands and fiddling with my phone is awesome. Setting kitchen timers while my hands are dirty from cooking, or while I'm putting something into the oven (I tend to forget if I wait until I've walked away from the oven) is pretty damn useful.
My kids love asking Alexa questions, and some of the skills (like the Magic Door) are huge hits with them.
Overall, I think assuming the Echo is meant for shopping is a bad assumption. It is meant to pull you into the Amazon ecosystem (Echosystem?), but I don't think voice shopping will ever be successful.
Why the future tense? Hasn't that been going on since 2015?
I have an Echo Dot and a couple Hue bulbs in my apartment. The light switch setup is awkward so I end up having to walk in the dark a bit when I get home before I can turn on the lights. Being able to voice-activate the lights as I enter my apartment (or just have the Philips app automatically turn them on when my phone is close enough to home) is useful. Is it essential? No, of course not. Am I concerned about security/privacy? Yes. I've decided that the security risk of someone being able to turn a couple of my lights on and off without my permission isn't that big a deal.
I just picked up a Google Home Mini on discount over the Thanksgiving holiday. I like that I can tell it to play music on my Chromecast, or start Netflix videos on my TV. Again: not essential. But it's a hell of a lot more convenient than fumbling with my phone to do the same things.
My goal longer term is to build an open-hardware, open-software home assistant that can do most things without needing to leave the local network. There are a few projects out there already that do this, or subsets of it, but so far I haven't found much that meets my requirements.
But I totally agree that in many cases these things aren't necessary. They can make things more convenient, but in the absence of, say, someone with mobility or motor control issues, they're not essential. But, say, Google Maps isn't essential either (we have perfectly good paper maps), but I sure as hell wouldn't give it up. I do expect that home control will mature to a point where it's not just a "nice to have" anymore, but I figure we're years, if not decades, from that point.
Granted the internet of things is wildly different, and your points are valid, but surely we will find some happy medium between home automation ending in tears and a working solution?
Wow, I hope this is rhetorical. No, you never give anyone your password for anything. Yes, you absolutely let them go through the dull process of setting up new accounts.
> When I move into a house, do I want to spend the first day looking up manuals online to try and work out which buttons to hold down in order to claim the devices as my own?
shrug, yeah, why not? That's the kind of stuff I would do anyways. Moving into a new home requires all kinds of "oh, ok, that's how that works" kind of discoveries. "Hmm, the breaker panel says '#5: kitchen' but that one also apparently has the garage lights. But not the garage door opener, for some reason."
> not be able to easily set the heating until they've moved in ... the epitome of "first-world problems"
I will concede that this is truly a PITA and a drawback of modern life.
Computers are so cheap that we can "afford" to put them everywhere. Hopefully the next generation of these devices will have sane fallback/factory reset modes that behave like their ancestor devices until they've been setup/enabled.
Well assuming it's a unique password, not connected to other accounts and you've deleted any sensitive data, why is this so obviously not even an option to you? Sometimes deleting an account is a ginormous pain and it saves some trouble for the buyer.
Left to the new owner, maybe "who cares!" but one should really try to get rid of data they no longer need / use wherever possible.
I would argue that that's a failure of the thermostat. It absolutely needs to have a dumber fallback mechanism, not just for new residents, but for the current ones. (What if my internet goes down? What if the cat pees on my router?)
More seriously though, this is a major pet peeve of mine. Many of these devices will also become completely unusable when the manufacturer decides to terminate the service. This is a big reason why I hesitate to pay for products that don't adhere to open standards, and allow for local/offline use as a primary mode.
This has got to win HN today for the most HNist of comments. ;)
Ditto for stuff like Roombas. I've noticed all the new ones have their schedules set via an app. WTF? My current one has buttons and that works just fine. I'm seriously thinking of getting a spare now.
Smartphones are great solution for controlling a lot of things, but it seems like we're in a place where people stupidly think it's the solution to control all things.
Staying warm is a first-world problem? How out of touch can the author be? That's a basic need.
There was also an outlet in another room with some complex controls. It stopped working after a while. Turned out the switch - which is connected to a freaking electrical wire - required a battery to work. I had that taken out too, and good riddance to all of it.
In "third-world" areas, and even in many modern "first-world" areas, a heater can be manually turned on with a simple switch, regardless of thermostat settings, and just as easily turned off. The lack of these controls on a significantly more expensive thermostat is where the first-world problem creeps in.
If I have a separate account for my home - say 742EvergreenTerrace@example.com - then it would be easier to hand that account and password over the the new owner.
Not that the ToS for your light bulb dimmer matters much in practice, but technically it's probably forbidden.
When you sell the house, transfer ownership of 742 Evergreen Terrace Management Company to the new homeowner.
Now realistically the person buying your house probably doesn't know how to use Git and your family probably isn't gonna make pull requests, but it seems like a novel use of Git and Github. Maybe if it were effective enough a wrapper could be made?
You're selling it as a mitigation of stress.
On the flip side, I can only really get the true value of the car. If I didn't list the issues I could probably inflate the price and only discount on what they happen to find during inspection.
If I'm alive when I stop living here, my plan is to print out the log and have it nicely bound, and turn that over to the next owners as something like a ship's log, but for a house instead of a ship.
I'll also leave a thumb drive with the OmniOutliner document, exports of that document in various formats [1], and a PDF of the print out.
[1] Probably HTML, Word, OPML, and RTF.
I'd actually go further. I do care about home automation, because it is almost certainly a negative and possibly a deal-breaker for me to put any offer in to buy a place.
If it has anything installed that has any form of off-site access or any dependency on a remote service then I am going to require the existing owner to remove it and make good at their own expense as a condition of any offer (other than possibly a suitably approved alarm system with clearly detailed monitoring arrangements and contacts).
Likewise if there is anything installed that relies on any sort of sensors or "smart" control systems, I am going to require credible written guarantees about the security, privacy, safety and longevity of that system, or far more likely it is again going to have to be removed and made good at the current owner's expense as a condition.
I say this because the systems that ADT, etc sell these days are largely made up of white labeled COTS Z-Wave sensors with the security panel just being a hub and interface to the Z-Wave network.
The house I moved into this past year is covered by sensors for an old ADT system that are useless to me, and I've been slowly removing them and replacing them with equivalent Z-Wave e.g., door and motion sensors as I get to it. Whenever I move, I'll take the hub with me. Any sensors that get left behind would be almost entirely equivalent to an old security system being left in the house except for the fact that they'd be pairable with any system the new owner decides to put in place since they're actually standards based.
Zigbee is also fairly popular for some applications; it's what e.g., Philips Hue runs on.
Devices using either of these will generally pair with any hub with the appropriate radios like Smart Things.
There's additionally a class of home automation stuff that runs over WiFi; they more generally have proprietary communication protocols and I personally avoid them for the most part.
No matter; I wasn't interested, and I was happy to get rid of all the their signs and stickers.
In fact, ADT's latest move seems to be piggybacking on Smart Things for HA, but... since I already have Smart Things what do I really need ADT for?
So, no smoke or CO2 alarms in your house?
It's like staging a home right? None of this furniture comes with the house but how it's staged absolutely influences your impression of the home.
That being said, if I was ever to leave home automation hardware behind, it'd be a "if you want to pay x on top of the already agreed upon price for the property, I'll leave it", where x is the cost for me to just buy new modules for my new place.
That sounds like a pain in the ass.
> if I was ever to leave home automation hardware behind, it'd be a "if you want to pay x on top of the already agreed upon price for the property, I'll leave it
I don't want to buy new crap to deal with the crap you left behind. I'd argue that you ought to pay me for dealing with some arbitrary hardware that I've now inherited. This is the equivalent of leaving some finicky boiler system whose spare parts can only be ordered from a single factory in Germany.
In context they are also more or less offering to remove it for free. I expect that includes putting conventional fixtures in (depending on the terms of the sale, but why bother trying to insist that the house doesn't come with light switches).
At my old condo, one thing I left as a bit of a 'gift', was a extremely solid dual-arm TV wall mount. It was cheap for me to repurchase for my new place, and then they don't have the risk of screwing into the studs near but not in the holes I had mounted mine or such concerns that might weaken their own mount. I had all the hardware and instructions, which I left with it. This might've been a less handy choice had either the condo been large enough for other places for the TV to make sense or be appealing, or if the TV mount I had installed wasn't sturdy enough to support all possible TVs one might be bringing in.
If you live in any major urban center that request would likely get laughed at since the value of your depreciated hardware likely wouldn't even count as a rounding error on the purchase price. Some buyers might even want a discount on your selling price because of the extra work they'd have to do to get rid of the gear.
So they're a good idea if you think it's very likely you'll stay in a house 15+ years, but not so much otherwise.
Even aesthetical changes are a big warning - this one has been somehow tampered with, and you have no clue what was changed and for what reason.
For example I bought some older BMW few years back. When i went for some complete checkup after cca 2 years, mechanic told me that car has been lowered a bit and brakes are some lightweight version. It was my first car and I didn't notice, and effin' dealer didn't mention it. All good but - lowered car has issue in places like underground parkings, where road is steep and sometimes I hit the bottom of the car when road bends too much. So because some idiot previous owner wanting to squeeze a bit extra driveability out of a diesel car (although amazing diesel it is), I now have these crappy consequences and have to drive carefully like with some ferrari. I've hit the bottom in various situations maybe 20x so far, maybe one day it will break something crucial and I will be left in some nasty situation with broken car.
Yeah, you want untampered (more) predictable stock cars.
Technically you can take the stove, fridge, washer, dryer, window coverings; but almost nobody does. The buyers realtor will automatically put a clause in the contract that they stay. It saves everybody the effort and cost of moving them, and generally the rest of the room matches them and not the new house. Sometimes this isn't done but that is rare.
Light bulbs are not in the contract, but they aren't worth the bother to remove.
Seems like there are two options. (1) You can do it the Dutch way, i.e. every time someone moves they'll have to take their floors out. Those floors often won't fit into your new apartment, so you're just creating lots of waste. Not to mention all the effort associated with it. You will have to remove the floors, but also the person moving into your place will have had to remove the floors from their old place. (2) You leave the floors in when you move out. Then the new tenant/owner can decide whether to keep them or not. In the worst case, both new and old inhabitant will still decide to remove the floors. In the best case, no one will have to do anything and no waste is created.
So what could possibly be gained from the first way of doing things? Genuinely curious if someone knows the reasoning behind this.
Haha I was not...people literally take the floor laminates with them when they leave, if not to reuse them but out of some sense of ownership I don't fully grasp.
Apartments are rented in a few ways: fully furnished (incl. floors and all the furnishings and even kitchen stuff) which is aimed at expats who make lots of money and people who are living short term; partially furnished (maybe including floors and some appliances or fittings, for which you'll pay a regulated monthly fee), or bare, which is as it suggests without fittings and without floor coverings. The latter is cheapest and most common I think.
I've heard that sometimes you can make a deal with the leaving tenants if you'd like to keep their existing floors (for a price, of course!). People here seem rather adept and used to installing the laminate themselves, and they also seem to like the idea that you can put down whichever floor covering you like best.
It must be a good business to sell floor laminate...
Perhaps you are thinking of rent?
Most sellers will leave anything fixed to the building like lights, sinks, toilets, doors, door handles, sockets, fitted carpets, fitted kitchen appliances, plants that are buried in the garden, fires and fireplaces, television aerials, boilers and radiators, built-in cupboards, permanently installed mirrors, and so on.
Things that aren't fixed in quite the same way have different conventions. For example paintings, light shades, freestanding lamps, rugs, curtains, plants in freestanding tubs, and freestanding appliances are often taken by the seller.
It's always possible to negotiate, of course; if the buyer and seller agree on something different, that's perfectly legal. And there are horror stories of overly trusting buyers discovering the seller has removed the turf from the lawn, and things like that.
All we had were some sockets in the ceiling into which you'll fasten your own bulb-holders/shades, and then your own bulbs.
The only lighting present by default was that above the bathroom mirror(s).
If you say "fixtures stay in the house" then they stay. If not, no obligation to leave them. Typically, however, these clauses deal primarily with appliances and other larger items (TVs, hot tubs, etc)
In my experience people don't think to bring the bulbs with them, written or otherwise.
It would be perfectly feasible to leave the IKEA hardware in the house if we were to move.
Last year I bought some Osram Lightify bulbs, as here in Europe they are compatible with the Hue hub (which like Tradfri also works offline). I also got their own hub to update the bulbs, and it is absolutely useless. It says it is connected locally, but still it takes seconds for the bulbs to change state, and usually in a group only some of them change. The same bulbs paired with the Hue hub work perfectly.
It is WiFi only, and I‘ve had it randomly lose the connection and need to be reset. I haven’t tried it offline, but I imagine it’s not going to work.
I only got smart bulbs as I wanted to be able to change the colour temperature and brightness, they are just connected to dumb switches. Tradfri seems superior for this now, as their controllers don’t even need a hub to control lights.
I don't want purple or green lights in my living room, so the fact that IKEA bulbs are limited to warmth and brightness is fine for me (I like to just keep them on "warm").
I wish I either removed everything before putting my house on the market, or excluded them all from the sale. The buyer was confused, and the Nest smoke alarms needed to be replaced prior to closing.
The Nest smoke alarms were fine, but due to local fire codes, I needed to have wifi running at inspection time and all of my smoke alarms had to be Nest. I was replacing one a year and still had a few "dumb" smoke alarms in the mix. Unfortunately, my realtor advised me poorly in this situation when I told him my plan was to take the smoke alarms and thermostats with me.
Personally I would not purchase a home that was configured with nest or other home automation equipment for several reasons.
1) It's a huge security risk. When you buy a home the first thing you do is change the locks because you don't know who the previous owner may have once loaned keys out to. Now you have a bunch of computers in your house giving remote access that may or may not be giving other people access and you can't tell.
2) Most consumer home automation systems have incredibly bad failure states. Those wirelessly networked alarms? When you cheap Chinese wifi router catches fire from a faulty power supply the failure mode is that you die. That's a pretty big oversight. Remember when NEST pushed an untested software update remotely and caused dozens of houses in the Northern Midwest to lose heat in the middle of winter and then be destroyed by broken pipes?
3) Vendor lock in. I don't want the previous owner to lock me into a line of products. Period. I'm sure everyone here remembers when Phillips decided that their smart light sockets would embrace DRM and only accept Phillips brand LED bulbs. They backed down but it is bound to come up again. Not to mention simple incompatibility between competing products and stacks.
4) It's just a damn pain to use most of the time for gain that can be measured almost entirely in novelty factor.
If it seems to be a bit much just be glad you aren't in Massachusetts where they are currently trying to get arc flash rated 110V breakers added as a requirement to the electric code.
Are you just talking about MA adopting newer versions of the NEC that require AFCI [0] more places, or is there really something new related to arc flash?
[0] A proprietary software hellhole, like everything else these days.
...however, the code (at least back in 2002) specified protection of all electrical outlets. Receptacles are plugged into outlets. So are hired wired lights, smoke detectors, etc. An outlet is "A point on the wiring system at which current is taken to supply utilization equipment."
This means that any literal reading of the code requires arc-fault breakers from a practical perspective since even the outlet into which an arc-fault receptacle is plugged requires protection upstream from the receptacle. On the other hand, building departments often make code interpretations that are politically expedient and that's why some jurisdictions may allow arc-fault receptacles as a means of code compliance.
AFAIK the code also requires the wiring itself in those places be AFCI protected, since the (immediate) goal was to avoid smoldering fires in the wall where people sleep. This would imply the simplest route is an AFCI breaker for the whole branch circuit, although it was (is?) permissible to run metal conduit up to the first receptacle and have that do the AFCI.
Would have loved for the NEC to require that the code on AFCIs was technician-upgradeable and some general sense of open, but I'll just go back to banging my head against the wall now.
I have some that have "long-term tamper-proof batteries" (I think they last 5 years or something)... and _somehow_ are "interconnected" (so they can all trigger each other) which was a requirement. They don't use _my_ wifi, I don't know how they are interconnected without wires exactly (or if it even really works). I'm not worried about it, but it passed inspection.
It's not that hard to change a thermostat and smoke alarm. "Dumb" smoke alarms and thermostats are very inexpensive and easy to install. Buy a home for the structure and location. You can always change the few things you don't like.
Do … do people realize that power cuts occasionally coincide with house fires?
I really don't care about a backup mesh network as long as they are loud enough when there is no network.
A few days later I was at a bar while their alarm system was getting inspected. I asked one of the pros about the situation and he told me that Nests require a working internet connection in order to pass state inspection, and all of the alarms have to be Nest.
I think the underlying issue is that people don't see a huge amount of value in a little bit of automation and balk at the prices, so the market consists mostly of buyers that really want to be able to do various automations.
My hue switches also control their hue lights just fine without any internet - although they do need the hue hub to be powered up.
Switch outlets with $1.80 switches. Yank out pretty lights and put in simple cheap hanger cans. Keep your dumb honeywell thermostat and reinstall the 4 wires. Buy dumb smoke alarms and litter them everywhere (they're cheap). Yank out special outlets and put in el-cheapo outlets.
In other words, yank out and substitute the smart stuff back to cheap dumb stuff that just works.
This isn't hard. It's a few hours to do this swap. And most of the mains stuff can be picked up at Walmart or similar for cheap.
Same with a nest thermo. Swap out for a honeywell done. These things are pretty much low cost and minimal time commitment.
I don't see how this is different than learning how your 10-year-old garage door opener or 20-year-old furnace works.
The fact that you do this has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. You and I are not representative for this.
What button? I've got a detached garage, so it doesn't make sense to have a button inside. And when the previous residents were (apparently) evicted, they took various keys, remotes, etc with them. I most certainly had to buy a remote and find my garage door opener's manual to get it working. Damned if I was going to pay a garage door repairman to come out and hit a few buttons for me.
Your typical HN reader is probably willing and able to reprogram the thing on their own, but this is not normal.
I explored at one point if there was a market for an app to automate that last part, but so far such noodling keeps winding up at a less generally useful Keybase.
The long answer is that's all part of setting up a Trust for your estate, picking Trustees that can execute your Trust responsibly/competently when the time comes, and picking recipient heirs as well that can benefit from your property. All of that is a long conversation to have between you and your lawyer and your heirs.
(In that way, Shamir's Secret Sharing is simply a modern technical/mathematical equivalent to bequeathing your heirs a puzzle box with a safety deposit key in it. If your heirs can't solve the puzzle box, do they deserve the contents of that safety deposit box?)
That said, there probably is a role for some of the cryptocurrency exchanges to play as possible Trustees in an estate, just as banks large and small play into many estates for the transfer of wealth. It could be a feature the exchanges could offer whereby they help liquidate a cryptocurrency as a part of executing a Trust.
(I would also not be surprised if there was at least one person building a Rube Goldberg machine in Ethereum smart contracts where on proof of their death the contracts execute transactions to an exchange sell order with forwarding instructions to Western Union telegraph the money to a loved one's postal address.)
Moving out of a smarthome seems like a pain. I can imagine in the future that smarthome companies will roll out better authentication and setup processes, but in my paranoia I can imagine too many security issues that will arise. I don't want my home to be a gateway for breach in another dimension. I'm okay to turn the light on myself when I enter a room, set the thermostat, and water my own plants. I don't see a need for improvement there.
1. Everything must be reversible, preferably within a short period of time. If I replace the doorbell or locks with smart ones, I keep the old ones in storage. If I replace light switches, I make sure to document the way the wiring worked before I touched it, and keep everything so I can put it back if/when I move. I had a house with 14 light switches, 2 door locks, a garage door opener, 3 cameras, 7 door and window sensors, like 4 or 5 outlet controllers, and a thermostat all upgraded to "smart devices" in my house, and it took me about 5 hours to set everything back to the way it was before i added anything.
2. Everything should work exactly the same as it did before being "smart-ified", and should never stop working because of a network being down, or a power outage reset it. This means light switches still need to look and act like light switches, in 100% of cases. A thermostat should still work without WiFi, the TV remote should always be able to control the TV, the door should be able to be opened with a key, etc... When my nephew comes over and likes to switch the lights on and off really fast when he can sneak over to it, I shouldn't need to "reset" anything or have it be in a weird state because of that.
3. Rely on external servers as little as possible. If the internet is down, but my local network is up, my whole system should run at least 90% as well as it does with the internet.
Following those few ground rules meant that it cost more to do the whole system, and there were some things I could not upgrade to "smart devices", but it made the whole process much more fullproof, and it was significantly easier when we went to leave (just had to mention that the smart home stuff was not included in the sale of the house).
Light switches were "automated" by putting small z-wave switches in the electrical box of each switch (leaving the original switch showing and acting the same way it always did), z-wave plugs and power strips were used to turn on/off various things if needed, smart lightbulbs were avoided at all costs, the thermostat was reliant on a 3rd party network for the remote switching, but still worked 100% of the time by adjusting it on the wall. Door locks, garage door controllers, doorbell, etc... They all worked completely on their own, and then had the extra "smart" functionality layered on top.
I hear the sentiment that all IoT stuff is garbage, and I have to completely disagree. The cheapest item in the category is probably garbage, but that's common with just about every other area. If you spend the money, if you actually do a little research, there are many options out there which are secure, reliable, and actually built to last.
For example, I have a google home. Google home relies on an external server to work, but that's okay, since it's not really "replacing" anything, only adding a new "class" of device.
But it's not okay for a door lock to not take a standard key (or in my case, the door lock needed a number pad), just to get "smart" functionality.
I've seen so many people (like in the linked blog) have to describe to guests which switches they can use, or how to install the app to control the lights.
Even if that was 100% local, it's still not okay in my book.
The requirement I add to yours is that none of my devices are permitted to talk to the Internet except my PC. That means no Wi-Fi devices, for the most part. (I do have some IP cameras, but my network disables their ability to talk externally.) Any communication between my house and the outside world goes through a single network device which I can depend on to implement reasonable security practices.
http://transitionrealty.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/RE-Pr...
Line 183-184 "Are there any items or systems on the property connected or controlled wirelessly, via internet protocol (“IP”), to a router or gateway or directly to the cloud?"
Most smart home problems that tend to be solved by using a cloud service could be solved just as well by using a VPN. I do this with my Hue and my Wifi cameras, both with great success.
The challenge with a VPN is setting it up. Router manufacturers generally either offer OpenVPN, which requires a 3rd party app, or PPTP, which is horribly insecure. A router that could generate a secure IPSec configuration and push out a profile for the smartphones would make it a lot more usable.
Even then, it's still probably going to be more work than using a cloud service.
Maybe IPv6 will solve the problem as all of these things can have publically routable addresses. What could possibly go wrong?
I haven’t installed any smart outlets but I would consider doing the same. Most of these jobs are super easy, and if you can’t handle it a $20/hr handyman certainly can.
It's like giving the keys to the house and suggesting they change the locks after they move in.
I know what this guy described is a more involved process, but most smarthome cloud accounts are about as simple as an email & password change.
Most smart home stuff should work fine if there was no hub controlling them, like with light switches and electric shades.
Andrew Warren video talking about these features https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thUJARumXWE
And the new owner just gets control over the system and controll everything. No cloud/account nightmare like described here ...
Secondly for everything i install I write a document on how it works, how to override it or bypass it if it breaks, and how to remove it when I move out.
I wonder how many license agreements I did not follow by doing this?
Additionally - use something like a raspberry pi or an appliance that will remain with the home. If I decide to rent it out, or leave it behind, its not tied to me, but is still manageable.