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Comment by vnxli | Hacker News Reader

This is entirely on the author. Sure these vendors make awful products and poorly maintain them - but nobody is forcing anyone to buy them or integrate them into their house. I have yet to hear, or especially see, these devices make anybody’s life easier than doing the task manually.

I never think about light in my home, I flip the switch if I need it - lights seem like such a chore to my friends who have to issue commands to a speaker and that’s one of the few things this tech is supposed to be good at

Good technology gets out of the way and let’s the user do or be or experience something. This is the opposite

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> I have yet to hear, or especially see, these devices make anybody’s life easier than doing the task manually.

Let's fix that, shall we? I have a Philips Hue system and also a physical switch[0] that I can move around. In my hallway and my kitchen (high traffic rooms) lights turn on via motion detection, making it absolutely unnecessary to ever turn touch a physical plug (with my wet hands after washing the dishes for example). I'm also not blinded by the lights when going to the toilet in the middle of the night. I sync them to my TV (and two LED strips on its sides) while watching a movie for a more immersive experience. And I also gradually dim the lights and shut them down in the evenings if tomorrow is a work day, giving me a visual cue that I should go to bed. And it works via local network, flaky Internet doesn't affect a thing. I've never plugged a mic/speaker to it and I still absolutely love it.

Don't get me wrong, I've been definitely burned by other types of IoT appliances, but smart lights are awesome. More expensive investment than non-smart ones for sure and whether that price is justified is up to you, but in my 3-4 years of using them I have yet to change a single bulb or a battery in a motion detector / switch.

https://www.philips-hue.com/en-us/p/hue-dimmer-switch--lates...

This setup really sounds great and very involved.

But how do you turn the lights off again? Timeout? Not detecting any motion? Also, do you have any pets?

As for dimming the lights, I'm sure it looks impressive and also dramatic. But I've been able to go to bed in time for more than 40 years just fine. Also, what if you do want to stay up later?

Which, I think, is the gist of the first comment: You can do all these things, but they don't improve the current status and thus mostly serve as recreational activity.

Turning off the lights is a big problem. You need to introduce presence detection, which is more than motion - people are very still when watching a movie or reading a book or working at their desk. That's when you have to introduce phone detection or heat detection or other sensors that need to be processed and integrated exploding the complexity.

[0] is an electronic switch, not a physical switch. A physical switch is hard-wired into the wall and you physically switch the circuit open or closed.

> I never think about light in my home, I flip the switch if I need it - lights seem like such a chore to my friends who have to issue commands to a speaker and that’s one of the few things this tech is supposed to be good at

Pre-covid we used to leave the dog at home during the day (I now WFH so not an issue), but it gets dark at 3:30 here during the winter, meaning the dog is stuck sitting in the dark for 2 hours. Philips Hue has routines for turning on lamps 30 minutes before sunset meaning the dog gets to chill out and stare out the window for an hour longer. The bulbs also sync with TVs and devices that will adjust the lighting for tasks/bedtime/movie time.

We use hue bulbs in our bedside lamps, and they sync (pretty much out of the box) to alarms in google calendar so 30 minutes before "up" time the lamps come on and fade up to full brightness when my alarm goes off. It happens 5 days a week, and correctly knows when I'm OOO to not bother waking me. The lights can also do holiday modes so no more giving keys to my neighbour to ask them to turn on lights for me.

Heating is even more key - ever go away for a week and forget to turn down the thermostat? I know I have, and we've just wasted a weeks worth of heating the house to comfortable human temperature rather than just keeping it from freezing. Modern smart heating systems have thermostats in each TRV so you can adjust the temperature in one room rather than the entire house (where right now I am using one room), and can be controlled on timers, and deactivated remotely.

EDIT: I do want to say that the devices (particularly the voice interface to them) is not perfect, however I would estimate our failure rate at once every couple of days rather than every time we try to turn on the lights, and as others have mentioned here it needs to have "dumb" fallbacks - I need to be able to turn off the lights with a switch, or walk to the thermostat and adjust it otherwise it just doesn't work.

> Philips Hue has routines for turning on lamps 30 minutes before sunset

FWIW, mechanical timers have been able to do this for decades.

20+ years ago I had a mechanical timer that turned on my porch lights at sunset and off at 11pm. You just needed to configure your latitude so it knew when sunset was.

I found a honeywell timer on amazon, which requires being hard wired. There is no way my landlord would have let me do electrical work in my previous property, and getting an electrician out for a "simple" job like that is ~$80 plus $75 for the timer. A hue bridge + bulb is ~$75 and I can use my existing lamps too.

> You just needed to configure your latitude so it knew when sunset was.

Having an electrician hard wire an extra switch for each lamp, configuring latitude and individual timers (presumably they don't all work off the same trigger so if you want to change them from 30m before to an hour before, or 15m after you have to update them all), managing DST... That doesn't sound massively simple to be be honest.

> mechanical timers have been able to do this for decades.

I don't think people are claiming that smart homes are allowing for things that were never physically possible before; I'm certainly not, but it is definitely more convenient.

You just needed to configure your latitude so it knew when sunset was.

Mechanical timers have never "been able to do this". Sunset time changes on a daily basis. In Seattle that can be anywhere from 4:15 to 9:30 p. m. That's fine if one finds +/- 2.5 hours acceptable. Others have more precise needs.

I'd love to see one of these work in Finland :)

Our sunset times vary from "sun never comes up" to "sun never goes down".

Practically any kind of sunset-based automation is completely useless for anything over here except maybe for some decorative outdoor lights.

Wouldn't it also need to know the date? Around here sunset ranges from 4:30pm to 9pm, depending on the time of year.

The flip side with the heat is that I can’t help but feel I’m introducing another failure mode into my heating system with an internet connected smart thermostat which is a whole lot more of a problem in a sub freezing area than forgetting to turn the thermostat down.

You're not wrong - you are introducing complexity here, and you need to be aware of the failure modes (and the fallback paths available to you).

We are talking about someone who spent a thousand dollars on glowing hexagonal tiles that have a shitty wood pattern silkscreened on them.

If she'd done a 5 minute google search like I just did, she would have seen several reviews describing them as being very buggy.

In fairness, the main living area light at my brother’s place are scattered across a bunch of switches in different places. I could see being tempted to have all on and all off voice commands or other central control.

My house is a lot simpler. I have voice command for one light that doesn’t have a switch. Used to use wireless X10.

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