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Comment by dmje | Hacker News Reader

I'm probably alone in thinking home automation is a tremendous waste of time. I think there's maybe one exception, and that's being able to switch on heating remotely, which is actually useful. The rest is IMO gratuitous nerdery. Mildly interesting/fun: maybe. Needed: no.

In a world in which resources are scarce and everyone is getting fatter, getting off one's ass to switch on a light is probably a good thing...

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I think you are getting it wrong, remote switching a light with your smartphone is almost a byproduct of home automation. Nice things you can have: turning on/off external lights at certain conditions; dim bathroom lights at night so if you go there in darkness you won't be blinded; turning off lights automatucally when you have kids that keep forgetting about it (I tell them each time anyway like in the old times just to teach them); blinders that go down at sunset, but only when it's cold enough outside etc etc. You might think you can live without this, you absolutely can, just like you can live without many other things.

You are conflating automation with remote control.

Replacing a lightswitch with an app that requires human interaction is indeed ridiculous.

Replacing a lightswitch with a motion sensor has been a staple feature of commercial buildings for decades.

Similar for heating control, occupancy detection, adaptive lighting, energy management, etc. Replacing a physical entity without adding any value to it is pointless, hence the 'automation' part of the phrase

It is actually the same number of trips on my end at least. Without phone control for my lights, I turn off the lights on the way to the couch, get comfortable in the dark (can't even see all my blankets), then look for the remote in the dark, and then start up a movie. With the phone control for my lights I go to the couch, do all that stuff in the light, and then dim the lights afterwards. The only difference is that I have to paw around for the remote longer in the first scenario.

While there is some resource waste because I'm not going to rip the old lightswitches and copper wires out of my apartment walls and, I dunno, recycle them or something, this doesn't seem to be a fundamental issue. The automated stuff is mostly wireless, so I guess we could save a bit of copper if we were to install it in lieu of switches. So really the issue is that the previous designer didn't correctly separate out UI from underlying functionality, that's their waste not mine!

As others have said, there many things which are much more practical to implement with "smarts".

In my case, I love my Hue (and similar) lights. It's not just a question of not getting off my ass to turn them on and off. It's the fact they can be dimmed, that at night if I get up I always press the same button, but the light won't blind me. I can also easily change the colors when I'm watching a movie, etc.

Yeah, I could probably buy separate dumb lights for each purpose, and turn them on or off according to the need of the moment. But I live in a small, rented apartment, so having random wires and tons of lamps all over the place would be much more painful than fiddling with an app (which actually works quite well).

However, I agree that the smarts should be able to be easily bypassed in case they don't work. With Hue, the lights can be configured to turn on automatically when powered on for example, so I can always turn on the light from my dumb wall switch if the controller is dead.

One thing that I always ask myself when starting down a thought process like this one is “But does it have accessibility benefits?” In this case, being able to turn on lights or raise blinds remotely has a clear and obvious benefit to people with motor difficulties.

I'm basically in agreement with you; while I've seen some good use cases for HA, much of it is indeed falling into some other camp (even the person who needed it to have a single place to adjust the 18 lamps in their basement; it is a bit of a luxury to have 18 separate lights in a room).

However, are you sure that resources are scarce? It seems to me we are rather too good at extracting them and turning them into commodities.

One big problem is usability. If you want something to turn on, the easiest way would be to have to ability to touch said thing and turn it on. Also security, planned obsolescence and so on.

A master switch in the front door, turn off everything, before leaving the house is the only automation I love and miss when I don't have it.

I agree, there is some convenience when it works but when it doesn’t it’s so infuriating that it undoes all the previous convenience.

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