The rise of digital housekeeping: the hidden work of smart technology | Hacker News Reader

The rise of digital housekeeping: the hidden work of smart technology

oslomet.no

50 pointsfinnjohnsen239 comments

Article is kind of light, but there is a surprising amount of work that comes with smart technology. Now, when I visit my parents, instead of getting asked to help fix something physical, I get asked to help diagnose smart light bulbs that for some reason have a single bulb that works but won't connect.

I have been fixing my grandparents IT stuff for the past 30 years, it's nothing new. I remember how happy I was I'm now an adult (15 or so, well over a decade ago) with enough authority to pass this on my brother.

That’s why we are living like luddites. During house renovation nothing smart comes inside despite complete new electrical installation. There come thick cables for wallbox and heat pump, but that’s all. I am so tired of barely working apparently simple electronics.

When I did a roof replacement two skylights needed to be replaced and I was offered 3 options. One was purely mechanical, one had a simple remote, and one that required an app! Naturally the app one was the super premium trim.

Am I just so old to know that tying a permanent house control to a platform that can go away like say palm or blackberry or windows xp (vista driver signing) or support for the current wifi standard is slightly ridiculous? Especially for a 30 yr+ purchase?

If I want to be positive about smart home stuff I just share my confusion that the industry didn't standardize on PoE(power over Ethernet) and just give the end customer an Ethernet switch or switches that most novices can figure out and is trivial to transfer to the next homeowner.

I sometimes use RF-based (Zigbee, Z-Wave) smart home stuff in the walls; no Internet dependency. These devices work fine if you don't use any smart stuff, they just allow control over the radio.

I built my own smart home… it's not flawless but I know how to fix it.

For me, pretty much none of the "smart home" stuff with rare exceptions (e.g. my bedroom was never updated with a light switch) actually does anything that saves me any real effort. There are a ton of things I'd like to just wish away but they require manipulation of the physical world.

For me the one irreplaceable ‘smart home’ feature is circadian lighting. There are ‘smart’ fixtures that will do this themselves but I’ve found scheduling on a per-room basis to be workable (albeit at times a maintenance headache) for coming on 12 years now.

Absolutely can’t live happily with dumb lights only. It’s not just aesthetics - I believe it has a major impact on my sleep health.

Are you considering as circadian lighting the control of just the brightness and when they come on or also including the change from cool to warm light color as well? The ability to change the color temp of the lights is the killer point for me. Anything above 3600K is a no go for me after sunset

Both! My lights go dim and deep red after sunset but very bright and cold mid-day.

I've found the same. I've been interested in smart homes stuff for 10+ years. My dad had z-wave in his beach home 15 years ago (not exactly an early adopter, but it was pre-HomeKit and pre-influx of cheap wifi devices).

Between flaky software/firmware, fear of network security, device incompatibilities, and the slow but steady enshitification of all the things, the industry has been a real let down.

I have a Smartthings hub, 4 z-wave switches, 2 z-wave wall warts, a handful of Sonos speaker (pre-voice assistant models), 2 HomePod Minis, one old Echo mini, and an Apple TV.

The Sonos and Echo pre-date HomeKit. The Echo only exists to add voice control to Smartthings and Sonos. "Alexa, play music in the living room" "Alexa, turn on the outside lights". Sadly, Sonos's software has been on a downward spiral for a few years now. The latest iOS app is less intuitive and reliable than the previous. And my wife's iPhone 16 Pro wouldn't connect to the network for months - I eventually had to shut it all down, hard reset everything, and rebuild the Sonos network. I'm done with them.

The Apple TV was bought for TV (duh), but serves as the Homekit base station. The HomePod Minis replaced a couple of Sonos in our bedroom (see above). But, Spotify doesn't play natively on the HomePod because Spotify and Apple seem to be in a state of corporate Cold War. So, that kinda sucks.

I'd love to add a few more light switches, but I'm reluctant to add any more Z-wave since it doesn't talk to Homekit (without rolling some sort of 3rd party bridge, which means adding another device to my network and managing it manually myself). So, I'm kind of stuck with what I have until I find the gumption to replace it all with Caseta or similar.

It's all a big old mess. But at least the shitty ecosystem has kept the house relatively uncomplicated. My wife manages to use all the things without much trouble. So I guess that's a plus.

I have a couple Apple TVs but they're basically for TV and music. My pair of Alexas, the one in the bedroom is basically to turn on a light that doesn't have a switch and set an alarm. I can use it for music but rarely do.

I do have an RPi camera that I now have to figure out why I can't connect to and a thermometer that is supposed to alert me below a certain range that I also need to debug. But that's about it.

Give me SmartHome that can load and unload the dishwasher and I'd be happier.

I'm in the same boat as you around Sonos. Find any alternatives that you're considering that aren't HomePod?

Nope, nothing easy. I went with HomePod Minis since we're not audiophiles and almost everything else in the house (laptops, iPads, phones) is Apple.

My only complaints are - lack of Spotify integration (you can AirPlay it, but not play it "natively") and you need an Apple Musi sub to play any alarm sound that isn't the default ear-splitting noise (it'll wake you up, but it's jarring - I prefer some "yoga" music or similar).

Sound quality is good enough for background music. If I wanted higher quality, I guess I'd get full-size HomePods.

That's been my experience as well... it's a downward trend of reliability. Forty years ago my parents had a bunch of Radio Shack home automation stuff that was actually reliable, though functionally simple. Apart from Philips devices attached to a Philips hub, everything else I've tried in the last decade has been flaky in some way.

I used some X10 stuff for a number of years after I bought my 200 year old house which had a lot of pull chain lights and the like. Actually worked pretty well.

Apart from Philips devices attached to a Philips hub, everything else I've tried in the last decade has been flaky in some way.

Everyone says the Philips bulbs are so reliable, yet they are the 2nd flakiest devices in our house (2nd only to those complete shit Leviton light switches that lose their minds once a month). One more “no response” when I open you in HomeKit, and I swear…

Are you using them with the Philips hub, or on their own?

Philips hub, latest hardware, reset multiple times. There’s just something flakey about our setup. It might even be that the bulbs are, what, going on ten years old? Maybe newer ones are more reliable.

Or I’ll just replace them with Nano bulbs that use Matter. Those have been rock-solid.

I don’t know if a vacuum robot counts but it saves us tons of effort. We wake up to a freshly vacuumed home every morning.

You need to have a very specific house layout. My brother does. I don't. A Dyson stick vac is much more useful for me than a vacuum robot would be.

It doesn’t need to be that specific the only problem I can foresee is that it cannot go downstairs. In my case, I just got two of them one for my upper floor and one for my ground floor. If you get some of the more advanced ones now they’re not particularly affected by wires, tassels, etc.

It's a very old house with lots of transitions over the years. Benefits from a few stick vac sweeps now and then but a robot vac wouldn't work well.

I would reframe what you said as it doesn’t work for specific house layouts. The vast majority should be able to use them with no problems.

In my experience, most houses have transitions between sections that are probably more than a robo-vacuum can easily handle.

Interesting, that’s not what I’m used to. What sort of transitions are you referring to because these things can get over a half inch hurdle.

There are any number of >1/2" transitions on my ground floor. But, as I say it's a 200+ year old house that has been added to and modified many times. I wasn't going to buy a robo-vac just to find it wasn't very useful. Really it's just my dining room/kitchen that needs to be vacuumed regularly between monthly housekeeper visits and a stick vac handles that in a few minutes.

Been thinking about this recently and how best to pass on/handover these digital responsibilities onto my spouse/eventually my children.

I'm going through a home reno and walk to document everything but dunno where how to start. [1]

It's only getting worse in terms of volume of 'smart' items, planned obsolescence of these items, trying to reduce reliance on BigTech.

[1] Related HN discussion -https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38444577

I haven't really gotten into "smart home" stuff, but I can definitely relate to the idea that the modern tech landscape can often create a ton of busy work.

Just look at my TV, for example. The way TV used to work was that you turned it on and the TV was on. Now, even though I've got a relatively friendly setup with an Nvidia Shield, a "user" still has to navigate through some menus to get what they want to watch on the TV.

And of course, every so often, one of the various streaming services will log out, which will take some manual intervention to get back up and running. There are three TVs in my home, so between them all I'm playing tech support on a TV at least once or twice a month.

And don't even get me started on the rigamarole involved with getting my kids set up with Minecraft. Servers, Realms subs, linking Nintendo and Microsoft accounts... I don't know how anyone without some tech in their background can even navigate that mess.

I don't mind streaming menus per se because they have about as many extra steps as one would expect given that you need to somehow communicate what you want to watch.

I'm annoyed, though, that streaming app hide "purchased" and rented content in favor of their recommendation lists. If I just rented a movie from Amazon Prime, and immediately open the Amazon Prime app on the streaming box, I don't need recommendations. If anything, I need to be nudged to watch the thing I just bought!

I remember wanting to play GTA at my friend’s house, and it took a whole hour and lots of fiddling with the menus followed by a multi-GB update to play. We jokingly said that we were playing IT Simulator.

I have less and less patience for needy tech.

Just a couple days ago I tweeted that I was surprised how good home assistant is and how far smart home stuff went. It is so reliable that I only had one cheap bulb failing, which I could prevent just by googling and finding out it's an unreliable model.

I have a lot of smart devices. What's more important is that I have way more automations you'd expect from that number of devices. I even have smart tv switch to and autoplay a youtube playlist with new movie trailers that it makes automatically for me. I just click on the movie that I want to watch as usual, but it shows trailers and then plays the movie. This is magic and it is reliable. The only problem is to set this up of course, but it became so much easier with home assistant, I can't express how much I am amazed by an opensource software.

I thought this article was going to be about organizing things in our digital lives.

A lot of devices are pivoting to being "smart" but they aren't viewed as appliances. They need to just work, not be fancy. I have a lot of appliances that have some sort of wifi connection ability, but i don't need a notification on my phone when my laundry is done it already sings a song, or I've set a timer.

The items in my house that actually are helpful to have on our wifi, and be "smart" are the ones that I fret about being off or closed in the case of our garage door, or outside lights.

There is potential for an excellent experience but it is far from the average one. If you have a technical person set up home assistant and keep physical switches (eg lutron caseta), everyone can win. But most people who buy a smart bulb have never heard of home assistant and may not have the patience or ability to learn. I think HA could do a better job at attracting and onboarding the average consumer.

Now multiply it by 5 in terms of time if you want your smart devices to not constantly phone home and spy on you.

The ubiquitous private “anonymous” surveillance built into everything is the main dystopia here. People lack the imagination to see how it will inevitably be misused.

We just finished a home renovation and the only "smart" thing I did was ensure every room had ethernet connected to a 16 port switch. I did however get Hive (remote thermostat) installed when we moved in 8 years ago.

These houses with smart locks etc scare me.

See:

More Work For Mother: The Ironies Of Household Technology From The Open Hearth To The Microwave

By Ruth Schwartz Cowan

The rise of manufactured controversy: the hidden work of seeking gender conflict in smart homes

Now I have to keep React Native version updated in the family wishlist app I made "for fun" 7 years ago.

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