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Building up a "smart" home where you have control of everything is radically different from off-the-shelf IOT crapware that turns into a paperweight when some company decides to pull the plug.
Almost every bulb in the house is a smart bulb, every external door (and some internal doors) has a sensor, some windows, and some rooms have motion sensors, in some cases more than one. Every room with at least one smart bulb has a smart switch, whether a wireless dimmer or the actual light switch on the wall.
The bulbs, you group together; I use the "Circadian Lighting" integration rather than "Adaptive Lighting" and it _does_ support light groups, so all of the bulbs in my hall can be managed by a single group entity, the 5 spots in the main bathroom, same thing, 4 in the en suite, same, etc etc.
Everyone starts out thinking it’s wonderful. It’s when it comes to maintenance or troubleshooting that things become tedious. Spending 60 dollars on a bulb that may or may not last 2 years.
After 10+ or so years of messing with these stupid bulbs no one in my family besides me even uses I’ve basically switched back to all “dumb” stuff now. This isn’t even taking in to account the amount of “smart” devices that start with even basic interoperability but then end up locked in a walled garden when money got expensive. Sure you can fashion up an esp garage door opener but do I really need another 20 cobbled together devices to maintain?
I use a mix of Z-Wave and Zigbee devices (as well as lots of WiFi such as ESPHome and other devices), I started initially with Hue bulbs, moved to HA, ditched the Hue hub, increased to near 100 bulbs a mix of Hue and IKEA, door/window sensors and motion sensors, water leak sensors, wireless dimmers, and plenty more.
My kids don't know any different, the oldest now 5 has grown up with automatic lights, and has a smart switch I built for her to change the colour of the lights in her room as she wishes; we occasionally sit together and she choses a new set of colours for each button, my son (3) likes to pick a colour for his bedroom lights before bed using the colour picker on mine or my wife's phone.
The kids are aware that if they don't come to dinner when we ask I can just shout "Ok Nabu, turn off the TV" from another room and just the suggestion will convince them to do it themselves.
There's some maintenance for replacing batteries, but I really like that IKEAs stuff uses mostly AAA and I have automations to notify where the low batteries are, and as a household with young children, we've always got batteries charged and ready to go.
We use Frigate to notify us with a voice prompt across the house when people walk through the gate before they even reach our front door, we have audible alerts if the garage door was opened, and plenty more.
My wife will occasionally have griped with how something works, so I ask her to tell me how she _wants_ it to work, and I fix it.
Overall, other than adding new features, it's very hands-off.
If you have HACS, you can add this: https://andrew-codechimp.github.io/HA-Battery-Notes/
Someone's always got a way to improve things.
Thank you, I do have HACS and I'll be getting this installed ASAP!
1. one z-wave switch died after 10 years, replaced it with a zigbee one.
2. Two GE zigbee bulbs failed after 8 years.
I've made a point of trying to avoid anything which requires the internet/cloud to function.
The hue bulbs that I added in 2015 are still going strong. I see so many people complaining about the short lifespan of bulbs and all I can figure is that their power dirty or they are buying very cheap equipment.
The only way I have ever lost bulbs is when I forget to remove them when changing apartments.
Modern bulbs from reputable manufacturers easily last a decade of normal usage at this point
The original metal and glass ones are still going strong at nearing 10 years old, but some of my newer ones made from plastic and plastic since Siginify started cheaping out the build quality have been failing.
Out of somewhere in the region of 60-70 Hue bulbs, mostly Colour + White Ambience, a mix of Edison, Screw and GU10, I've now had 3 of the new cheap/light/plastic ones fail, and zero of the older metal/glass ones, though I've shattered the glass on 3 of the glass ones being careless when moving.
I'd rather have troubleshooting be tedious than have troubleshooting be impossible because I don't have direct control of the device.
It's worth noting that I _enjoy_ finding ways to automate my home, or create solutions to problems that didn't exist, and using Home Assistant, but my experience has been anything but troublesome.
Granted HA started off pretty rough, and there are ways it does things I still don't think are as good as they could be, but it has come along an incredible amount and they're doing great things at HA/Nabu/Open Home Foundation.
EDIT: typo
Even 5$ sensors and bulbs from Aliexpress were pretty much plug and play experience.
To me, though, the value is that I can turn those devices on / off from whatever logic I desire. On a lot of them I can gather power consumption which helps me to understand how much energy I use and where it goes.
If you're buying some random smart crap with integration on some sketchy app then yeah you'll have a bad time
That said, haven't scaled anywhere close to 100 devices