Hacker News Reader

Comment by lesuorac | Hacker News Reader

Can't speak to most of those but smart lights are pretty nice.

I made sure to buy zigbee ones so that I'm just tied to home assistant which even if it goes out of business will still work with whatever binaries I've downloaded already (as well as it works locally so I can control them during internet outages). I'm sure somebody else can explain why you should get Thread or Matter nowendays but I never bothered to learn the differences.

But yeah, the average life of a company is what 1 year? Don't get any product you want for more than 5 years from a company younger than 5 years if you need that company to exist for it to work.

View on HN

Zigbee + Home Assistant is the best future-proof combo

This is the sort of thing that makes me worry about my solar inverter, battery etc. so much remote management stuffed into these things.

Just make sure it follows open standards and you’ll be fine.

smart lights are pretty nice… I made sure to buy zigbee ones

The connectivity doesn't matter when it's the actual filaments/LEDs that burn out after only a year or two.

Even buying a big name like Sylvania doesn't help. I had eight Sylvania smart bulbs burn out or go into endless flicker fits in under a year. They're all in a landfill now.

Of course, that's better than when Feit Electric sent out a firmware update that deliberately bricked all of its smart bulb controller boxes with nothing more than an e-mail telling people it was done. (This was before Apple Home or Google Home existed.)

I haven’t had this issue at all and I’ve had some of my Philips Hue bulbs for close to ten years.

Mind you, one would expect them to work for a long time considering they’re (probably) the most expensive on the market.

Smart switches > smart bulbs

Isn't switches just more brittle and less control?

I can set individual colors and intensity on the lights as well as with a dumb switch I can also have the lights just come on so if I were to sell the house or whatever the next person wouldn't need to have home assistant to work anything in the house.

The hope is that with smart switches, no one needs home assistant to work anything in the house either - they get a UI they have had their whole life, a simple switch or toggle button. The smart part is an optional extra guests don't have to worry about, they just use lights the way they've always used lights.

You can't control color easily, but you can get dimmable smart switches. I find for most lights, I don't change the colors pretty much ever. YMMV.

If switch changes state to on, set scene depending on daytime (or other conditions) - should suffice?

To change for another scene, have a button or voice command?

I’m with you here - make control „as usual as possible“, also saves a ton of money and annoyances - and most important: home automation is about automation, not controlling manually via phone…

You must have some funky electricity at your place, I have two smart bulbs (a TP-Link wifi and a generic Zwave) that get daily use and have been running fine for 7 years now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com