I think it's just an extension of my not caring to "tinker" with my professional workspace. I have all stock OS backgrounds, always preferred a GUI editor/IDE. Barely any customizations that aren't tied to significant velocity improvements.. IDK. I'm not a "space" tinkerer; physical or digital.
I never was interested in the tinkering side. The functional side has been very handy.
For example, smart thermostats reduced the heating bill 40% while leaving the place warmer where we actually are.
Smart dimmers on lamps let you dim them in the evening, or turn all the lights off with one push.
Your use cases may vary and the answer may be none do it but a good level of smart home things are quite practical.
We're building a custom home and it's only been through this process that I've taken an interest in smart home / home automation. Why? Mostly because
1) building speakers into your walls & ceilings means you need to control their input somehow, and your gear is going to be in a wiring closet
2) if you don't want Alexas or Nest devices sitting around on horizontal surfaces, your voice control options are limited
3) you don't want your security camera footage stored in the cloud
4) you do want a single pane of glass for visibility into things like your HVAC, your irrigation system, your security system, your garage door status, and your AV gear.
Home Assistant is tremendously helpful as a FOSS alternative to Control4, Crestron, Savant, Lutron, and Josh.ai, but you can't entirely escape the "big tech" part of the ecosystem because each of the primary systems (say, your AV streaming or your power shades) will still require use of the OEM's product. Many of which have integrations with or APIs exposed to Home Assistant, but not all.
There are some quality of life improvements available through automation, but most of it is incremental and only enthusiasts would really care.
1 - My child is a runner. Zigbee door position sensors talk to home assistant and play sounds when a door is unlocked or opened.
2 - I'm super private. Giving people a key to my house is not something I'm comfortable with. I use Unifi Access + ESPHome + Zwave deadbolt to get the level of control I'm comfortable with. The doorbell also plays a sound in the house (in addition to the app on my phone)
3 - I have an under counter water cooler that runs way too hot. Zigbee temp sensor + Zigbee powerbar + simple exhaust fan keeps it cool.
4 - I dislike having 15 tv remotes and I have a more traditional AV setup (not sonos). I use events on the TV to control the audio (power on, volume, infer input selection)
AI has made all this a lot easier. I don't reall put a ton of effort in anymore, whereas before I'd have to fumble with configs.
However this week spent an hour with claude to migrate to tailscale, latest home assistant update, sensor setup and filtering for my rtl433 antenna, connected hue lights while we're at it, migrated to latest pihole version and put everything in git in one nice compose file with a step by step instruction on how everything was setup and which account sign ups were needed. I still checked every step and manually approved stuff, but the remote session feature made this easy to finish.
That makes me uncomfortable, electronics controlling physical access sounds like a nightmare to me. I'm glad we have the options though, so different people can customize to the level that makes them feel safe.
And the most important thing(s) that any experienced HA automation geek knows is:
1) Always have a manual way to control a device if HA goes down.
2) Local only, no cloud.
It is for this reason that my lights (Hue) and switches (Inovelli) are bound in ZigBee groups. HA adds some niceties, but the lights still work if it’s down. Accent lights I have bound to the Hue Bridge, because their app adds features HA doesn’t have, and they aren’t required for emergency egress.
The only gap I have, I think, is that because I’ve set all bulbs to respond to power restoration after a cut in last known state, if everything somehow lost its Zigbee binding, putting switches into dumb mode locally still wouldn’t help. However, since that’s an improbable scenario, I accept the remote possibility in exchange for not being awakened from lights coming on in the middle of the night. Plus I keep flashlights / headlamps throughout the house.
For a home, I'd argue that you should fail open, for safety. So now I'm sleeping or out of the country and the software fails and the doors unlock.
Then there's the quality of the software. Home Assistance is probably fairly good, but the software in the devices probably isn't. All the demonstrations I've seen of home automation, regardless of supposed quality and interoperability has been, in my mind, yanking as all hell. If an IoT sensor reports nothing, is that because there's nothing to report, or has it lost connection, or is the configuration broken? I'd be constantly nervous about the later two. A practical example is tire pressure sensors, I despise them. They are more often than not misreporting, so you learn to ignore them.
And as you say: "any experienced HA automation geek knows", yeah, but I don't want to be a home automation geek, I just want the stuff to work. I don't want to be bothered by setup and configuration, I don't want to think about it, ever.
Example: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07DR9CMGZ
But being able to control my garage door when I'm not home is definitely very useful. Get a RATGDO and it's entirely local, no cloud. Use your remote access solution of choice to get into your local network to operate it.
But now I need a way to monitor the status of a system I’m using to prevent a water line from freezing, and suddenly all this home automation stuff seems very useful.
Adding off-peak controls for electrical devices, water heaters, thermostats, EV charging, etc just makes sense so you don't have to think too hard about it.
I also really enjoy setting lighting for different moods - specifically when watching movies, and that's easy to do from the couch :)
Like plugging in an old AC into a smart plug to manually turn it on remotely (make sure it had enough amps)
I will say though monitoring my air quality with a proper "smart" device (dedicated to monitoring) has been very eye opening
No, we were renovating the electrics and my boss got all excited and asked about all sorts of automation. We did none of it. The closet thing I have to smart home things is PoE in more network drops than I really need.
Frankly I don't want to deal with it, I have zero desire to debug my home. It even pisses me off that my car charger needs to be online, because I don't understand why it needs networking. If it's to prevent people from misusing it, just add the option of a padlock.
I have zero trust in IoT devices, both from a security perspective and from a functionality point of view.
4 years later I have more than 50 relays and sensors in 2 houses, controlling water pumps, irrigation, AC, thermostats, monitoring energy consumption and allowing energy optimizations and saving manual work. I have a smart water valve on my desk waiting to be installed and I need to add a few more thermostats (energy is so expensive these days), otherwise I am almost done.
I have nothing fancy like light themes and moods. I have solid solar-AC-heating optimizations with the temperature sensors and window open sensors; I have a decent irrigation setup and also external lights control. That's it. I am not a fan of tinkering with microcontrollers, I did not even modded or used custom firmware to any of it, I am just pragmatic in using the tech where I need and for what brings me benefits.
You do you though, mechanical outlet timers work perfectly well.
You are not. I have no interest in having my appliances spy on me, or hit me with sudden unexpected costs or subscriptions, or being hacked.