How I Learned the Smart Home Industry Needs to Change, part 2 | Hacker News Reader

How I Learned the Smart Home Industry Needs to Change, part 2

blog.astro.ai

45 pointsDuhck49 comments

Time for a small rant. I mostly agree with the premise of the article (that most home automation products are too tech-user targeted), but I have an even bigger complaint:

Automation doesn't mean that you can control it from your fucking iPhone.

Automation means that I don't have to think about it. It happens automatically. I was looking at "automated" systems for underground sprinklers this summer and it drove me insane. I don't care at all whether I can turn on my sprinklers from Starbucks. What I want is a sprinkler system that is smart enough to know when the soil is dry, and smart enough to look at the weather forecast and say "Hey, the grass is dry, but there's an 80% chance of rain this afternoon. I'll wait it out and see what happens"

The same goes for all kinds of "home automation" products. I couldn't care less about controlling my lighting from my phone, but it'd be really awesome if the lights in the living room dimmed when I started playing a movie (of course, with the option of turning them back up if I'm trying to do something else).

Get the 80% cases right, with an option for manual override, and I'll be happy as a clam!

Author of the article here.

Ironically the first draft of this post hit a lot more on the point that the mere concept of automation is broken (hence the title, The Jetsons Fallacy).

Today's smart home solutions look more like universal remotes. The motion sensors, computer vision, and other sensor arrays create a system of false positives that need to be baby sat more than our old (analog) systems. This is a regression, and it will be many years before the tech is ready to move forward.

While I agree with the example you presented about dimming your lights when a movie starts, think about the use cases, and how horribly unpredictable we as humans are.

Instead I think home automation should focus on solvable problems that don't predict your behavior, but complement it.

Sprinkler systems (and the people who don't use them properly) are indeed in need of "automation" as you say. I see so many sprinklers on in the middle of the day (as opposed to early morning, when they should be on) or during a rain storm. It's not that hard to properly set the timer, but people still don't do it.

Get the 80% cases right on sprinklers and the fact that people don't manually override is fine.

I've never cared for a lawn in my life, so purely out of curiosity, why should a sprinkler system be on in the early morning? Wouldn't morning dew take care of watering grass around those hours?

Morning dew is not enough to consider your lawn watered. Typically you want a few inches of saturated soil for watering.

As for why it's not "ideal" to run sprinklers in the middle of the day, the idea is that if you water early in the morning, then all of your sunlight hours beat on watered grass. If you just started watering in the afternoon, your grass has already been in prime morning sunlight without the watered soil to boost growing. It's not necessarily bad, it's just not ideal.

It's because the rate of evaporation is highest during the noon hours. Water utilities regularly ask people to water their lawns in the early morning or evening to reduce wasting water to evaporation before it can be soaked in by the grass itself.

A lawn doesn't need a constant mist, it needs a couple of inches of water a couple of times a week. Dew is unlikely to accumulate to that depth. Watering in the morning reduces evaporation.

If you water in the middle of the day, you'll lose more water to evaporation before it can soak into the soil.

it'd be really awesome if the lights in the living room dimmed when I started playing a movie (of course, with the option of turning them back up if I'm trying to do something else).

What do you think of the approach from this older video of mine? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7jeJSdJPpk

This isn't much of an article. The only point of any substance in it is that Nest devices are difficult to install. This is true, but that's because HVAC systems don't have wireless functionality with a nice clean API. The only way to control them is through hooking up wires.

The article ending with a local evening news type of "Coming up next" is just insulting. Make your point in this article or don't waste my time.

According to their blog, these are a group of ex-Crestron guys that got into an accelerator a month ago with a "3+ month" plan to "refine our product, team, and strategy". So there's nothing to look at or even discuss.

The nice thing about hardware is that you can say "put up or shut up" and it doesn't come off as snarky. Get back to us when you have something better than Nest, because that's what you have to beat right now.

There are HVAC systems out there that are controlled via a digital bus where the hookup then becomes power and control. However, these are rare in residential installations where analog switched systems are common.

My thermostat recently died so I had to replace it. Looking at my local Home Depot and Lowes, I could spend $300 for the Nest or $24 for programmable weekday/weekend device. I would have been happy to pay a premium for better technology, but a 12x premium was more than I was willing to go.

Additionally, the Nest would have only been used 3-4 months of the year. I live in the dry southwest and I use (and prefer) evaporative cooling. None of the all in one thermostats can control evap coolers. If Nest wanted to innovate, they could build a remote control box to add this functionality, then I might consider it a better value.

The article didn't mention the biggest reason people aren't buying Nest, and the reason I didn't buy one: cost. The Nest thermostat runs around $200 - $250, while a basic thermostat can be had for around $20. It's the same for the Nest smoke detector: $99 versus less than $10 for a basic one. As one experienced in the real estate market, I can say that home builders usually go with the cheapest solution. And, I don't think consumers are going to rush out and spend 10x as much for something they already have, or are replacing, no matter how good it is.

Honestly, the problem is not just that the Nest thermostat and smoke detector are expensive... I could (almost) justify spending $200 on a thermostat or smoke detector once. But I have 9 heating zones and approximately 9 rooms that need smoke detectors. You know what I'm not doing? Spending $1800 on thermostats for my house. Hell, I haven't even replaced all the old spring-loaded mercury-filled thermostats from the 80's when the house was built. If I could buy one Nest, and 8 remote receiver thingies for like $10 each that just report wirelessly to the Nest, then I might actually buy one.

I don't think this is universally true. The bottom of the market is hefty in real estate, as you say. But, it's not the whole market. In fact, the range of quality/price in all home fixture is pretty wide. There definitely is a market for high end everything, including Aircon, water heating and other "similar" categories.

It's like saying that some high end monitor failed because everyone gets the cheapest monitor. Yet, Apple still sell some monitors @ 5X the price of the bottom end.

A lot of markets are like this. The bottom takes 50-75% of the market share with the rest ranging widely. TVs, doorknobs, office chairs, socks, nipple tassels...

I bought a honeywell version that's half the cost. I'm not that lazy that I need a thermostat to tell me when I'll be home and when I won't. I can preemptively adjust the thermostat schedule as my schedule changes - rather than wait for Nest to figure it out (and waste energy bill). Through the web interface or app it's so easy even a caveman can do it.

Also, maybe I'm the only person who is not in love with the design of the nest. One of my friends has one and my eyes instantly drew to it - not because it was beautiful but because it stuck out like a sore thumb.

The honeywell version looks like a regular thermostat. I don't need something that tells my guests I have disposable income.

About the smoke detector: You can purchase a smoke alarm that would alert you, or the fire department. It costs $30. http://simplisafe.com/smoke-detector

Admittedly the Nest also includes a Carbon monoxide, which costs $50 from Simplisafe. However (and someone can correct me if I'm wrong) you don't need as many Carbon Monoxide detectors as Smoke Detectors.

The Simplisafe requires a monthly fee for the monitoring - but anyone who wants an automated house is probably looking for an automated security monitoring system and it doesn't cost extra to add more components.

There's a sort of disconnect between stuff that's part of the machinery of a house and the tech gadgetry world.

House parts like central heating, taps, toilets and such tend to be very standard and long lived. How long did indoor toilets take to get traction? How big an advantage are indoor toilets over chamber pots?

A "gadget" is very flimsy feeling compared to a toilet. IE, I expect the toilet to work in 20 years, but not an ipod. It might get clogged, but any plumber will be able to fix it. I think people are hesitant about installing ipods as part of the core infrastructure of their houses. What happens if your windows system won't connect to a router you buy in 10 years. Who will fix it? What happens if wifi becomes obsolete?

I don't think I'm explaining this very well. Merging gadgets with houses is kind of unnatural. They operate at different time scales. Tortoises and fruit flies.

tldr Home automation products tend to offer a lot of features to woo early-adopter technical investors likely to be on Kickstarter whereas simpler products would gain more traction long term

Entirely true, but I think the consumer's version of simplicity conflicts with the developer's view of it. Simplicity to the consumer often introduces a complexity to the developer on a whole new level of discomfort when compared to snazzy technical features. Technical features are for people that know how to communicate what they want to the system, but simple features often mean inferring what people want, without them telling the system and without even being able to communicate it at all.

The sprinkler use case above (tonyarkles) is an easy example, because there is a knowable science to healthy lawns. The light dimming is much more complex. How do you infer if someone wants the lights to brighten when they walk into the kitchen momentarily for a snack, even when a movie is on and you normally want them dimmed?

Not sure I'd agree with "the general public does not see these products as easy to use or convenient as they’d hope"

Redo the analogy and instead of a Nest promotional article comparing the Nest to other thermostats, compare to a nearly identical home improvement product like fiberglass insulation. After all, you're competing with every product on every shelf at Home Depot, not just smart thermostats, so this appears superficially fair. In more detailed analysis, its an even more fair apples to apples comparison.

The financials are similar although insulation pays off sooner and the capital expense is almost infinitely more flexible. The ease of use for insulation is off the charts compared to a Nest, you simply install it and keep it dry and watch the energy bill drop. The convenience factor for insulation compared to a Nest is also off the charts, insulation never requires firmware upgrades or wifi access and has a much longer useful lifetime than "typical electronic gadget" or even modern dumb thermostats.

Overall a batt of fiberglass insulation beats the nest on all specified marketing criteria. Yet, most homes could use more / better insulation despite insulation having been marketed for decades and the nest being a newcomer to the space. If you can't sell insulation to these people, you're never going to sell them a Nest using the same marketing message.

Marketing messages usually have little to do with the actual product, so a message that is unusually close to the facts of the product is statistically likely to be wrong.

I fail to see how insulation is easier to install than a nest, but other than that, it's a really interesting point of view. The nest really is the last item on the list when optimizing your heating bill.

Really? Automating turning off AC/Heat when you're not there saves a ton of money and is very low effort. Especially if you don't have a programmable thermostat at all.

I cut my bill enough to cover the Nest in less than 3 months and I purchased it shortly after launch. For me it was the 80% and now I continue to work on fixing the rest of the problems with my AC/heat related costs.

Some level of programmability is probably worthwhile although you can get a lot of the same effect by manually turning the thermostat up and down which I do a lot anyway. And if I didn't have a programmable thermostat I might well spring for the extra dollars on the Nest if only for the cool factor. As it is I have a programmable thermostat that mostly works just fine. A lot of people are likely in that situation. I've thought of getting a Nest but there's some finite probability I'd run into installation problems and it is unlikely to save me much if any money.

Edit: I should mention it would be for heat only. I don't have AC.

Yes, because the average person has the willpower to go walk over to their thermostat all the time -- especially when they leave / come home.

Not a chance.

Turning off your heating/cooling apparatus is the most natural thing for people in Japan.

Don't people turn their lights off in the us?

Most homes already have a thermostat installed, making a Nest install pretty easy.

Insulation generally requires open walls and/or roof to install, upping the difficulty a great deal.

I live in an old brick home in St. Louis (1888) and have read that insulation can cause the walls to not "breathe" properly, causing accelerated degradation. I'd love to insulate better, but I'd have to tear our the walls, move everything out of each room (with all the dust), and then I could potentially cause a bigger problem. I do need nicer windows, but those are pretty expensive in relation to a Nest.

It's a case-by-case basis, but I've been thinking about buying a Nest for years... I think I could recoup the cost over my standard programmable thermostat in just one leaky-window winter... And I can install it myself in a couple hours (taking my time).

Combine the previously stated benefits with the fact that I have roommates (replace with active family for some) and it'll adjust to our widely varied schedules - and I can adjust it whenever I think about it... When I wake up freezing because the roommates shut the heat off before a cold front hit; when I get to work and realize I left it set too high, etc.

This is actually a really bad comparison.

Not just for the reasons other people mention (it require open walls, etc), but because you miss another serious issue:

Fiberglass insulation is, by and large, installed very badly.

Leaving even small gaps between the stud and batt (as most installers do), or compressing it too much (as most installers do) loses not an incremental amount, but instead almost 50% of the insulation value.

This is why open cell spray foam, even at the same r-value, does so much of a better job - it's less prone to installation error.

In any case, people often do not get the expected value from insulation, due to installation error.

It's like people who spend 15k on a new HVAC system, and then have them install the whole thing using flex duct. People don't know enough to know what "right" looks like.

By comparison, Nest requires almost no brains to install and use properly.

The Nest thermostat is actually easy to use and the convenience factor far outweighs any perceived complexity. Early adopters didn't buy this because of the unproven (at the time) energy efficiency features, they bought it because of the design, the improved UX/UI and the fact that they could could change the temperature without getting out of bed. The more the mass market is exposed to this tech through interaction with early adopters, the sooner adoption will pick up.

Also replacing legacy devices, especially thermostats and smoke detectors, is not at the forefront of the average consumer's mind. I think cost plays a much bigger role in the adoption of these devices than complexity and usability. Nest products are not cheap but as they continue to build out (or acquire) their ecosystem their value proposition will increase and mass market adoption will start to take off.

A little OT, but I have to say it: "Photo Credit Google Images" does NOT make it OK to use copyrighted material. Google can claim fair use, you can't.

For many people, including me, the value proposition of Nest isn't worth the cost.

There needs to be a modular middle ground between Apple level in-home automation software and unassembled kits. I don't see myself spending over $100 for a thermostat. Ever.

Wait until your thermostat wiring goes bad.

With a combination of hard-to-modify interior walls and an open plan design where wall-mounting often doesn't make sense, going with wireless thermostats was an easy choice.

Now the thermostat in the main living area can be moved depending on whether we are using the wood stove, and the kitchen thermostat that was always too far from the radiators and too close to the oven can be placed where it actually keeps us comfortable.

Unless your house is new-ish and thermostat placement was carefully considered, the benefit of being able to easily move a thermostat and experiment with placement can be enough of a benefit to justify relatively expensive thermostats.

regarding issues with themostat placement check out http://ecoventsystems.com/

Themometers in every room, and controllable vents let you set temps for each room, making each room its own zone. Granted it's only compatable with forced air systems but i love the idea of one zone per room.

That's a very nice retrofit technology. I have hot water heating. But that does bring to mind the possibility that a weakness of the Nest thermostat is that it does not have a complete picture of temperatures around the zone each thermostat controls.

In some cases, a Nest may not be a good investment. However, my home was built in the late 1970s where energy efficiency was not in the builders lexicon. I literally cut my electric bill by 50% with the nest vs the dial based thermostat that was included in the house. This paid for both of my nests in 2 months.(upstairs and down). Since then, I have saved that amount consistently all summer. Now I live in Houston, so saving AC as much as possible is a huge boon for me.

However, when its cold, I notice little to zero benefit from the nest. Keeping my house warm takes significantly more energy than keeping it cool(our AC units are relatively new and efficient, as is the furnace. However, the hot air just leaks right out of the ceilings into the air...

So IMO, there are cases where a Nest is worth it, and will pay for itself. ymmv though.

But the Nest isn't competing with a dial thermostat, it's competing with a $20 programmable thermostat which will save you the same amount of money for 1/10th the cost.

That's a bit of a simplification. Things the Nest can do that a $20 programmable can't:

- use the thermostat, and the Protects, as occupancy sensors and do auto-away when it determines no-one is in the house - have a 'never below' temperature to prevent freezing of pipes, even if everything else says the heating should be off - learn about cooling and heating rates so that if I say I want the house to be 68F at 0600, it knows when to switch on based on what temperature the house cooled to the night before.

I disagree- most of my savings come from the ability to a) shut off when we leave the house. You can program a thermostat to your work schedule and weekend schedule, but ours varies by enough that I would never be diligent enough to keep up with it(and I shouldnt have to be) b) take in consideration the external temperature and the properties of my house to know when to start cooling it down.

>I don't see myself spending over $100 for a thermostat. Ever.

If my thermostat could figure out the ideal time to heat and cool my apartment to maximize my comfort and minimize my cost without me having to mess with it, I would gladly pay $100 for it, even if the savings were less than the cost of the unit.

Smart home or the whole Internet of things stuff frightens me a lot. Not that I'm in fear of privacy implications of interconnected devices and the bad and insecure software. No it is just that the smart stuff is out-dated pretty fast and increases the amount of (toxic) waste rapidly. And we are already fighting for rare earths and other building blocks of these devices. So we are not just replacing our TV or notebook every 1-2 years. No, now we should replace all the gadgets that are advertised to make our lifes easier and safer, if it is your freezer, your smoke detectors, electrical outlets, body sensors, thermostats and everything else which can hold a chip and has a excuse to be "smartened".

No, I do not want that.

What, they not only want to sell me a PR pamphlet, they also ask for my mail address before I even started to read the bait. That was certainly built by an expert designer. For chasing potential customers away before they know it. I'm gone, anyway.

I love new gadgets but I need to be convinced that home automation gadgets are a lot more reliable than all the other tech I have before I go all in. I do not want to be surrounded by tech problems, I want to have some escape from that. I can have tech problems with almost all of my entertainment (except board games), with almost all of my productivity, and even when I exercise. I don't want tech problems just trying to stay warm and safe in my house any more often than I have to. I have a Nest protect that I took down when it spent a day going off incorrectly and I'm not sure I'll put it back up again.

I'd be interested in Nest reliability data as well. I live in an area of the country that gets cold and a thermostat failure could be really expensive if pipes ended up freezing. Frankly just about anything that decreases system reliability is pretty much a no starter for me.

Now there's a product idea: a backup thermostat that takes over when the house temperature drops toward freezing.

This should do the trick (plus some heat tape): http://www.amazon.com/Farm-Innovators-TC-3-Thermostatically-...

Interesting. I do have a couple piping runs near the wall in the basement that might not be a terrible idea for. Just like with computer systems, I'm always debating the depth of backup and types of failure modes it's worth spending money on.

I'd prefer to see a product that was less clunky that the old thermostats but not Nest where you totally have to buy into their ecosystem.

I strongly agree that the home automation industry has a history of failing to deliver, spanning the early 1990s to the early 2010s.

In the late 1980s, during the time I was in primary and high school, my parents had X10 lamp and appliance modules throughout their home. The main benefit of this was the ability to remotely turn on lamps, which was especially useful for those that didn't have wall switches and/or had their switch in some hard to reach location.

But a secondary benefit was scheduling. Since my parents both worked and I as a negligent teenager couldn't be bothered to remember to turn on outdoor lighting in the evening, there was an appeal in having the system simulate a "lived in" home by turning on key outdoor and indoor lamps at random times. Initially, my father set up a simple schedule using a programmable X10 controller, but we found this fairly limited.

I ended up putting together a menu-driven application that signaled an X10 controller and automated the system from my computer. Why develop the discipline to turn on evening lighting yourself when you can make a program to do so? The controller used a fairly simple serial protocol. Using the computer gave us a great deal more control. We could give more randomness than the controller's "1 hour window" and account for vacations by also automating weekends, among other things.

Fast forward to today and in my own house, I am using... wait for it... the same X10 controllers to allow me to remotely turn on and off lamps and appliances such as our attic fans. I no longer have that old application I built in the 1990s, but I also don't really care about the automation as much as simple remote control.

Here are my beefs with the automation industry today, and where I disagree with the author:

* I feel Nest is a meager representation of where the industry should be heading. It's thoroughly uninteresting to me: I already have a wireless programmable thermostat that I can use in any room of the house. It doesn't interface to the Internet, but frankly, I would never use that. I live in Los Angeles, so I don't ever need to kick-start the heater to warm the house up before I arrive home (or whatever else you can do with an Internet-connected thermostat). Maybe that's more interesting in other parts of the country. I've heard in some places, people remotely start their cars. Moreover, I turn on and off and fine-tune the temperature as my comfort merits. I don't want an energy-saving algorithm interfering.

* Meanwhile, X10 has not changed a bit since the late 1980s. The modules do the same thing they always did. The modules even look basically the same. They still send their signals over the electrical wires. I suppose they've been comfortable doing what they do and leaving it at that.

* I've recently converted 75% of my household from fluorescent and CFL to LED lighting. Now I have periodic X10 signaling problems. Superficial research suggests the X10 power-line signaling can get garbled when mixed with LED lighting. Great.

However, based on the above, I am considering replacing my X10 modules with Insteon modules that augment their power-line signaling with wireless signaling [1]. I don't yet have any experience with Insteon, but it looks like a promising (if expensive) successor to X10.

The author's chief complaint would appear to be that systems like Insteon are too complex for a non-technical consumer. That is probably true. Making systems like this easier to use is good. However, I fear that today's knee-jerk solution to complexity is remove options to simplify user adoption, gather as much data as possible, send data to central repository for analysis, control system from corporate headquarters. In other words, in today's world the plain "cloud" will solve all your problems as long as you surrender yourself.

Perhaps unfairly, I have boiled down to the same fundamental matter as many technical debates: how much control to give the consumer? It's the underpinning of the plain-cloud versus (re)decentralized Internet debate. As a decentralization partisan, I am emphatically in favor of giving the consumer control—of their data, their house, whatever. I don't believe that the only viable path to simplicity is to absolve the consumer of any thinking.

One can conceive of an Insteon system with the ethos of Nest. Plug in the controller and all of the modules, and the system will figure out how to control your devices, lamps, and security on its own by sending usage data to Insteon Inc. (Don't worry, we don't share this information with anyone but our most trusted advertising partners). Sure, you may have a lamp turn off while you're reading, but that's just the system telling you it's time to sleep. The convenience and energy savings are worth it.

I'm not saying it's gonna be Electric Dreams in your house, but I am saying I don't want your Edgar playing music on my radio.

[1] http://www.insteon.com/2635-222-on-off-module.html

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