In October of last year my mom came home from the ICU, now unable to get out of bed. I replaced all the bulbs in the house with smart bulbs and put the fans on a little smart plug thing. It made me really like the idea of home smart home features, but I’m not techy. They’re just Alexa enabled for her to use with the fire stick, and I use google home on my phone for em.
Can you offer any advice for ones that don’t require internet? Every time our power goes out (any time there’s a storm), I have to go around and reset them while they flash at me like the worst night club
That’s the entire problem. Automation products depending on the cloud do have fewer requirements, are simpler to get started with, even if they’re overall poorer choices. They’re a fundamental fact that something needs to control your devices: cloud devices means the company takes care of that for you.
Taking the cloud out of the loop means you need to manage some sort of automation hub. There are many choices but I don’t know which may be approachable for non-techies. The new Matter/Thread standard tries to solve this while making everything work together, but adoption has been slow so you may not be able to use it for much yet. Your choice of automation hub drives your choices.
Maybe some of what I do is applicable, but I AM techie, I love to tinker, and I own my home, so maybe not. I try for local control where possible plus make choices that are additive: things still need to work normally.
Prefer smart switches, not bulbs, so they still work normally. They also act as repeaters for local Zigbee or Z-Wave networks
Z-Wave and Zigbee are local low-powered mesh networks commonly used in home automation. “Thread” is a newcomer but not widely used yet. Think of them as a network between Bluetooth and WiFi, but designed as a mesh to better cover your home. These are local networks only, there is no cloud connection (directly). They use a lot less power than WiFi, which makes battery devices more practical, and different frequencies for less interference. You should expect to pick one.
Home Assistant (HA) on a Raspberry Pi. This was always the techie choice as opensource software that supports everything but in the last two years they have made it a lot more approachable, and Nabu Casa sells it installed in custom hardware. Among other things, it lets me use all of Z-Wave, Zigbee, and Thread devices, as well as Ethernet devices and gives a lot of automation power. When you’re starting out, you should stick to one for simplicity
I do use Alexa, which requires internet access. I choose to subscribe to Nabu Casa to manage that in HA, since it also funds further HA development but this is not required and there are no ads or data collection
My latest automation was for my teen staying up late all summer: at midnight, dim the family room lights and announce over Alexa that he should go to bed. He’s back at college now but I’m sure I’ll want it next time he’s home
Personally, instead of smart bulbs, I’d use smart switches for automating lighting. There’s no need for every bulb to be individually controlled and carry all of the overhead involved in that. On that note, I’d also love to see DC circuits that can take LED bulbs without needing a transformer for each bulb (which tends to be what causes it to fail IIRC).
Just tried looking at the state of the smart switch market and fuck Samsung for naming their app for transferring files from phone to PC “smart switch”. Especially because there’s plenty of ways to do that already that don’t require a shitty Samsung app.
Excluding Samsung from the search, I’d suggest not looking for products directly but finding enthusiast communities that are building their own smart homes. There is more to it than just getting devices that don’t rely on some specific company’s web services. You’ll need to also setup a controller/server, connect all of the devices to that, and then figure out how you want to interact with it (eg via phone, scheduling, voice commands, etc). I haven’t done this myself, but I’m guessing all of these are solved problems, but doubt that anyone would call setting it all up easy.
Bulbs v switches is actually why it took me so long to get them to begin in. Having bulbs, inherently disposable things, full of tech seems… Less than ideal. But where I live, the electrical is rough. Like, we have 1 circuit, the light circuit. Everything else is messed up and turned off at the box, including all the 220s, except for the water heater. Run everything off power strips and have to turn everything off to cook. Lol. I don’t want to mess with the electrical in this house. I want to move. Lol
There are several competing protocol: zigbee, zwave, and the newest is matter. They just require a hub to be controlled.
I use all zigbee smart switches, and a conbee II usb stick. I have a old laptop running homeassistant os, and it has a one click addon for conbee II. I think amazon echo also have builtin zigbee controller.
If the power goes out, all the switch automatically connects back to the hub when the power is back. Obviously, this setup is not affected by google, amazon, even the entire internet goes down. As long as my router is functional, I can control everything using my phone, when I am at home.
newcomers are Thread and Matter, based on IPv6 and include standardized device profiles that should really help things work together. The standard is widely sponsored, including by Apple and Amazon
Matter works on your regular ethernet or WiFi network, and can access the internet. This is likely used by things permanently wired to power. For example Apple HomeKit uses this to control devices like light switches or printers
Thread is a local low powered mesh network, sometimes called Zigbee 2.0 because it’s the same frequency and comes from the Zigbee Alliance. It is very suitable for battery devices like lightbulbs and sensors, and is bridged to Matter for controllers
Philips Hue have the ability to work without internet and it seems like a lot of people like them, though they are kind of expensive. I’ve used Sengled bulbs before and they were fine, not sure how well they work without internet. But I think for you the problem isn’t the bulbs reliance on the internet, they just seem very forgetful. For both Hue and Sengled, when the power comes back on after being out, they just start working again on their own after about a minute. No need to reset anything.
The main non-techy issue even for locally controllable smart things is that the big voice assistants are all entirely internet dependent. So even though Hue bulbs are technically controllable locally if your internet is out, Alexa and Google Home both won’t be able to do anything with them.
In October of last year my mom came home from the ICU, now unable to get out of bed. I replaced all the bulbs in the house with smart bulbs and put the fans on a little smart plug thing. It made me really like the idea of home smart home features, but I’m not techy. They’re just Alexa enabled for her to use with the fire stick, and I use google home on my phone for em.
Can you offer any advice for ones that don’t require internet? Every time our power goes out (any time there’s a storm), I have to go around and reset them while they flash at me like the worst night club
That’s the entire problem. Automation products depending on the cloud do have fewer requirements, are simpler to get started with, even if they’re overall poorer choices. They’re a fundamental fact that something needs to control your devices: cloud devices means the company takes care of that for you.
Taking the cloud out of the loop means you need to manage some sort of automation hub. There are many choices but I don’t know which may be approachable for non-techies. The new Matter/Thread standard tries to solve this while making everything work together, but adoption has been slow so you may not be able to use it for much yet. Your choice of automation hub drives your choices.
Maybe some of what I do is applicable, but I AM techie, I love to tinker, and I own my home, so maybe not. I try for local control where possible plus make choices that are additive: things still need to work normally.
Personally, instead of smart bulbs, I’d use smart switches for automating lighting. There’s no need for every bulb to be individually controlled and carry all of the overhead involved in that. On that note, I’d also love to see DC circuits that can take LED bulbs without needing a transformer for each bulb (which tends to be what causes it to fail IIRC).
Just tried looking at the state of the smart switch market and fuck Samsung for naming their app for transferring files from phone to PC “smart switch”. Especially because there’s plenty of ways to do that already that don’t require a shitty Samsung app.
Excluding Samsung from the search, I’d suggest not looking for products directly but finding enthusiast communities that are building their own smart homes. There is more to it than just getting devices that don’t rely on some specific company’s web services. You’ll need to also setup a controller/server, connect all of the devices to that, and then figure out how you want to interact with it (eg via phone, scheduling, voice commands, etc). I haven’t done this myself, but I’m guessing all of these are solved problems, but doubt that anyone would call setting it all up easy.
Bulbs v switches is actually why it took me so long to get them to begin in. Having bulbs, inherently disposable things, full of tech seems… Less than ideal. But where I live, the electrical is rough. Like, we have 1 circuit, the light circuit. Everything else is messed up and turned off at the box, including all the 220s, except for the water heater. Run everything off power strips and have to turn everything off to cook. Lol. I don’t want to mess with the electrical in this house. I want to move. Lol
There are several competing protocol: zigbee, zwave, and the newest is matter. They just require a hub to be controlled.
I use all zigbee smart switches, and a conbee II usb stick. I have a old laptop running homeassistant os, and it has a one click addon for conbee II. I think amazon echo also have builtin zigbee controller.
If the power goes out, all the switch automatically connects back to the hub when the power is back. Obviously, this setup is not affected by google, amazon, even the entire internet goes down. As long as my router is functional, I can control everything using my phone, when I am at home.
To be pedantic:
Philips Hue have the ability to work without internet and it seems like a lot of people like them, though they are kind of expensive. I’ve used Sengled bulbs before and they were fine, not sure how well they work without internet. But I think for you the problem isn’t the bulbs reliance on the internet, they just seem very forgetful. For both Hue and Sengled, when the power comes back on after being out, they just start working again on their own after about a minute. No need to reset anything.
The main non-techy issue even for locally controllable smart things is that the big voice assistants are all entirely internet dependent. So even though Hue bulbs are technically controllable locally if your internet is out, Alexa and Google Home both won’t be able to do anything with them.
I believe some Echo devices can control Zigbee devices locally - however I didn’t really pay attention since I’m not interested in that