> After considerable research, it's not worth the hussle or money.
Agree. There is no point in making a 75% smart home. A 10% smart home is fine, it feels like a nifty gadget here and there. It can be clever to automate just a few things, maybe get a nest or make it possible to start watering plants remotely when on holiday. But the dream of the full smart home isn't here yet. If you have 9 lights switchable on your phone, that tenth light just feels like a hassle. If you try, you end up spending more time fiddling with your smart stuff than you would ever spend walking to light switches.
I have a shortlist of demands for "smart home" things (specifically the simplest things like switches and other fixtures).
1) It should be as reliable as a regular dumb switch. It can't work 99% of the time, or take 100ms from switching to lighting.
2) It should require no extra cabling. If I can run ethernet over my power lines already, surely I should be able to reliably route around some smart home packets too-
3) It should work as far as possible with existing fixtures. I don't want to replace my switch, I just want to add a smart relay behind the switch. Switches are pieces of interior design, I don't want to be limited to a choice of 2 colors of extremely expensive "smart switches".
4) I don't want any products backed by a single/small company. It should be a reasonably big consortium or an open standard. Z-wave checks that box, barely (and it fails horribly at item 1).
If I were to build a house today I would probably try to make some good decisions in "dumb" power cabling such as trying to put all lighting together behind some central master relay to be able to do the hotel style switch-all when leaving, and also put Cat6+PoE sockets everywhere (both high and low on walls) as to be able to put sensors (motion, smoke, whatever) without ugly cable routing or using wireless.
> if my siblings an I were brought up just fine in the 80's without being in a "smart onesie", I'm sure we can do just as fine today
That's really the same argument as "we were brought up in asbestos houses with smoking people and we're fine..." isn't it :)
I thought I'd done my research when I built a dedicated movie theater in my basement, around 2004 or 2005. I hung a decent projector from the ceiling and wired DVI through the walls and ceiling. What I should have done was put an accessible conduit so it was replaceable. because.. only a few years later the projector was destroyed in a lightning storm, which also took out a fridge, toaster, a bunch of GFI outlets, router, etc.; and by that time, decent 1080p projectors were affordable ... and were all HDMI.
so
- conduit for those cool hidden in-wall wires like HDMI for your wall-mounted TV, etc.
- whole house surge protector
Your PoE idea is pretty good, ethernet has been around and will be for a while, and wireless will never really cut it all the time.
The light switch stuff has actually worked out well for me with a specific case. Living in apartments with basically no interior lighting at all. There'll lights in the kitchen and that's about it. You're expected to use lamps and there might be one or two switched outlets. The smart home stuff combined with some battery operated controllers that i can double sided tape to the wall I can add my own switched lamps that have wall switches without tearing the walls out to run my own wiring. Makes things much closer to a normal place. Other than that it didn't tend to get used nearly as much but it was fun being able to turn off the lights on someone from work.
Agree. There is no point in making a 75% smart home. A 10% smart home is fine, it feels like a nifty gadget here and there. It can be clever to automate just a few things, maybe get a nest or make it possible to start watering plants remotely when on holiday. But the dream of the full smart home isn't here yet. If you have 9 lights switchable on your phone, that tenth light just feels like a hassle. If you try, you end up spending more time fiddling with your smart stuff than you would ever spend walking to light switches.
I have a shortlist of demands for "smart home" things (specifically the simplest things like switches and other fixtures).
1) It should be as reliable as a regular dumb switch. It can't work 99% of the time, or take 100ms from switching to lighting.
2) It should require no extra cabling. If I can run ethernet over my power lines already, surely I should be able to reliably route around some smart home packets too-
3) It should work as far as possible with existing fixtures. I don't want to replace my switch, I just want to add a smart relay behind the switch. Switches are pieces of interior design, I don't want to be limited to a choice of 2 colors of extremely expensive "smart switches".
4) I don't want any products backed by a single/small company. It should be a reasonably big consortium or an open standard. Z-wave checks that box, barely (and it fails horribly at item 1).
If I were to build a house today I would probably try to make some good decisions in "dumb" power cabling such as trying to put all lighting together behind some central master relay to be able to do the hotel style switch-all when leaving, and also put Cat6+PoE sockets everywhere (both high and low on walls) as to be able to put sensors (motion, smoke, whatever) without ugly cable routing or using wireless.
> if my siblings an I were brought up just fine in the 80's without being in a "smart onesie", I'm sure we can do just as fine today
That's really the same argument as "we were brought up in asbestos houses with smoking people and we're fine..." isn't it :)