"And finally, there’s “cleverness”. I’m naturally drawn to unusual solutions. A world where every problem was best solved by doing the obvious thing would be, to me, a dull world. I want to believe that there’s free utility out there, that you can make different/weirder choices and grab it."
I'd argue you're falling into this trap here. Smart home admin is a pain but if you select the right stuff then the benefits easily outweigh the setup. I think the most important tips are:
* buy from a minimal amount of vendors, to avoid complexity
* buy from big, well-reviewed brands
* just buy things that connect straight to WiFi, rather than needing weird additional hardware
* try not to overcomplicate things - you automatically get control per room but apart from that I just use commands to turn all the lights on in the morning and off at bedtime
TP-Link Kasa is a great start (as another commentator already suggested), I use a lot of their smart plugs (but also I have a lot of lamps and don't use the main lights very much)
I do worry about that. There's definitely a strong analogy between "noise blocking earmuffs instead of noise-cancelling headphones" and "local outlet plugs instead of smart home".
I think the thing that pushes me over the edge here is that I'm privacy focused, so using any solution that phones home to a big tech company is a non starter. That means I'm pretty much left with Home Assistant, which seems... complicated.
I tried a mechanical outlet timer on the TV plug to have scheduled screen time! But the dang kids reached bag and unplugged the thing and plugged the tv directly into the wall. So the TV went bye-bye completely.
I should put automatic shades on my windows before we put the plastic on the windows for the winter! Right now the blinds get trapped under the plastic in whatever state they’re left in.
I did not know those water alarms existed! I could have used that before my kids flooded the bathroom! It should be illegal to make sinks and tubs without overflow valves.
I like my hue lightbulbs upstairs. Everything goes red in the evening. It looks crazy from the street but it does help with getting sleepy.
Hello! I subscribed to your newsletter via RSS quite a few months ago but this is the first article that I felt like commenting on. I read it when it came out but this comment is about a weeks worth of thinking so it's sort of a wall of text, oops!
I work in recycling electronics so I sometimes see these devices, most commonly the timers and have tried them for some mood lighting in my room but it went out of sync and wasn't worth it in the end. I sometimes think about automating things in my house but I rent so it's not a priority besides the remote vacuum that I already have. Basically everything you have up there is great, except you didn't mention that plugging a radio into a timer has the advantage of making it an alarm clock that can have more than 2 alarm times with the downside of not being able to hit snooze on it.
You totally forgot to mention outlets that sense light. This is generally used on for outdoor lighting strips but indoors it is commonly used in the form of nightlights. Not sure about the utility of indoor light activated wall outlets, what would it power besides a night light that needs to be on when it's dark? Photovoltaic switches generally turn on when there is no light present, not sure if there's an adjustable one that turns on when there is light. Solar panels do function in this way, you could rig up a small relay to one or have it drive a motor or pump when the sun is out or bright enough lights are on.
Another thing that you may not have considered is pressure plates. I just went through a haunted house, so there were a few exhibits in the path that activated by stepping specific or faux blow dart traps. Now I'm not sure what exactly in a midwit home would need to be powered by a pressure plate. I can think of a toggle for outdoor lights, something to scare away wild animals, trigger an outdoor fountain or gate in a garden path. Generally this seems to be something that is better suited for outdoor tasks. One variation I thought of was not just a standard pressure plate but a scale that triggers at a specific weight. Maybe something like a bag of water getting to a specific weight that activates a pump?
Besides the clapper, I did see that there were some voice activated light bulb sockets that triggered on specific phrases. There was also an LED lamp that could be dimmed or turned off entirely with your voice. Not sure about the quality, some of the reviews stated that the sockets failed after only a year. There was one particular product called the "Lamp Commander" that triggered off of phrases that you could record, but it is no longer manufactured or in stock anywhere. I did find an article that references a Make project with an arduino to recreated the clapper but you can set variations on claps, thus avoiding the problem of having multiple clappers in earshot all toggling at once, and it apparently can activate on whistling. https://www.instructables.com/Sound-Activated-Outlet/ the only annoyance I see is that the arduino seems like overkill, especially if there might be existing clapper circuits that you could program patterns into. Alas a quick search for "The Whistler" only gives results for the classic radio show. One variation on the clapper that doesn't seem to exist are: noise above a certain range for a duration to flip on the circuit/light on and then countdown to flip off if there's no noise. This could be used sort of like motion activated light circuits.
You mentioned a few times of using lights to essentially replace a dinner bell and there's two things that I would like to point out:
1. People have largely replaced the dinner bell with their phones. They text / call (rare) their family members that dinner is ready.
2. Intercoms exist. Most people don't set them up nowadays because again phones have largely replaced their functionality. Years ago I saw an intercom set up in a detached house unit and it was mostly because me and the other kid were two young to have been given phones yet. You could use a timer to set up an intercom device and have it turned off after a certain time but I doubt most would agree to that. Maybe it's best for a living room to garage setup.
Also you mentioned the roomba and said something about cats ... maybe you have never heard of self cleaning litter boxes but they have existed for over 20 years. I have never used one so I cannot attest to how well they work.
> Personally, I’d never buy these, because I’m fanatical about color quality
I would love to hear more about this. I have been suspecting this makes a big difference, but I am not sure how to pick higher quality bulbs. Is CRI important?
I worry I might have overstated my knowledge of bulb quality! Basically, here is my advice:
1. All else equal, CRI is good.
2. But some people say CRI is a bad measure, there are (several?) other measures of color quality.
3. All LED bulbs "flicker". But the good ones have an internal switching power supply meaning they flicker at like 10 KHz. Crappy ones will flicker at basically the frequency of the alternating current, so like 50-120Hz (200-1000 times lower!)
4. Color temperature is important, though it depends on what you're going for. Lots of people prefer "whiter" light during the day and "yellower" light at night.
I think teeeeechnically it would be functionally complete (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_completeness) not Turing complete because NAND gates have no storage/tape. But we should definitely find a different component that has storage and realize the retro Turing complete kettle control system dream.
I'm from the Netherlands and at the "Action" they sell cheap "smart" bulbs that you can manage via Google Home. Since us Dutchies are wary of Chinese backdoors, I believe the retail store had to fix their firmware not to call home. It's rebranded Tuya stuff, but it works! I just shout "Hey Google, lights on!" or "Hey Google bedroom lights on" and I can dim them by saying "Hey Google lights x%". Having those pucks in both the livingroom and bedroom made a real difference.
This was good and all but I can’t help but think it should have been written by grug.
In all seriousness I believe that one driving force behind all IOT hardware being awful is that Sturgeon’s Law gets to go twice: 90% of hardware is crap, and 90% of software is crap, almost independently of each other. So I stick to dumb stuff and that way I can improve my hit rate from 1% to 10%!
CRI is the best measure I know of to predict light quality, but I hear there's some info in more complicated spectral analysis.
Brands with good CRI include the following. I'm pasting from my spreadsheet, so apologies for formatting issues. The last number on each line is the CRI.
As someone who routinely gets curious about smart homes every 6 - 8 months and then bails because it's too complicated/expensive/privacy-scary this is a banger of a list of lo-fi alternatives that actually accomplish 99% of what I'm looking for. So thanks from all of us aspiring dumb dumbs. This list is tailor made for us.
You can find a diy in-wall smart switch that senses the physical switch state and has wifi/ZigBee so it's also smart (there are some under the Sonoff brand). The net effect is that you can use your existing wall switches but you can also control the same circuit via "smart".
Heh-had the same reaction to the list of apps last week when trying to figure out if my nest thermostat was going to work after whatever it was that the Google was killing was dead. Capitalism according the ElfPuff company is corroding the entire smart-anything market.
I sympathize with the insanity of smart home ecosystems. I've found that the Kasa products by TP Link to be the only ones worth getting. While they still work off WiFi, they actually work 99% of the time and the singular app that controls all the outlets and lights doesn't feel like spyware, and they're still supporting even the oldest of their products.
Besides that, those temperature sensors seem great.
I wasn't quite ROTFL after reading the first few paragraphs, but I was LMAO. (I figured some retro net-speak would be appropriate for this excellent retro-tech article.)
Back in the day, I used one of those mechanical timers to turn the router off every night to keep my kids from surfing the web, thus avoiding a nightly battle trying to get them to turn in their devices in the evening.
They make exterior lights that sense when it's night so you can have that one exterior light flipped on all the time without actually being on all the time
2) relay/ power strips
At home Depot I found power strips that you plug in all your devices and then based off one device it will turn on all the others. For instance I turn on my computer and that triggers everything else plugged in to the strip to turn on. I use this in my office, entertainment system, and shop.
Thanks, those relay power strips are fantastic, I had no idea they existed! For anyone else, I wasn't able to find anything useful by searching for "relay power strip". The magical words seem to be something like "energy saving surge protector".
Woah, didn't expect that I'd get so much utility out of this post, but it actually has some neat ideas! Love how it's almost like turning your home into a Minecraft redstone creation :)
I totally agree that the user interface to home automation is not great if you don't speak YAML in your sleep while dreaming of docker configurations and transparent proxy config files. We can do so much better!
As far as your wishes -
1 Can be managed with a Shelly Dimmer
4-5 exists google "Switchmate" and "SwitchBot"
6 exists with Phillips Hue bulbs as a configuration setting, probably many other bulbs as well I'd reckon. Phillips Hue bulbs are like 2x the price, but 1/2 the headaches and great light quality imo.
Yup, there are definitely "smart" versions of 1, 4, and 6. (Though not sure about 5, though?) At the moment, an advantage of going "full smarthome" is that it allows you to do these things. But it seems like you *could* have "midwit" versions.
"And finally, there’s “cleverness”. I’m naturally drawn to unusual solutions. A world where every problem was best solved by doing the obvious thing would be, to me, a dull world. I want to believe that there’s free utility out there, that you can make different/weirder choices and grab it."
I'd argue you're falling into this trap here. Smart home admin is a pain but if you select the right stuff then the benefits easily outweigh the setup. I think the most important tips are:
* buy from a minimal amount of vendors, to avoid complexity
* buy from big, well-reviewed brands
* just buy things that connect straight to WiFi, rather than needing weird additional hardware
* try not to overcomplicate things - you automatically get control per room but apart from that I just use commands to turn all the lights on in the morning and off at bedtime
TP-Link Kasa is a great start (as another commentator already suggested), I use a lot of their smart plugs (but also I have a lot of lamps and don't use the main lights very much)
I do worry about that. There's definitely a strong analogy between "noise blocking earmuffs instead of noise-cancelling headphones" and "local outlet plugs instead of smart home".
I think the thing that pushes me over the edge here is that I'm privacy focused, so using any solution that phones home to a big tech company is a non starter. That means I'm pretty much left with Home Assistant, which seems... complicated.
I tried a mechanical outlet timer on the TV plug to have scheduled screen time! But the dang kids reached bag and unplugged the thing and plugged the tv directly into the wall. So the TV went bye-bye completely.
I should put automatic shades on my windows before we put the plastic on the windows for the winter! Right now the blinds get trapped under the plastic in whatever state they’re left in.
I did not know those water alarms existed! I could have used that before my kids flooded the bathroom! It should be illegal to make sinks and tubs without overflow valves.
I like my hue lightbulbs upstairs. Everything goes red in the evening. It looks crazy from the street but it does help with getting sleepy.
Hello! I subscribed to your newsletter via RSS quite a few months ago but this is the first article that I felt like commenting on. I read it when it came out but this comment is about a weeks worth of thinking so it's sort of a wall of text, oops!
I work in recycling electronics so I sometimes see these devices, most commonly the timers and have tried them for some mood lighting in my room but it went out of sync and wasn't worth it in the end. I sometimes think about automating things in my house but I rent so it's not a priority besides the remote vacuum that I already have. Basically everything you have up there is great, except you didn't mention that plugging a radio into a timer has the advantage of making it an alarm clock that can have more than 2 alarm times with the downside of not being able to hit snooze on it.
You totally forgot to mention outlets that sense light. This is generally used on for outdoor lighting strips but indoors it is commonly used in the form of nightlights. Not sure about the utility of indoor light activated wall outlets, what would it power besides a night light that needs to be on when it's dark? Photovoltaic switches generally turn on when there is no light present, not sure if there's an adjustable one that turns on when there is light. Solar panels do function in this way, you could rig up a small relay to one or have it drive a motor or pump when the sun is out or bright enough lights are on.
Another thing that you may not have considered is pressure plates. I just went through a haunted house, so there were a few exhibits in the path that activated by stepping specific or faux blow dart traps. Now I'm not sure what exactly in a midwit home would need to be powered by a pressure plate. I can think of a toggle for outdoor lights, something to scare away wild animals, trigger an outdoor fountain or gate in a garden path. Generally this seems to be something that is better suited for outdoor tasks. One variation I thought of was not just a standard pressure plate but a scale that triggers at a specific weight. Maybe something like a bag of water getting to a specific weight that activates a pump?
Besides the clapper, I did see that there were some voice activated light bulb sockets that triggered on specific phrases. There was also an LED lamp that could be dimmed or turned off entirely with your voice. Not sure about the quality, some of the reviews stated that the sockets failed after only a year. There was one particular product called the "Lamp Commander" that triggered off of phrases that you could record, but it is no longer manufactured or in stock anywhere. I did find an article that references a Make project with an arduino to recreated the clapper but you can set variations on claps, thus avoiding the problem of having multiple clappers in earshot all toggling at once, and it apparently can activate on whistling. https://www.instructables.com/Sound-Activated-Outlet/ the only annoyance I see is that the arduino seems like overkill, especially if there might be existing clapper circuits that you could program patterns into. Alas a quick search for "The Whistler" only gives results for the classic radio show. One variation on the clapper that doesn't seem to exist are: noise above a certain range for a duration to flip on the circuit/light on and then countdown to flip off if there's no noise. This could be used sort of like motion activated light circuits.
You mentioned a few times of using lights to essentially replace a dinner bell and there's two things that I would like to point out:
1. People have largely replaced the dinner bell with their phones. They text / call (rare) their family members that dinner is ready.
2. Intercoms exist. Most people don't set them up nowadays because again phones have largely replaced their functionality. Years ago I saw an intercom set up in a detached house unit and it was mostly because me and the other kid were two young to have been given phones yet. You could use a timer to set up an intercom device and have it turned off after a certain time but I doubt most would agree to that. Maybe it's best for a living room to garage setup.
Also you mentioned the roomba and said something about cats ... maybe you have never heard of self cleaning litter boxes but they have existed for over 20 years. I have never used one so I cannot attest to how well they work.
Great post, very entertaining, just subscribed.
> Personally, I’d never buy these, because I’m fanatical about color quality
I would love to hear more about this. I have been suspecting this makes a big difference, but I am not sure how to pick higher quality bulbs. Is CRI important?
I worry I might have overstated my knowledge of bulb quality! Basically, here is my advice:
1. All else equal, CRI is good.
2. But some people say CRI is a bad measure, there are (several?) other measures of color quality.
3. All LED bulbs "flicker". But the good ones have an internal switching power supply meaning they flicker at like 10 KHz. Crappy ones will flicker at basically the frequency of the alternating current, so like 50-120Hz (200-1000 times lower!)
4. Color temperature is important, though it depends on what you're going for. Lots of people prefer "whiter" light during the day and "yellower" light at night.
If you get NAND gates, you can make your house Turing complete
I think teeeeechnically it would be functionally complete (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_completeness) not Turing complete because NAND gates have no storage/tape. But we should definitely find a different component that has storage and realize the retro Turing complete kettle control system dream.
I'm from the Netherlands and at the "Action" they sell cheap "smart" bulbs that you can manage via Google Home. Since us Dutchies are wary of Chinese backdoors, I believe the retail store had to fix their firmware not to call home. It's rebranded Tuya stuff, but it works! I just shout "Hey Google, lights on!" or "Hey Google bedroom lights on" and I can dim them by saying "Hey Google lights x%". Having those pucks in both the livingroom and bedroom made a real difference.
This was good and all but I can’t help but think it should have been written by grug.
In all seriousness I believe that one driving force behind all IOT hardware being awful is that Sturgeon’s Law gets to go twice: 90% of hardware is crap, and 90% of software is crap, almost independently of each other. So I stick to dumb stuff and that way I can improve my hit rate from 1% to 10%!
Since you opened the door … let’s talk about light quality: what are the bulbs that are worth their salt??
As I’ve rotated LEDs in for failing incandescents over the years, I’ve been unanimously underwhelmed: light quality feels thin, ghoulish, or clinical.
I’m clearly buying the wrong stuff …
CRI is the best measure I know of to predict light quality, but I hear there's some info in more complicated spectral analysis.
Brands with good CRI include the following. I'm pasting from my spreadsheet, so apologies for formatting issues. The last number on each line is the CRI.
-----
Waveform:
Superwarm 1700k 83
Lux24 Circadian 2400k 95
Centric Home 2700k 95
Centric Home 3000k 95
Centric Daylight 4000k 95
Centric Daylight 5000k 95
Centric Daylight 6500k 95
-----
Philips - Ultra Definition:
Soft White 2700k 95
Daylight 5000k 95
-----
EcoSmart - Premium:
Soft White 2700k 90
Bright White 3000k 90
True White 3500k 90
Cool White 4000k 90
Daylight 5000k 90
-----
Feit - Enhance:
Soft White 2700k 90
Bright White 3000k 90
Cool White 4000k 90
Daylight 5000k 90
-----
Cree:
Soft White 2700k 90
Bright White 3000k 90
Daylight 5000k 90
-----
GE - HD:
Relax HD 2700k 90
Refresh HD 5000k 90
Reveal HD (looks weird and I hate it)
I'm worried I might have implied more expertise in lights than I really have. I've just followed this advice, which has been OK for me https://dynomight.substack.com/p/midwit-home/comment/41787519
I have some CREE brand bulbs which seem pretty good to me, even comparing how things look with the LED bulbs and incandescents.
As someone who routinely gets curious about smart homes every 6 - 8 months and then bails because it's too complicated/expensive/privacy-scary this is a banger of a list of lo-fi alternatives that actually accomplish 99% of what I'm looking for. So thanks from all of us aspiring dumb dumbs. This list is tailor made for us.
You can find a diy in-wall smart switch that senses the physical switch state and has wifi/ZigBee so it's also smart (there are some under the Sonoff brand). The net effect is that you can use your existing wall switches but you can also control the same circuit via "smart".
Heh-had the same reaction to the list of apps last week when trying to figure out if my nest thermostat was going to work after whatever it was that the Google was killing was dead. Capitalism according the ElfPuff company is corroding the entire smart-anything market.
I sympathize with the insanity of smart home ecosystems. I've found that the Kasa products by TP Link to be the only ones worth getting. While they still work off WiFi, they actually work 99% of the time and the singular app that controls all the outlets and lights doesn't feel like spyware, and they're still supporting even the oldest of their products.
Besides that, those temperature sensors seem great.
I wasn't quite ROTFL after reading the first few paragraphs, but I was LMAO. (I figured some retro net-speak would be appropriate for this excellent retro-tech article.)
Back in the day, I used one of those mechanical timers to turn the router off every night to keep my kids from surfing the web, thus avoiding a nightly battle trying to get them to turn in their devices in the evening.
Oh i would like to add a useful few devices:
1) daytime/nighttime sensing lights
They make exterior lights that sense when it's night so you can have that one exterior light flipped on all the time without actually being on all the time
2) relay/ power strips
At home Depot I found power strips that you plug in all your devices and then based off one device it will turn on all the others. For instance I turn on my computer and that triggers everything else plugged in to the strip to turn on. I use this in my office, entertainment system, and shop.
And a request:
Humidity based wall outlets
Thanks, those relay power strips are fantastic, I had no idea they existed! For anyone else, I wasn't able to find anything useful by searching for "relay power strip". The magical words seem to be something like "energy saving surge protector".
Woah, didn't expect that I'd get so much utility out of this post, but it actually has some neat ideas! Love how it's almost like turning your home into a Minecraft redstone creation :)
I totally agree that the user interface to home automation is not great if you don't speak YAML in your sleep while dreaming of docker configurations and transparent proxy config files. We can do so much better!
As far as your wishes -
1 Can be managed with a Shelly Dimmer
4-5 exists google "Switchmate" and "SwitchBot"
6 exists with Phillips Hue bulbs as a configuration setting, probably many other bulbs as well I'd reckon. Phillips Hue bulbs are like 2x the price, but 1/2 the headaches and great light quality imo.
Yup, there are definitely "smart" versions of 1, 4, and 6. (Though not sure about 5, though?) At the moment, an advantage of going "full smarthome" is that it allows you to do these things. But it seems like you *could* have "midwit" versions.