Asklemmy

In addition to all the automation everyone has talked about, some of us are also data nerds.

I enjoy knowing the temp, air quality, etc. in every room. How does this change throughout the day/season? Did leaving this door open or this fan on improve anything? What can I automate at what threshold to improve things?

You can also get a lot of data about energy usage too. And if you have solar and battery, it's neat seeing how much it affects and how much you save.

Automation is useful, but in the end it's just a hobby like many other things. It's fine to be into it or not into it.

Lights are really nice. With one voice command I can turn the entire house into a bright daylight, or drop it to low intensity red shift at night.

My thermostat warms my room up before I awaken so I won’t be cold getting out of bed, while my lights slowly fade on over 10 minutes before my alarm, waking me before the tone sounds most days. At bedtime, I can fade off all the lights in the house at once before going to sleep.

Also, I can turn on the color effects and throw a dance party for the family.

So many reasons.

Smart locks on doors that disarm house alarms when they're unlocked with a code. Lights that turn on when someone is in a room, and off when the room is empty. The garage door alerting you that it's still open around the time you go to bed. The house stereo turning itself off at a certain time on weeknights, and the house alarm system turning itself on at the same time. Being able to check that the gas fireplace is off after you've driven out of your neighborhood on your way somewhere. The house disabling the security system for 20 minutes when it detects you on the second floor landing, so that you don't trip the motion sensors when you go down for a snack.

A non-trivial example of some more complex things our house does: when one of our phones enters the neighborhood, and it is after dark, our carriage and porch lights come on. If no other phones are already home, some of the inside lights also turn on. When we turn onto our street, the garage door opens. After the garage door is closed, the outside lights turn off.

Any number of things ranging from small to large conveniences. Some small conveniences become large ones when you have guests staying over.

30% reduction in heating cost without reduction in comfort.

Convincing we’re-home-simulation while gone.

Each single light is independently dimmable, making for variety in light scenes for different purposes.

I operate a rooftop solar power station. While I have scripted all the individual components like battery management, Inverters and the various sinks (for where the power goes when it’s not needed immediately) using Grafana to get alerts, I use automation to activate the various scenes and settings to maximise the useful power I get from the system.

I personally don't have any of that but here's what I would like to use it for. When I go away for, say, two weeks, I'd like to be able to randomly flick lights and TV on and off in my apartment to seem like someone's home. Currently I do it by plugging floor lamps into timered power socket controllers, but they aren't internet enabled so all I can do is program them to come on and off at specified times during the day, which an observant burglar could figure out.

I would also like to save on gas bills and turn the heating off when I go away. But if it's winter time and I go away for 2 weeks, I hate coming back to a cold flat that take ages to warm up to comfortable temperatures. I'd like to be able to turn the heating off when I leave, and then back on, say, a whole day before I come back.

I'm not deep into it, but I've been trying to get deeper in with Home Assistant. I have several smart plugs, a smart thermostat, some Google Nest products, and even an indoor security camera.

What drove me to home automation, specifically the smart plugs where it all started, was that I live in an apartment. Most of the outlets aren't connected to wall switches. So I'd have my various lamps around where the plugs/attached switches are like behind furniture or other awkward spots to reach to. It got annoying. The smart plugs solved that so I could turn them on/off from my phone.

Next, I started placing them on a schedule. So that when I got home (back when I was working from the office), I could come home to a lit house. Or if I fell asleep on the couch, all the lights will turn off at some point instead of being on all night. Or when I'm out of town, I can play with the lights to simulate someone being home.

Then I got a free Google Nest Mini (similar to an Amazon Echo). Controlling the lights from phone was great, but controlling via voice was even better! Because what if my phone wasn't on me? Or battery dead? How about if I had guests who wanted to turn on/off lights? Now both bedrooms have one, plus the living/dining room. I can control everything from those, by voice.

The thermostat here, though digital, wasn't even programmable. So I replaced it with a smart one, free from the power company. I can even control from my phone (or voice). Now I can schedule heating/cooling. During a trip, I'll leave it outside of my at-home temp range to save money. But on the way back home, like from the airport, I can have it start heating/cooling so that by the time I get home, my apartment is ready for me.

Security camera is obvious. I travel a fair amount, so it's an extra piece of mind.

Altogether, it's about convenience and ease. These all solve or at least mitigate admittedly minor issues, but still, I don't have to worry about them anymore. Some, especially the thermostat, even help me save money. And a couple even provide me with a bit more security (at least I feel that way).

You can read measurements without going to the device itself, instead, you use a phone or similar. This also means that a device doesn't require a display. Consider an outside thermometer as example. Home automation allows you to draw a little graph giving you a good idea how cold it got. Let's add another measurement device, say a radon meter. Again, no display needed and you could stick it somewhere less accessible.

You can make home automation as silly or useful as you want it to be.

Honestly for me the draw is in minimizing the mental/emotional overhead of forgetfulness. My wife and I both have ADHD, and I have autism. That leads to a potent combination of spacing out and forgetting even very important things.

So both in service of that and as a fun hobby (My special interest is computing), I have automation using presence detection, various timers, Z-wave outlets/light switches (I refuse to use IoT, I prefer local access/control every time), GPS position and various stuff like that, in order to avoid things like leaving our home theater projector powered on unwatched (reducing bulb lifetime), leaving the oven on, leaving the espresso machine on (boiler heating water over and over again unnecessarily, wasting thousands of watt-hours of electricity), turning reptile enclosure lights on/off on a schedule with sunrise/sunset, that sort of thing.

I have this ultimate vision in my head of my bedtime routine going from "Walk through the whole house for a few minutes and lock doors/turn things off" to "Triple-click my bedroom light switch 'off' and it turns off the rest of the house lights/TVs/projectors, reduces AC temperature a couple degrees, locks the doors, arms the security system for 'home', locks the car...". You get the idea.

My journey started innocently. I wanted some dimmers in my basement which has my office and a theater setup with 3 separate light sets. Then my wife wanted a craft area so I added another dimmer. I then bought some smart plugs to control my desk lamp and my monitors. Initially all of these devices were individually controlled either via web page or by the company app (Shelly) all within the confines of my LAN. I then spun up home assistant to see what it could do on a whim - and found it had built in hooks for my projector, receiver and Nvidia shield. When I sit down to watch a movie, I can now dim all lights, turn off distracting things (my office monitors and desk lamp), kick on the projector and control the shield to pick a movie. And if I have to use the bathroom? Pause the movie, turn up the accent lights and walk without fumbling for a single switch. Also - the dimmers are all connected to physical switches on the wall so it's not a "phone only" setup. Press the wall switch, lights come on. Hold the switch, and the lights start at their lowest point. Double click the switch and full brightness. Pretty versatile!

For me it's a fun hobby, plain and simple. Some people like maintaining saltwater tanks, some people like miniature train sets, I like maintaining a smart home and automating repeat tasks.

I manually turn my lights on and off. Life is so hard for me.

Many people live on a schedule. When you can automate things according to that schedule it's nice.

It is fun to do.

But for practical reasons the biggest thing for me has been easily connecting switches together.

For example my kitchen has two big lights. Each light has its own switch but they put the switches in the opposite side of the room, so if you want both on you need to turn on one walk across the kitchen to turn on the other and do the same thing to turn them off.

With automation/IOT I can now logically connect the switches together so turning on one switch will turn on the other.

I have only some smart lights, a Philips Hue system, and only use limited automation, but for me it is brilliant.

I live in Sweden so during the winters we have to wake up hours before the sunrise, waking up in darkness is dificult for me, so I have set up my Hue system to act as part of my alarm clock.

At 05:00 my alarm goes off, just before that my smart lights in my bedroom and hallway slowly turned on, so my eyes are already adjusted to the light, this also means that I am more alert and ready to get up. A few hours later the lights turn off.

During weekends the I don't have an alarm, and the lights turn on at 07:00, meaning I wake up slowly to a lit room.

I have been thinking of adding automation for the lights for when I come home after work, but so far I am happy enough with manually turning on the lights just outside the door.

JEA -- Just Enough Automation.

For some people that's 'none'. For others, that's more.

People who don't understand why their level of preferred automation is different from yours and challenge you on that, those people are bigots. Look, Braydenn, we don't care whether your blinds open and close at sun-down based on the temperature and light inside vs outside; it's neat, but it's like 'fridge art' neat to people whose preference is less than yours, and we keep quiet.

When I wake up and leave my bedroom l, the lights at the backdoor turn on so I can see where I'm going. When I get back from walking the dog, the camera knows it's me and triggers the heater in the bathroom so it's toasty when I'm showering. When I'm done in the shower, and turn the heater off, the coffee machine turns on. By the time I'm dressed, my coffee is ready to go.

That's just one routine I've got set up. I've got ones for both kids rooms for wake up and bedtime stuff.

It's pretty nice.

Only when you have it working you truly realise how cool it is that things can now happen on their own, AND because you wanted them to. Like, I have some stair lights turn on when someone passes by, BUT only when the Sun angle is low enough. So it magically happens earlier in winter, and later in summer. BUT it's even better, because when it's after 22:30, the turn-on automation is deactivated as to avoid the dogs flashing the lights on while we sleep. It's like magic and you can tailor things for your workflow.

I guess I got a kick out of it. Every time Home Assistant automatically turning on all lights 30 minutes before sun down, me and my kid would cheers. It's also nice to not worry about "have we locked the door?" or "have we turned off the AC/water heater/stove" etc because the automation take care of turning off everything when no one home, and automatically turning on lights when we got home at night. Also, there's an automation that send intruder alert if no one at home and the motion sensor/door sensor are tripped.

Note that they're not hassle free though. There is always a malfunction or two every one or two months, so I don't recommend it to anyone unless they like tinkering with stuff.

I'd only like smart windows and lights, since I like low yellow light at night and to open the windows in the morning and to close them later. But I don't like the idea of Amazon or Google having my house (and conversations, internet traffic, etc.) even more at their disposal, that's why I avoid to invest on IoT devices right now.

Also, there's the getting locked out of your own house: https://medium.com/@bjax_/a-tale-of-unwanted-disruption-my-week-without-amazon-df1074e3818b

For a lot of things, it's a solution in search of a problem. I set it up on its own vlan because since I do networking every day for work segmenting things off is really simple for me.

I only have a handful of automations that I use.

• Turn on the garage backyard lights and the back door lights when I get home after sunset.

• Send my robo vacuum out whenever I leave the house for more than 5 minutes.

• Turn on the porch light and the exterior housing lights at sunset and off at sunrise.

• A button to turn off all the lights on my house on my phone that I use every night when I go to bed.

• A button in my living room that turns on two table lamps, a floor lamp, and some accent lights instead of turning them all on individually. It also turns them all off.

• Scene buttons at the bar that will turn on multiple lights and change colors. I'm planning to do animations with the lights here so that I can press a button and the lights do a little dance.

I don't really like motion sensors for rooms or areas because there are a lot of times I come in I don't actually want the lights on. I also don't have a million sensors because I don't want to deal with batteries or really care about everything. Things should have a purpose and not just lights that feel like they are there just for the sake of "hey look, I have lights that do something."

Like someone else said, it’s a hobby. I spend money on things, they make me happy for a little bit, they make problems for me, rinse, repeat.

Why do people go fishing when you can buy fish in the store? Why do people draw instead of taking pictures?

It’s nice to go to bed with all the lights on, press a button and have them all go off. It’s nice to have the doors lock when I leave and unlock when I come home. It’s nice to get an alert on my phone if my garage door is open when I leave. It’s nice that all the lights come on as the sun sets.

None of these are necessary, but all of them are nice and it would be annoying if I had to go back to dumb lights.

I love walking into my kitchen and having the lights come on at an appropriate brightness based on time of day without having to interact with the switch. I love having my gawdy custom LED lights come on in the hallway when I open my bedroom door, and having them super low at night when it’s dark so I can still see without blasting my irises. I like having a heater that runs on one end of the room until the other end hits a certain temp, and more so only having it come on if the temp is below a specific threshold in the morning. I love having my porch lights turn on and off with sunset/sunrise, and having seasonal lighting schemes. I love knowing when my house is entered and exited when I’m away, knowing that I can control many things while out of the house like lights, or if I need to open the garage door for a friend to grab something, or give access to someone once without having to give them a key, or to have the TV room turning on before I head in there so I don’t have to bother with sitting through the power up cycle for everything. Mostly, I like being able to control lights without them having to be on the same circuit. My living room doesn’t have a light fixture with a switch, but I’ve got 4 lamps and two switched down lights (one at my front door and one over the fireplace) that are all controlled from a single wireless switch, button on my phone, or voice command. My bedroom is the same, I don’t have to turn out the lights and then get in bed in the dark. I get in bed and press the action button on my phone (which works conditionally based on time, location, and a couple other consistent factors) and the lights turn off while the fan turns on. It’s a lot of work for a bunch of minor conveniences, but more than anything I really enjoy the technology and seeing what other weird and stupid things I can do with it.

As others said, fun and convenience.

For example: when I start a movie, the lights in my living room dim or turn off automatically. Sure, I could get up and do and set several lights manually, but I would probably not bother and watch a movie in a lit room. When I stop or pause the movie, lights go back to the normal setting.

If it’s dark when I get home and I open the front door, it starts the default lighting program. Sure I could fumble for the light switches in the dark, but it’s another convenience.

Why use a garage door opener when you can just get out of your car, open the door, get back in your car and drive it in?

Now keep asking that question about little things around the house and it starts to make sense.

Automate_the_boring_stuff == more_time_for_fun

As I said to people I know, fun. I have fun setting this up. Its a hobby. I like to search for bargains and build the automations. If you don't have fun doing it, its usually not really worth it. It gets expensive quick and its kind of a lot of work to research and setup if you want to keep your privacy.