Unsmarting your house

[root]

When smart tech first hit the market I adopted it in a big way, spending a tonne of money - 1st gen Philips Hue was not cheap.
I still have a first gen Amazon Echo and have ended up with 4 of the things

I embraced Home Assistant, tying together both products designed to provide smart home functionality and forcing older things to become smart with the use of wifi connected power sockets. I even wrote my own code to control my garden lights and monitor the weather, using a Raspberry Pi with relays and sensors.

I purchased a robot vacuum and was somewhat impressed until it lost it's ability to find it's home charger no matter how many times I reset it or moved things round to accomodate it.
I paid a lot of money for gigabit fibre when it became available.

Fast forward to 2022 and I have gone completely backwards. All of the gadgets that use 'neglible' power in standby, add up to a fair amount of money now that electricity has become incredibly expensive here in the UK.

All of my lights are manual. I do most of my cleaning with a 50 year old Hoover, with a cheap modern cordless for when I can't be bothered to drag the old beast out.
I no longer run a big server, and my broadband is via 4G/LTE, delivering around 50meg when the weather is good.

I retain my smart speakers, but they sit on remote control sockets that are definately not smart, using a little remote control, along with my TV and desktop setup. I've even got a timer on my phone charger to stop it using 'vampire power'. With everything turned off my home uses less than 10 watts, minus my aquarium/fridges/freezers.

I have found, since doing this I have an awful lot more time. No longer am I wondering why that one light refuses to switch off. I'm saving a good £20-30 a month in electricity costs, despite massive increases in prices and moving to somewhere where we cook on electric rather than gas.

I'm sure that smart homes will have a future, but I am not convinced the benefits outweigh the cost and inconvinence of lights and heating that depend on your internet connection being up and running.

Has anyone else gone 'backwards' in terms of home tech, or have you gone all in? I'm not quite convinced it's mature enough to be fully reliable.

 

[strollin]

I wouldn't say I've gone completely 'backwards' but I have 3 smart switches that I simply don't use anymore because every so often they 'forget' how to connect to my router so I need to go back in and re-enter the router pw or something like that. Each switch is from a different manufacturer so the procedure to access the switch setup is different for each device. I simply got tired of resetting them so the last time each lost its connection to the router, I simply never went in and reset it.

I have Amazon Echo devices in several rooms (garage too) but mostly use them to listen to music. We have a robotic vacuum that my son gave us as a gift. My wife likes the thing, I hate it because every single time it runs it gets stuck someplace so never finishes vacuuming.

 

[root]

I wouldn't say I've gone completely 'backwards' but I have 3 smart switches that I simply don't use anymore because every so often they 'forget' how to connect to my router so I need to go back in and re-enter the router pw or something like that. Each switch is from a different manufacturer so the procedure to access the switch setup is different for each device. I simply got tired of resetting them so the last time each lost its connection to the router, I simply never went in and reset it.

I have Amazon Echo devices in several rooms (garage too) but mostly use them to listen to music. We have a robotic vacuum that my son gave us as a gift. My wife likes the thing, I hate it because every single time it runs it gets stuck someplace so never finishes vacuuming.

I think this highlights the issue - the smart switches would have surely worked at some point, but they decided not to. You need to have loads of apps to juggle things and it just gets to a point. When my partner said no smart stuff in the new house I was disappointed at first but I know better than to say no for a quiet life. Now I just don't miss it and things are easy.

Agree with you on the robot vacuums too - I loved mine at first, reviewed it here too, but over time the wretched things's sensors seemed to slowly fail to work properly, which seemed to be a common fault with the one I had so back it went. Luckily here we've got pretty good consumer law and I spent a few years working at a retailer's tech helpline so I know how to use it.

We also used our Alexas for music 99% of the time. I've gone back to just using a hifi + Bluetooth speakers. The Echos were activating without being spoken to a little too much for my liking so now they gather dust (and stop using my power)