CES: Hey Robert, you asked why one would want to have smart home tech. Here's some thoughts about it.
Hey Robert! You asked in the CES episode about what people actually want to use "smart home" technology for. I'm an enthusiast and want to chime in. Now here are some opinions.
I have to admit that having a smart home is also a glorious hobby. Much of this should be taken as me trying to justify to myself having bought all of this stuff. ;-)
Many products sold as "smart home devices" are actually just "connected devices". These turn into a smart home once you can let these talk to each other and add a scripting system to do automations.
As usual, the manufacturers are bad at interoperability. So to make your home smart, you need some box that talks to all devices and sensors and translates between them.
There are proprietary boxes with cloud services attached, there are also lots of open source solutions. I'm using Home Assistant aka HASS, which is an amazing piece of software.
So, what's good and useful with having a smart home?
Energy metering, statistics, consumption control and automations!
Some things that are nice:
Many heating installation contractors only use the default settings, which are usually very inefficient. Same for my house. The energy and heating statistics help to fine-tune the heating system and save energy!
You can use temperature and energy stats to make informed decisions on where to replace devices, change behaviour or improve the building to use less energy. The before/after statistics also allow you to see the success of what you changed.
You can turn off the heat pump during expensive hours (we use a dynamic pricing electricity contract) or raise flow temperature during cheap hours.
You can charge the BEV during excess PV production or during cheap hours. Same for powertools, ebike, etc.
Based on a new law, this year I'll get a much cheaper electricity contract if the heat pump reacts to a signal by the grid operator to limit its power consumption during the grid's peak hours. My heat pump was designed years before this new law was conceived and the manufacturer doesn't support this feature. With HASS I can retrofit this consumption limit myself by changing heating flow temperature and thermostat settings automatically.
Smart home sensor data, dynamic pricing and interconnection with the grid operators will be extremely helpful to do the energy transition to renewables. Green energy is variable and thus we need to control consumption dynamically based on production.
In my home, we have many older home entertainment devices that run perfectly fine, yet consume a ridiciously high amount of standby energy. HASS automatically cuts their main power when it detects 10 minutes of standby.
We close the garden gate automatically after sunset to keep the feral hogs out during the dark. (Hi, Mr. McNabb!)
You can calculate the location of the sun to automatically change the angle of the window shades, blocking direct sunlight from baking the room without blocking the view outside.
You can change the light temperature of the home office based on the time of day.
You can control a ventilator for the washroom based on dew point sensor data to avoid black mold.
You can add sensors for water spills and fire detectors and get a notification even while you're not at home and ask a neighbor to check if things are okay.
When we had a water spill, we then used a dehumidifier that consumed a lot, yet we were able to to only run it on free excess PV electricity.
Some things that suck:
The manufacturers aren't just bad at interoperability, some sabotage it. You often fight the manufacturer for control over the device. The "Matter" standard doesn't seem to take off, either. Some advanced features are blocked behind a cloud account or subscription service.
Connected devices are nice because you can get new features via a firmware update years after you bought the hardware. Obviously, they can also take features away or remotely break the device. The c-level suite at Sonos resigned in disgrace this week after they fucked up a major firmware/app release months ago and haven't fixed it yet despite many promises. As a software developer I find this saga very funny, except that we're affected as well and my family complains about the broken music system since last year.
Manufacturers go under. Some or all functionalitly of a device may break because of that. If you're unlucky, core parts of your smart home may depend on products with suddenly lost cloud functions. Your private home may end up like these folks where a major part of their business is controlled by an Amiga 500 in a storage closet nobody dares to touch. You may have to hunt for vintage hardware on ebay to keep things running. (I'm trying to avoid this by using KNX for the core functions, it's industrial hardware with a support track record of decades.)
It's all about who's in control of the device and sensor data. Your smart home snitches on you. Things are nice when you can use data for yourself. But as we know, data can also be used for malicious purposes. If you cross-reference data from several sources, you can get detailed behaviour tracking. Ad targeting, upselling, insurance claim denial, government surveillance.
There's a large community of smart home hackers and many efforts to build alternative firmware to address the previously mentioned issues. While that's nice, it means you'll hunt obscure forum threads and try to figure out what firmware to use to gain full control.
It's never finished. I keep twiddling with the setup, this is my hobby and I consider this fun. But my family needs to be quite patient whenever dad misconfigured the smart home, "again".