I’ve been buying smart home devices for many years. I love some of them and would absolutely buy them again if they stopped working. However, I own several types of smart home devices that I wouldn’t replace like-for-like, as better options are available.
7Smart Light Bulbs
Asmart light bulbwas one of the first pieces of smart home tech I ever bought. It was impressive to be able to control my lights via an app on my phone and to be able to change the color or color temperature of the bulb. However, smart light bulbshave one major flawthat renders them useless much of the time.
Smart light bulbs need power to work, and that power is only delivered when your light switch is turned on. If you turn off your smart light bulb with the switch on the wall, it no longer has power, meaning you may’t control it remotely. It effectively becomes a dumb light bulb again. If you live in a home with other people, it isn’t realistic to ask them not to use the light switches in your home.
Moving forward, I’m going to be installingsmart switchesin my home instead. You can control a smart switch to turn your lights on and off, but since it is always connected to power, you never have to worry about it becoming unreachable.
Kasa Smart Light Switch HS200
The HS200 lets you control anything a standard light switch controls—all from your phone. Turn your lights, ceiling fans, and other fixtures off and on no matter where you are.
6A Smart Home Control Panel
The idea ofsmart home control panelsseems like a good one. Having a centralized hub from which you’re able to control all the smart home devices in your home seems like it would make sense. Anyone in your home can use it, and you can even get visual feedback about the state of your home.
In my experience, however, a smart home control panel just isn’t much use. If you want to control your smart home devices, you need to go to wherever the smart home control panel is. No matter where you place it, there are going to be plenty of occasions where it’s nowhere near where you are, making it more hassle to use than just pulling out your phone.
My goal with my smart home is forautomation rather than control. I want things to happen without my input, such as my lights turning on when I walk into a room. A smart home control panel is effectively just an expensive set of switches stuck to your wall, which isn’t that smart at all.
I have anAmazon Echo Hub, and I honestly can’t remember the last time that I used it to control a smart home device in my home. The majority of the time, it’s used to display my current gas and electricity usage and prices that get pulled from Home Assistant. In other words, it’s just a glorified display that I could easily replace with an old tablet.
5Echo Devices
When the firstAmazon Echo devicesfirst appeared on the scene, it felt like they were going to be a real game-changer. Being able to use your voice to ask for information, play your music, or control your smart home devices made it feel like we were living in the future.
However,very little has changedsince the first Alexa devices launched. I continually get “Keep up with Alexa” emails from Amazon with information about what Alexa can do, and there’s never anything new of note. I got quite excited about the announcement that anupgraded AI-powered version of Alexawas coming, but we’re still no closer to seeing it happen.
The other major issue is that everything you say to Alexa (and possibly things you don’t) gets sent to Amazon’s servers, which isn’t ideal for privacy. Thankfully, things are beginning to change. I run aHome Assistant server, and recently, aHome Assistant smart speakerhas been released that’s designed to allow you to create your own voice assistant that is capable of running locally if you have suitable hardware in your home.
Home Assistant Voice is only currently a preview edition, but eventually, I hope to replace all my Echo devices with local voice control that is private and far more customizable.
4Smart Blinds
The idea ofsmart blindsis great. Being woken up by natural sunlight as yourblinds open automaticallysounds like the perfect way to start the day. However, I’ve found the experience to be less than perfect.
I went for IKEA smart blinds due to the low cost, and the first issue is that they just don’t look that great. They come in any color you want, as long as it’s gray, which is uninspiring at best. They work fine and do their job, but they’re not the color we would have chosen given a choice.
Another big issue is that the rechargeable batteries are located at the very top of the blinds. To recharge the batteries, I have to climb up some furniture to get to them, which gets annoying fast.
I wish that I’d gone forsmart blind tiltsor smart blind drivers instead. You can use these to control your existing blinds, so you can have any color of blinds you want. They’re also much easier to fit since you only have to install the controller rather than an entirely new blind.
There are similar options for drapes, too, so you can even have drapes over your blinds and control both remotely, having your drapes open and your blinds raised when you want to let the light in.
3Ring Doorbells
Until recently, I had twoRing video doorbellsfor our home that, by a quirk of design, has two front doors. I was pleased with the products when I first installed them, but as with so many tech products, they seem to have become worse over time.
The person detection is appalling, with so many false positives that I had to turn the motion alerts off because it seemed that the doorbells would tell me someone was at the door if the wind changed direction. To make matters worse, Ring kept increasing the cost of the subscription that I needed to store and access video recordings.
I finally gave up andreplaced them with a Reolink video doorbell. Not only do I have local storage at no cost by plugging an SD card into the device, but I’ve also linked it to HomeKit Secure Video so that I can access my recordings remotely without any additional subscription.
2Anything That Requires a Proprietary Hub
At one point in the life of my smart home, I almost had more smart home hubs than I had Ethernet ports, and that includes the spare ports in the nodes of myWi-Fi mesh. It’s incredibly frustrating that so many smart home devices require a proprietary hub to work out of the box.
I hada hub for my Hue lights, a hub for my IKEA blinds, a hub for my Zigbee sensors, a hub for my smart thermostat, and more. It was beginning to get out of hand.
Thankfully, with the help of a Zigbee dongle, I have replaced the vast majority of my smart home hubs by connecting directly to Home Assistant. For example, I could connect my IKEA smart blinds and my Philips Hue smart light bulbs directly to Home Assistant over Zigbee without the need for proprietary hubs. I now have one hub to rule them all, and it was a real joy being able to unplug the mess of cables from the back of my router.
1Smart Home Devices That Communicate Via Wi-Fi
There are a huge number of smart home devices that communicate over Wi-Fi. It makes sense since it means that you don’t need any additional hubs other than your router to control your devices and ensures that they can access cloud services.
There are plenty of downsides to Wi-Fi smart home devices, however. Wi-Fi devices need to communicate directly with your router, so if you want to install a smart home product a long way from your router, you may find that it causes serious problems due to the weak connection. If the Wi-Fi goes down, your smart home devices may also quickly become dumb.
Your Wi-Fi network can also quickly get congested if you start adding multiple Wi-Fi smart home devices into the mix. With several people in the home all using Wi-Fi at the same time, your smart home devices can start to become unreliable or even lose connection completely.
In addition, Wi-Fi is relatively power-hungry, so all of your Wi-Fi smart home devices need access to sufficient power. This usually means that they have to be plugged in, limiting where you can place them.
Wi-Fi isn’t the only option, however. Devices that use alternative communication methods, such asZigbeeorThread, can form a mesh network in which each device can pass on information to the next. This means that even the most remote device in your home can maintain a solid connection.
The low power requirements of these protocols also mean that your Zigbee or Thread devices can run on battery power alone, allowing you to place them anywhere you want, including places that don’t always have power sockets, such as bathrooms.
With so many smart home products out there these days, it’s not always easy to know which devices will be right for your needs and which will be less useful. Sometimes, you just have to suck it and see. Once I’ve invested in a product, I’ll try and get the best out of it, but at some point, products will need replacing. At least now I have a better idea of what I want and what I don’t.
