21st Century Smart Home Issues

A long day.....

So last night after a 5am start and travelling home on a busy train I stumbled into the house, fell over one of the dogs, kissed the wife and collapsed into a chair for a bit of respite. Two minutes later I’m informed that the heating isn't working as it should.

Switching into Home Tech Support mode I climb out of my comfy chair (pausing to stretch my back as I pulled a muscle) and amble over to give the Nest Thermostat a good hard stare while stroking my chin.

After nearly an hour of bad language and googling I am at a point where I've identified that the problem is related to it being connected to the WiFi but not able to access the Internet for no obvious reason. At this point Child #1 was streaming Friends on Netflix and Child #2 was murdering aliens on his Xbox so the internet was very much up in the house.

So after some thought I logon to the router and start poking around and its here we arrive at the moral of the story...

Some weeks ago Child#1 and Child#2 (both teenagers) were having a proper Tom and Jerry style argument in the house, the wife was very unhappy with this so naturally this meant I was going to be very unhappy next if I didn't solve it quick. "I know" I thought, I'll use the Router management app on my iPhone to knock just their devices off the Wifi and remove Internet from their lives for a few hours. This did the trick, no more Tom and Jerry antics, the children went back to being moody and all was well in the Denby Household....

Fast forward to yesterday evening where if I had any I would have been pulling my hair out trying to work out why my "Smart Thermostat" can't see the internet... It transpires that in my overzealous removal of the children's internet privileges I inadvertently also blocked the thermostat which is why I lost an hour and half of my life to troubleshooting. Mainly because out of the box the thermostat had a really catchy name like "aB7893_H5vbe334" so I probably thought it was a tv and it just got blocked just in case and missed when I re-enabled everything.

So the lesson is that sometimes smart devices don't save us time. To be really effective with some of this stuff you need to invest the time in setting things up properly from the get go with intuitive labels etc.. Plus it helps to have a less happy trigger finger on features you've never used before. :-)