Home Automation State Of The House 2024

(Image by DALL-E, thank you overlord, text written by a human)

At my core I'm a lazy person, automation sits well with me.?

I thought I’d kick off 2024 with an update on how our home is automated, I bet there are some folk out there on LinkedIn with some other use-cases and techno-magic helpers we can introduce into the family.

Taking into consideration maintenance effort and overall usefulness I've categorised as follows -?

Very very useful

IRobot Roomba x2 (for vacuuming the floor, knows the layout of my house, scheduled daily and every time the family leave the house, I can target a specific room, robot needs regular cleaning & emptying and new parts but cheap and easy, game changing with young kid, risky if dog poo is a variable)

Ring Spotlight Cameras (for security and occasionally talking to people at the door if we’re out e.g. last week we had a random delivery whilst out, we were able to redirect it live to the neighbour, thank us later DHL)

Rachio Irrigation Controller (can irrigate garden efficiently and remotely and in alignment with weather conditions e.g. it won’t waste water if rain is due, also fun to turn on when someone in garden).

Velux Skylight (closes itself when it rains meaning fresh air in our living room for most of the day, surprisingly valuable and zero maintenance)

Pool Chemistry (auto controls acidity & chlorine levels by drawing from a 15 litre acid container and increasing chlorination level from salt, reduces chemistry maintenance significantly)

Pool Auto-Leveller (keeps level consistent by auto-draining during heavy rain and auto-topping up for evaporation, during Summer I haven’t had to touch the level once)

Pool Cleaning Robot (for cleaning pool for a few hours a day, saves a lot of time cleaning and collecting for us)

Pool Aqualink (for controlling pool equipment remotely from phone, more of a convenience to start/stop things by pool or from house)

Quardio Scales (auto logs weight into Apple Health, creating a more holistic health profile at very little effort)

Quardio Blood Pressure (auto logs blood pressure into Apple Health.same benefit as above re: holistic health profile)

Madimack Pool Heater (keeps pool at target temperature, interacts with pool equipment to optimise itself, can be controlled remotely)

Fairly useful

x6 connected plugs (come on at sunset for lamps, Christmas lights etc., more a convenience but worth having, could be useful for security 'Home Alone' style)

Solar Panel Measurement / Dashboard (useful to monitor load, especially for optimising pool equipment and heater, allows us to increase sustainability effort)

Remootio 3 Gate Opener (remotely open by driveway gate, mostly for trades and such like, can also open through Siri but doesn’t work as well as expected, clunky experience through automation ecosystems e.g. only yesterday someone collecting something needed gate opened, could do that remotely)

Aircon Daikin (control aircon remotely from phone, occasionally useful if very hot or very cold)

Sonos wireless speakers (for music, not a lot of automation apart from multi-room which is not that useful)

Not that useful

Big Ass Fan ceiling fan (control fan from phone, not found a use case so far, wall switch is fine)

Observations (and some obvious parallels to enterprise automation & business applications!) -?

1. Devices that make your life easier through automation or augmentation aren’t ‘set and forget’, they need maintenance, some attention and a little love.? The more useful a device is e.g. IRobot, the more you’re prepared to invest in maintaining them.? Whilst I don’t go for a beer with my gate opener, my 4 year old daughter has grown up with much of this technology, for example ‘riding’ the irobot as a baby as it wizzed around the floors.? She says thank you to them as she leaves the house, she understands they’re helping us create space for other areas of our life. What she doesn't understand yet is that they'll be more lenient at singularity. ? Each of our main helpers (there's a hierarchy!) have names which helps to create respect for the jobs they’re doing. ?
2. Ecosystem wars are tedious & frustrating for customers - I know you want me to connect my pool heater to my wifi plug but just do the job I bought you for well and then we’ll talk about extending your boundaries into other areas of my life.? The most useful automation devices are completely open, connectable into many ecosystems.? Partnerships create additional value for the customer.? Additionally, most automation devices don’t want to silently do their job in the background, they try and ‘force you’ into their world/app, which creates a lot of friction in the automation outcome.? Just do your job, do it in an open way, do it silently and do it well.
3. If you can control your home environment automagically, you have more control in terms of both convenience and sustainability.? I know when to run electricity like pool equipment (acknowledged, a pool is not sustainable!) and even air con if needed (we're ceiling fan users not so much aircon).? Our 10kW of solar panels offset a lot of our electricity usage so knowing when I can maximise this is really useful.? I can also closely control garden irrigation (don't run if rain is schedule or currently raining), monitor usage and optimise with soil saturation and weather conditions.
4. It’s hard to tell exactly how something works and whether it delivers on the promise before you actually touch and play with it. Similar to enterprise software I would always recommend getting a vendor to demonstrate the capability in the context of your use case so that you can feel confident what it does and doesn’t do. The complexity, and the value, is often in the nuance and detail.

Enabling all of this is my home network infrastructure, a rock solid NBN 100mbps connection and Orbi AX6000, a router plus 2 satellites giving almost perfect wifi coverage for 600 sqm and a latency of < 15ms.? Generally I have 30 devices connected to it, it performs well. ?

What should I experiment with in 2024? What am I missing?