Southern SmartLiving

I suppose its inevitable for every geek, and now it’s my turn, I’m on the SmartHome kick.

A few months ago I picked up an Amazon Echo.  The whole “Star Trek” talk to the air and get something back thing has always been something I’d hoped would happen during my lifetime and now that it has, albeit in the pre-natal stages, I’m surely going to take advantage and see what I can see.

After a few basic tasks with the Echo, “Alexa, play ESPN Radio”, “Alexa what time is it” and so forth, I wanted a little more than kind of a cute but half assed speaker interaction.   So I started nosing around for what practical devices had an Alexa skills set.

It didn’t take long before I came up on the Ecobee home theremostats.   Seemed interesting, black casing, cool, ok design, not great but workable.   Room to room sensors, now that I really liked, geotagging not necessary.  nice.  The only problem was (well besides calling the Ecobee referred installer and getting dodged, then just plain ignored) in every review i saw the theme was the same.   Nice unit, but just not quite the NEST.   At the time the live generation of competitor NEST (owned by guess who…………)  supported a few things but the Echo/Alexa wasn’t one of them.

Bummer.

Oh well the show must go on.

Just when I was about to accept that the, by all accounts, best, most mature product for what I wanted to do wasn’t available, serendipity, reared her head and poof, the Gen 3 Nest arrives, complete with Echo/Alexa integration.   To me this is another bit of evidence that God  is the greatest of all geeks/techies, but that’s another discussion for another blog.   At any rate, I ran, not walked, but ran to Lowe’s and picked up a new NEST.  Had a really great installer out (as recommended by NEST) to get it put in correctly and it has worked fantastically (as long as I get the commands correct which has been a bit of a struggle).  The Goldilocks zone seems to be about 66 F.  Auto away works flawlessly so far.   Alexa is a happy  virtual lady.

Now to expand.   As luck would have it the light in my main hallway went poof the other night.   A perfect opportunity to test smart light bulbs that have both Alexa and NEST integration.   My daughter, bless her brilliant heart, is far too intelligent to actually turn off everyday devices like lights and televisions, so I’ll be testing a smart wall switch in her room.   The next blog will review those after I get them in and worked with a bit.