A Somewhat Smart Home
Over the last few years, modernizing your home to be ‘smart’ has been all the rage — and the textbook, happy path scenarios that we see being pushed is pretty darn cool. In one corner, relying on a cloud provider to act as the glue that connects all the gadgets together can bring it’s share of issues (privacy, security, uptime) and on other end of the spectrum, firing up fully flushed out local home-automation system may be impractical for the masses. For the way we use it, I see home-automation and smart-homes as a ‘would be nice’ party trick: if you can accept the tradeoffs and work within the limitations, it’s pretty great — but might there be a middle ground? Let’s explore.
Quick Links
Existing Home Automation Landscape
At the root, I think most wishes for automation fall into the categories of reliability, convenience and reducing monotony; I think most readers can recognize a few textbook examples:
‘Hey Alexa, set a timer for 37 minutes’ is way more convenient then stopping to figure out just what time it is 37-minutes from now and setting an alarm - doubly convenient if you need to be able to continue doing what you’re doing or you need to move onto a totally different task while you have the alarm run in the background
Having a built-in ‘automatic shutdown’ is super handy for things like setting a fan or light for bedr — ‘Ok Google, turn on the light for 30 minutes’
Combining a few actions together into a batch action i.e., ‘movie time’ or ‘start morning routine’
For us, these kinds of actions are all human-triggered (as in, I will generally call out to the assistant to manually initiate it) so most of the time, any latency as the command goes up to the IoT provider and then back down to the individual devices is generally acceptable.
When talking about latency, I’m looking at the total time between when I want a result and when that result happens: this means that the latency includes the time it takes to trigger the smart routine as well. For simplicity, I’m not yet going to consider scenarios where there is a disconnect in the IoT connectivity (although that can be a very real problem!)
For our house, we have a few broad checkboxes we would like to hit with some kind of tech:
Transition lighting: I’d like to get from point A to point B in the house without interacting with light-switches
Automatic-off: there are situations where it makes sense to turn something on, but I don’t want to stick around to have to turn it off
UX improvement: I’d like to make it easier and less-effortful to interact with the house
Transition Lighting
Slick Automated Lighting
Imagine your home being totally dark: by transition lighting, I’m referring to any lights that you might need to go from point A to point B in your home without stumbling around. For me, a good indicator for sufficient lighting is whether or not I have to slow down (due to lack of visibility) as I walk through the house at night.
I’ve seen some very slick Home Assistant-driven setups on YouTube but looking past the initial wow-factor, it seems that to replicate (the fancy ‘lighting following you’), a few preconditions need to be met:
the path needs to be predetermined, and
the pace needs to be (approximately) predetermined, and
the predetermined path must run its course completely: you can’t stop halfway and turn around (— unless that too is a predetermined path as well!), and
unless you’re using to smart-bulbs and/or smart-dimmer switches, lights will be a full-blast (most setups interact with the pre-existing room lighting)
Challenges
For my setup, I had a few problems with a setup like this:
Latency. Ideally, I would have a system that gives me just enough light to walk around at normal daytime speed and is not tied to where I’m going from or to. In my case, ‘normal daytime speed’ might as well be just short of running around the house which leads to the first complication: ‘smart’ systems [may?] have too much latency. Running a local Home Assistant server will give me the best response time but even that still may not work for all home setups. Imagine if you have blind turns leading to short hallways, or short stairs that you take multiple steps at a time (or just jump down), any latency with a Home-Assistant server may be too much.
Unpredictability. I want to be able to walk from nearly anywhere to anywhere else, potentially stopping or changing my path or destination at any point. Even if we got over the latency issue, there’s just too much unpredictability in all of the possible routes and paths throughout the house to practically define. To support this, instead of having just easy starting point (such as a pressure-sensor under a mattress), every light itself needs to be a potential trigger.
Cost, Complexity and Circumstantial Criteria. Our particular house has a lot of puck lights rather than traditional bulbs so getting those individually swapped out to smart-puck lights would have been quite expensive (even switching out a house worth of regular bulbs to wifi bulbs would have been a significant expense). One workaround could be to do all of the automation at the switch-level: swapping out switches for smart dimmable switches would reduce the complexity and cost. This wouldn’t have worked across the board for us because [1] I wanted more granular control over the lights and [2] there may be times when I don’t want the transient lights to trigger (i.e., during a movie).
What works for us
Our solution was to use old-school motion sensors to control our transition lighting. We used variety of different types of motion triggers but by integrating the control directly into ‘the device making the light’, the latency is all but eliminated and all of this becomes a relatively low-cost, self-contained unit that can be installed anywhere. We have a few different ‘types’ of locations, so we use a few different types of hardware motion triggers.
Sconces are great for hallways, stairwells and also bathrooms and closets. The battery-powered ones we use have three modes: On, Off and Auto (motion activated). Having the On/Off setting is great if you know that you’ll need a setting on /off for a longer, known time block (i.e., during a movie). These lights are ‘pretty’ enough that it’s not a huge eyesore to have them along the hallways.
Light bars, often used in the kitchen to provide illumination under cabinets are great for stairs. Typically sold in packs of three, each of these small battery powered lights can provide enough illumination for two or three steps. When lighting stairs, you can simply place them on the step or mount them to one/both walls and if you have hardwood stairs, you can even mount them on the riser of the step. Another option would be to use motion LED strips however it’s important to note that the motion sensor will only be at ‘one end of the strip’ so, if you wanted illumination for traffic going both ways, you would need two strip.
Motion Bulbs are a super easy way to stealth-retrofit an existing space without doing any electrical work or altering the ‘vibe’ of your place by putting a bunch of lights on the walls. Most motion bulbs use a passive-infrared (PIR) sensor which has the typical motion-sensor-dome that we are all familiar with; it’s also possible to get radar-based bulbs that are more sensitive (and don’t have the telltale dome) however it’s possible that they can be too sensitive, sometimes detecting motion through thin materials like hollow-core doors. We use motion bulbs in both our furnace room and garage; both rooms have doors that must be opened to enter so that provides the motion to trigger the lights to come on.
Motion bed-light strips are just a small tweak to motion-led strips in that they usually have two independent motion sensors, two sets of LED strips, all connected to a single power source and are great for providing illumination as soon as you put your feet down getting out of bed. Depending on how you orient the motion sensor, they can also be triggered as you walk into the dark room towards the bed.
Motion triggered outlets are another easy way to retrofit a space with motion sensitive lights: it’s great in places like laundry rooms, pantry closets etc. where there might be lighting in the general area but not enough or perhaps you want to trigger light in one location when motion is detected in another. By using an AC light source, this works well for locations that you don’t necessarily visit often (and thus don’t have to remember to change batteries).
Motion activated light switches, like motion-bulbs are great way to stealth-retrofitting an existing space. Like motion bulbs, the effectiveness of using motion-activated switches will depend on the layout of your home. Generally it will work best if your switch is in a place that won’t have a high chance of being triggered accidentally i.e., where a switch is placed around a blind-corner or inside a room. You’ll also need to take into consideration that when the switch is triggered, all of the lights controlled by that switch will come on (or turn off). This can be difficult to optimize if you have a single switch that triggers a roomful of lights.
The best part of using battery motion triggered lights is that each light operates independently: I can place the lights along any area I would like cover without any consideration for where I’m coming-from/going-to: I can walk slowly or I can run or , heck — I can even teleport and the behavior at each light-node behaves the same: it turns on if it spots motion. Being decoupled from the main (normal) lights in the area mean that if I genuinely want lighting in that area, I can still flick a switch and bring tons of light when it’s desired.
Tip
When attaching motion lights to the wall, I use 3M Command Picture Strips (aka command-hook-velcro): I get a confident connection to the wall and there’s a half-decent chance it won’t wreck the surface if I ever need to take it off.
Downsides
Having all of the lights fire based on hardware-based motion sensors is fantastic: you’ll generally never have to worry about turning lights on (or off) again but there are a few downsides to be aware of:
For the battery powered lights, you will obviously have to replace/recharge the batteries on a somewhat regular basis (for us, it’s about once a month). It’s not really documented well, but at some point, the motion activated lights will just turn on and stay on, but they will be obviously dim — this is the low battery indicator
Radar-based motion bulbs can sometimes pick up motion through thin materials like hollow-core doors
PIR-based motion sensors will sometimes pick up reflected motion
Motion-bulbs (PIR and radar) have a built in brightness-threshold so that they don’t turn on during the day. This can backfire if you want to retrofit a multiple-light fixture with motion bulbs — when one bulb turns on, it will raise the light level in the room so that the other bulbs do not turn on
Going with motion switches means that all the lights connected to that switch will turn on or off as a group which can be annoying for circuits with a whole bunch of bulbs changing at once
Automatic Off
Motion triggered lighting handles most of our needs but there are still a few scenarios where we might want to manually turn lights on but not be responsible for turning them off.
Perimeter Lights
Aside from any (real or perceived) security benefits, I’ve always liked the idea of perimeter night time lighting - it just makes a home more pleasant to come home to. Of course the pain point is to remember to turn the lights on in the evening and off in the morning. This could be a good use case for home-automation: for example, Google Home specifically has a trigger for sunrise and sunset and you can tie this either to smart-bulbs or to smart switches (or both!)
Linking it to smart switches lets you turn on/off entire groups of lights - great if you have a couple lights on an outdoor circuit. If your bulbs support dimming, that can be added too
Linking it to smart bulbs would likely allow you to adjust the color of the bulbs (both color temperature and even RGB) — great for seasonal decor (or you can even configure different colors for different status messages)
A solution that runs completely in hardware would be to use dusk-to-dawn bulbs. As their namesake suggests they come automatically when it’s ‘dark enough’ and then automatically shut off when there’s enough ambient light. Since they are triggered by the lack of available light rather than time of day, they will come on when in foggy/stormy conditions as well. This also means that, because the on/off determination is made per-bulb, this can mean that some bulbs may run longer than others if they happen to be placed in a location that gets a bit more light (say, near a street lamp).
For us, this was purely a cost-decision: we had four lights on four circuits so the cost of four smart switches (or bulbs) would be substantially higher than bulk pack of dusk-to-dawn bulbs. One additional advantage is that it’s easier to find higher-output bulbs that aren’t smart.
Bathroom Fans
For the first few weeks after moving in, one of the things we missed the most was having a timer switch in the bathroom for the fan. Being able to set the fan to run for a predetermined amount of time is such a hassle saver. I briefly considered humidity-triggered models but after reading some reviews, I found that they can be fussy (not triggering when humidity levels were reached) and really only being useful for showers. In addition to bathroom fans, timer switches can be handy for scenarios where you might want a device to automatically turn off for safety or convenience reasons (i.e., heaters)
As a bathroom fan controller, this can easily be one case where a smart switch shows it’s strengths:
you can have the fan run pre-determined venting-schedules (perhaps overnight even)
you can set automated schedules where the fan will always turn off at a given time
I’m sure you could tie this together with both a standalone humidity sensor and with predefined timer buttons
Going for a a [purely] smart-switch solution removes the option for easy, on-demand timed events. It’s nothing that couldn’t be overcome with a smart-button to trigger a timed routine but we just happened to into the timer-switch ecosystem before any of this took off so we had some switches already and it was something we were used to.
Delayed Off Lighting
Particularly handy bedrooms or sometimes rooms like storage closets or cold rooms, a delayed-off bulb is just that: a bulb that, when turned off, continues to stay on for a short period before actually turning off. As an aside, these bulbs make for awesome inadvertent prank bulbs if you don’t tell your partner about them.
Quality of Life Improvements
Syncing Devices
Sometimes you may want to associated a bunch of devices together either so that they turn on/off together or so that they are mutually exclusive. We use smart outlets to automatically juggle this:
For Skype Station, when the main camera and lights turns on (or off), we have a light on the other side of the room that does the same
We have an IR and oil heater in the bedroom and we have them on the same circuit. We have both setup such that they could run simultaneously without tripping the breaker but it’s safer to just play it safe: whenever one heater turns on, it turns off the other heater.
The downside about these synchronization smarts is that you do need to manually define both the “turn on” and “turn off” synchronization routines. It’s also possible that the synchronization calls sometimes don’t fire properly so for certain devices, it’s not a bad idea to have a few explicit “turn off at this time” calls sprinkled in (i.e. the heater outlets turn off at 0700 every day, no matter what).
Making the house intuitive
As a UX-standard, I’ve settled on using guide-light light switches to make is super obvious (especially in the dark) which switch you should press if you want light in a given area. I use a few different types of guide-light switches in different places:
Leviton L5611-2W with an illuminated rocker is my general purpose lit-switch which I use around the house. This is great in bathrooms or other areas where you have multiple switches in a gang-box where I want to make it super clear which switch corresponds to the ‘main light’. During the daytime when there is plenty of light, this is very much a stealth retrofit: when it gets dimmer, this switch still remains as a super subtle indicator
Pass & Seymour TM870WSLCC is a fantastic option for the bedroom (or theater-room), particularly if your bed faces the lightswitch: the little dot-light is super subtle and only really noticeable if you’re looking for a lightswitch on the wall. These are also (relatively) low-cost as well which is a nice bonus
Leviton 6526-W is a much more ‘blunt’ guide-light switch which is great for areas that are really dark and you want to make it unmissable where the light switch is. We used to use these switches for the garage or cold-room lights at previous houses. I use these switches now in super-dark-places to indicate outlets that have dusk-to-dawn lights associated with them (aka the garage)
Tying things together with routines!
I happen to be in the Google Ecosystem for now so routines are my lingo but none of this is particularly novel or unique to Google. I have a few convenience routines that make things flow a bit nicer:
“Done working in the shop” - stop playing any music in the shop, power down the air compressor outlet, turn on the air cleaner and bug-zapper for an hour
“Movie time” - turns off the RGB lights and other lights in the computer room, turns off my desk fan, powers on the HTPC setup and theater-fans. There is a corresponding ‘movie is done’ routine as well
“Heater related commands” — turns on the IR/oil heater depending on command for a predetermined period of time and turns it off
Looking at the future
In the future, I’d like to explore two things:
Some kind of stacklight or status light system. This can be triggered by things like someone coming to the door, it being dinner time, alarm clock/countdown or other alert settings (i.e., leak sensor)
A visual paging system that doesn’t require making noise (voice command) to trigger — voice commands are neat and all but it’s hard to fire off a voice command if, for example, you’re on a Skype Call
Right now, I happen to be in the Google Home ecosystem and in terms of home-automation and general smartness, it’s pretty abysmal - routines can only be triggered via time or voice commands. Sure, there’s sunrise/sunset (aka time) and dismissing an alarm (fairly narrow use case) but for the most part, the ecosystem works on time/voice being the triggers. For textbook ‘party trick’ type of actions, this is perfectly fine but leaves a lot to be desired:
You might want to react to external stimuli: security camera picks up motion ⇨ throw the camera feed up on a Nest display
You may want silence: imagine getting a drink at 3AM in the kitchen, or have a bedside fan turn off without having to talk to a device or worse, having a voice assistant blare out a stupid confirmation at 3AM telling you that the device has been turned on or off
You may want to react to a more complicated scenario involving multiple triggers:
Motion sensors A, B, C, D (in that order) have been triggered ⇨ turn on a specific device; if the motion sensors have not been fired in that specific sequence, do nothing i.e., anyone going from the kitchen to the office will turn on the office lights
Motion sensors A, B, C, D (in that order) have been triggered in ⇨ turn on a specific device, depending on the time of day i.e., anyone going to the kitchen to the office between 8AM and 9AM on a weekday will turn on the office lights
Motion sensors A, B, C, D (in that order) have all been triggered within a certain timespan ⇨ turn on a specific device i.e., if someone runs from the kitchen to the office, turn on the office lights, otherwise no nothing
Even though Alexa is substantially better in a few of these areas, it’s still somewhat limited - this might be the push for me to look at Home Assistant. Looking (much!) further down the road, I would really like to extend the home automation to tackle a very specific scenario — unscheduled meetings for Skype station. This would involve a few fairly advanced integrations:
Calendar integration: only on work days (i.e., not Christmas), and
Time window: only during work hours (i.e., not 2AM), and
Waypoint trigger: only fire this when I’m moving from the kitchen (A) ⇨ to the base of the stairs (B) ⇨ to the top of the stairs (C) ⇨ and turn to the office (D), and
Magic: and only when I do so at a certain pace (i.e., running up the stairs because: oh crap, unscheduled call is starting in 10 seconds), and (most importantly),
Voice free: this should happen without a human stopping to say ‘turn on skype station’
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