When it was time to upgrade our 20-year-old living room, I fantasized about replacing the lights, switches, fans, TV, and more with smart technology. Then I almost fell over laughing because I realized what a pipe dream that is.
Nothing in my experience with the smart home world is good or easy enough to warrant a full-scale retrofit. Even piecemeal updates are fraught.
Our plan was simple but also significant. We had to empty the 20×18 foot living room so we could redo the wood floors, replace the cracked front door and our storm door, add a ceiling fan, and possibly do other upgrades to fit the look and feel of our now more beach-themed space.
I won’t bore you with the details of all that paint and wood work (though it all came out lovely) but when I looked at my smart or non-smart choices, I got a quick sense of the struggles most norms (people not into tech) face every day when trying to upgrade the intelligence of their homes.
A happy home
To be honest, I always go into any home tech gear upgrade with trepidation, because I know that it probably won’t all work perfectly or even easily, and my wife will (as she should) complain. She has enough going on in her life without having to worry about why the learning thermostat isn’t learning, or that light that was working on its own last week, forgot itself this week.
In recent weeks, I’d already replaced our Nest Video Doorbell, which we’d had for years, with a Ring Video Doorbell, mostly to support my test of the new Alexa+. That device is great, although it does not work with Google Home, where all our other security cams live.
For this project, I hoped to mitigate some of the pain, and it turned out that the only way to do that was to sometimes just say no to smart home tech.
For instance, I could’ve spent more on a smart ceiling fan, and it would’ve made some sense since my nine-foot ceiling makes it impossible to use pull chains. I opted instead, though, for a simple remote control unit.
Sure, I might sound cowardly, but I have enough imagination to envision a time when something fails in the fan app or, as sometimes happens, the fan loses its connection to the app or my network. What if the company making the fan goes out of business and stops updating the software? I’ve owned ceiling fans for as long as 25 years. Can I depend on a small appliance company to support it for the duration?
Same with my high-hat retrofit LED lights. They’re essentially analog, but they work perfectly with my dumb switch. If I want to change the color temperature (I do not; this is not a disco), I slide them out of the housing and push a little switch on the back to the desired light color.
Locking it in
I drew the line at our new front door lock, though. I’d been using Lockly smart locks for years, and I had grown used to unlocking my front door deadbolt with a tap of my iPhone 16 Pro Max. Even my wife agreed that it was hard to give up. But the Lockly is an ugly device. We found Schlage Encode that fit the bill and, while it doesn’t integrate with Google Home (why should it?🤦♂️), it does at least work with Apple HomeKit.
The lock is now working well but Apple Home has been alerting me that my Apple Home hardware needs an update, but it never tells me which piece of hardware, just that we’re in danger of losing access to some of our Apple Home-controlled devices if we don’t upgrade. When I start the process, it always tells me that my wife’s device also needs an update, or she’ll also lose access. In other words, I need hers and my phone together, and I must upgrade them all at once. I think.
The other area where I decided I wanted to brave the smart upgrade was with my porch light. I planned to replace the whole thing and considered a smart porch light fixture, but I had my reservations. It would cost $30 more and might also tie me into aging technology that I might be forced to upgrade in five years.
Lighting the way
Instead, I chose a Cync smart lightbulb (one of our best smart lights) from GE. While it does not have Matter support, which is supposed to make smart home installation and management easy (I’ve yet to see any evidence of this), it does have the benefit of a “Made for Google Home” label, which means it should be easy to add it to my Smart Home and then control it.
Ha!
With my new fixture installation complete, I screwed in the light bulb, turned on the switch, and then opened Google Home to add the light as a new device. Naturally, no matter how close or how long I held my phone near the bulb, it never found it.
Eventually, I was forced to install GE’s Cync software, create an account, find the smart light, and then manually connect the smart bulb to my Google account.
Next, I wanted to set up a simple routine in Google Home so that the light would turn on at sunset and off at sunrise.
This required two separate routines, and only one would let me choose a sun phase. So one routine is set to sunset, and the other is an arbitrary time when I think the sun will be above the horizon.
Even after I did this, I had no easy way to tell if the routines were working or running. I had to dig back into the controls to set each one to run. After that, the routine worked and, so far, has held.
Not so smart
This, of course, is my point. I went through all that just for one single smart light. I could tie it to Alexa+, which, in my experience, will let you talk to it to create more complex routines, but the reality is that now most of my smart home tech is split between Google Home and Apple HomeKit.
I’m certain that with enough time and patience, I could fill my home with a lot more smart home technology, but I know that too much of it will be on different platforms, the devices won’t talk to each other, and much of it will, for reasons I can’t explain, sometimes stop working.
The dream of a fully automated home is still just that, and my real-world solution, for now, is to leave it behind and take the small, smart home and automation wins where I can.
I’m still waiting for my new living room furniture. It will not be smart.
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lance.ulanoff@futurenet.com (Lance Ulanoff)
