The midwit home

> Hauling your body across the room just to flip a switch is absurd.

Maybe this is a sign of getting old, but I never got why this is such a hassle. Light switches are within reach when you enter a room. Once you're inside, you rarely have to touch them again until you exit. On the rare ocasion that I do, maybe it's also a good time to stretch my legs, take a bathroom break, or get a snack.

Is that such a major inconvenience that we have to overengineer solutions using expensive and complicated ecosystems of gadgets and software?

Maybe I'm in the minority with this line of thinking on this forum, but I never got the smart home appeal. I want devices that I can control directly, not those that will interpret or anticipate what I want to do and, more than likely, cause frustration rather than satisfaction. The switch is the ubiquitous and perfect mechanism of control, especially if it's directly wired to a simple state machine, and not layers of indirection and "protocols". I wish more devices used dumb switches, not less.

Don't get me started on the motion sensing lights TFA mentions. I curse the times I've entered a public bathroom that has these, only for the light to go off at the most inopportune moment. Don't want to use a physical switch because of sanitation? That's fine, but cheap and low-power LED lights exist for them to be always on during your service hours. You won't save much having the light turn off, and potentially annoy your customers.

The light switch in our primary bedroom is, as you describe, within reach when you enter the room. It controls a switched outlet near the bed that has a lamp plugged into it. When it comes time to turn out the light to go to sleep, you have two non-ideal choices: get up from bed to turn the lamp off using the switch near the door, or stay in bed and turn the lamp off manually, meaning the next time you operate the wall switch the lamp won't turn on (unless you remembered to turn the lamp back on in the morning).

43 years old and it's never been a problem I've wanted a new solution to. Don't think I ever will. I remember deriding those clap-on, clap-off devices when I was a kid. Same deal here.

Ah, it sounds like you need smart switches then. :)

In my case I just have two lights. The ceiling one is controlled by a switch near the door, and the lamp is controlled by a switch on its cord. I use either depending on what I'm doing.

I have a lamp right next to my bed that I also turn on as part of my going to bed routine, so that I turn off the room light, get in bed, and still have light.

This is a lot cheaper than a home automation system.

To be fair, remote controlled lights can be genuinely useful. The reason the Clapper got popular with the elderly is because people with mobility problems have a hard time reaching switches. In those cases it solves an important problem. I wouldn't mind using it myself, except I think the clapping would be annoying, especially if it misinterprets and doesn't work. So I'm not opposed to eventually using one of the remote controlled lights or plugs the article mentions, but I thankfully have no need for it yet.

If you get even older you may reach the point where getting out of bed is something you'd only like to do once a day. Hopefully these doodads will be more reliable by then.

The only reason I have smartbulbs in my house (and not all of my bulbs are smartbulbs) is because I like adjusting them to be orange/red in the evening to signal to my body that it's almost bedtime, and white/blue in the morning to signal to my body that it's time to get up. It really makes a big difference for my quality of sleep, especially in the winter.

1. Enter bedroom

2. Turn on primary light

3. Walk to bedside lamp and turn it on

4. Walk back to primary light and turn it off

5. Walk back to bed and climb in

6. Turn off beside lamp.

It's not _the worst_, but it is toil.

On the bright side, it's a few more steps on your pedometer.

We may be in the minority, you're certainly not alone. I prefer physical, tactile controls, especially for my home and appliances.

I think smart lights may be the equivalent of an Arduino blink-the-LED sketch. Humans like a little bit of control (over your environment/technology) for its own sake.

And have it simulate sunrise in the morning. Starts at low power red at 6am and over 1 hour gradually increases to max power white. It does wonders to my family's morning routine in winter.

3-way switches are the best solution here. Switch the bedside lamp on from the main switch by the door, and then off again from a second switch at the bedside. Many stairways are like this: you can control the lights from the switches at the bottom or the top of the stairs.

Speaking of getting old, I've set up a lot of home automation stuff for elderly folks who have to deal with limited mobility. Sometimes getting up and down a few extra times really is a big deal, if possible at all.

One of my clients carries an echo dot with a battery pack with her when she's in her back yard, gardening. She mostly uses it for music, but the ability to drop in/phone call if she falls an can't get up has been a real benefit to her peace of mind.

FYI for the interested, and I admit a data point of one, but tp-link's Kasa stuff have been the most reliable of the smart switches, plugs, and bulbs that I've tried. Never once had an unexpected desync with any of it.

> Light switches are within reach when you enter a room.

For multi-entry rooms (many rooms that aren't bedrooms or bathrooms, and even occasionally bedrooms and bathrooms) this is often true of less than all the entrances to the room.

> Once you're inside, you rarely have to touch them again until you exit.

Not all that true if you are in a room with substantial natural light across the day/night transition.

> Don't get me started on the motion sensing lights TFA mentions. I curse the times I've entered a public bathroom that has these, only for the light to go off at the most inopportune moment. Don't want to use a physical switch because of sanitation? That's fine, but cheap and low-power LED lights exist for them to be always on during your service hours. You won't save much having the light turn off, and potentially annoy your customers.

Motion sensing lights with sensors designed to track motion outside of the stalls and a short timer exist specifically to "annoy your customers". Or. more specifically, they exist to discourage activities that involve spending an extended time in the stalls, whether it is various uncouth activities or merely employee malingering. Obviously, that also has adverse impacts on people doing normal bathroom activities that happen to take longer than average times, but that's a tradeoff the people employing these systems have decided is worthwhile.

It is not about energy savings, so arguing against it as unnecessary for energy savings misses the point.

For me, "remote control" is by far the least useful part of my home assistant setup - I have smart switches and use the physical switches most of the time to control the lights if I just want to switch them on/off eg as I enter/exit a room. The useful things (to me) come from integrating several different devices together - for example:

- If I've been out (defined by my phone's wifi connection or alarm arming state) and then come home and turn on the light nearest my front door, all the lights in my house will turn on (at a predefined brightness level according to time of day)

- When I start a TV show/movie/etc on the TV (but only in the evening), the lights in the room where the TV is will dim. If I pause, they get a bit brighter. Switch the TV off and they get fully bright.

- If I'm watching TV or listening to music and get a phone call, the TV/music automatically pauses

- When I leave the house, all the house lights get switched off automatically in case I forgot to switch any off (again based on phone wifi connection and/or alarm arming state - my alarm state is one-way so HA can't control the alarm, only the other way around)

- If someone leaves the bathroom light on for too long, it will automatically switch off

- In the morning, the lights in my bedroom dim up very gradually to help me wake up (with timing and whether it happens linked to my calendar so it happens later at weekends or during school holidays when I don't need to help with the school run)

- I get a notification on my phone when my washing machine/tumble drier are done which means I don't forget to unload/reload them

I also use HA to unify energy sensors (which are then sent into a Victoria Metrics instance) to monitor the energy usage of various things in my house - this has been pretty helpful to identify where I should prioritise trying to save energy.

All of this is done locally/without cloud services and I think I've probably just scratched the surface of what's possible so far - eg I don't have my heating/AC/blinds/curtains integrated into HA so far and I also plan to investigate whether I could usefully adjust the "wake-up time" in my HA setup depending on traffic/public transport status.

All of these things are of course possible manually and my guiding principle has always been that if the HA instance isn't running then nothing should stop working - but the automations do make life a lot more pleasant.

It is possible to work these steps into your routine.

1. Enter bedroom 2. Turn on primary light 3. Do getting ready for bed activities. 4. Turn on lamp when convenient 5. Use bathroom 6. Turn off main lights 7. Get in bed and turn off the lamp.

Keep in mind, this thread is in reference to a story relayed by the GP whereby an elderly woman lost control of her own lights and wanted to go back to manual switches...

This was solved in the 90s. The actual lightswitch can be mounted in a wireless remote that sockets into the switch plate by the door. You just take the switch with you to the bedside table. In the morning when you leave the room you socket it back into the switch plate.

And automobile!

This was solved probably around 1880: 3-way switches

I thought this until my parents bought an expensive and fancy house. There are dozens of light switches spread all over the walls of the large living areas plus individual lamps and it's a chore to walk around and switch them all off every night or when you leave the house. I can see why automation is attractive for that, and I can see why home automation companies would target owners of fancy houses since they have the most money.

I blame the designers though. The fine grained control is completely unnecessary. If each room had only one circuit for all the lights in the room, controlled by switches at each doorway, that would also fix the problem.

My stairway/upstairs lights are on a 4-way switch. I’ve never researched it but presumably one could build out a 5-way or 6-way switch by adding more switches wired the “middle” way. I’m sure there’s a term for the two wire switch in the middle but I’m no electrician.

got a write-up of it someplace?

The music quiet when phone call thing is particularly attractive. I think I have most of the pieces of it here. HomeAssistant, Owntone, airplay (shairport-sync) speakers, a phone running the HA client.

Unfortunately no write-up. But to get music to pause when the phone rings I use the Spotify integration and HA companion app. It's a pretty simple automation - it has one trigger when "Phone state" changes to "ringing", one condition that Spotify is playing, and one action which sets Spotify to paused.

I think the "ringing" state provided by the companion app only works on Android, not iOS though.

OwnTone has an HA integration so I would expect you can do something similar with that.

Sure, I can see how automation would be useful in that case. If it ever becomes a problem I need to solve, I'll consider fancy gadgets to help me, but jumping into a complex solution to a nonexistent problem doesn't make sense to me.

I reckon that most of these deployments are done because the owner is a tech geek and enjoys tinkering, and not because of necessity. Which is fine as well, whatever floats your boat.

Presently loathing an iphone rather than hating an android so i guess I’m out of luck.

HA Owntone integration works very well as does shairport-sync & its mqtt interface. Owntone also does Spotify.

Thanks for your thoughts btw.

For feature readers: there is a project [1] for Home Assistant that use VictoriaMetrics as long term storage of your Home Assistant monitoring data.

1. https://github.com/fuslwusl/homeassistant-addon-victoriametr...

The same cost to get an electrician out to wire in one 3-way switch paid for an apartment of smart (plug-in) outlets for me. And since it’s a rental, I would not have been allowed to actually add the 3-way switch.

Hey, different strokes for different folks. You do you!

Have you seen a room wired with a second lightswitch specifically for the bedside? I'd be interested to know if anyone's done this.