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The midwit home

(dynomight.substack.com)
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wmsmith ◴[] No.37860529[source]
While I believe that HA is very cool and many vendors provide valuable solutions, we must consider what happens when we die.

This is just one anecdote, but I believe the problem is more pervasive.

I was called to an elderly lady's home to "un-haunt" the building. See, her husband had recently passed away; he done "all of the cool things" to make the home smart. Unfortunately too smart. The wife could not operate the devices in her own home.

She had the tenacity to handle living in a dark house. All the time; she just gave up on the lights -- she couldn't figure it out and lived like this for an entire year.

She finally called for help when lights started randomly turning on and off. She believed it was the spirit of her late husband, but after some diagnostics, we found some cross-channel noise from a home further down the block. Whenever this neighbor would come home, he would turn on his lights via his home automation. About 75% of the time, it would turn on our lady's lights too. In her bedroom. And the neighbor worked 3rd shift.

I spend the next two days removing all home automation devices and, as she put it, putting in "turn the light on and off again" switches.

When choosing technology -- any technology, it's important to consider the life of that device and the people impacted far in the future.

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jchw ◴[] No.37861097[source]
Of course you can have your cake and eat it too. If you were to throw away the Raspberry Pi in my house that runs home assistant, all of the switches on the wall would continue to work. This is possible by switching in smart switches instead of smart bulbs. For RGB bulb controls, Zigbee pairing can make the operation of the remote controls independent of the hub to some degree, though I'm not 100% confident that those will function properly without the hub since then there's no coordinator (right?)
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1. 1-more ◴[] No.37863002[source]
Yeah I've done meross homekit switches for all of our light switches. There's one that needed a reset (via the button on the outside, easy as cake). I didn't notice for weeks because it works like a switch when you tap it. Switches are the best place to add smarts and they gracefully degrade just fine. This midwit fix involving remote controls to turn on lights STINKS. Hell, our bedroom fan has that just because it's a 2 wire fan and I hate it.