The midwit home

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.

Oof! Thank you for sharing that.

This is one of the reasons that smart bulbs and the like are generally bad - you never want a situation where the switch doesn't just act like a switch.

Smart houses should be designed from the perspective of remaining identical to use when the smarts go away. And if there's weird behavior it should all stop if you unplug the hub or controller.

I generally like in-wall smart switches but even there they tend to die faster than dumb switches, so you may be leaving your survivors a bunch of calls to an electrician.

I feel like "if your internet-connected X doesn't do regular internet-less X-things without the internet, its not an X" should be the core axiom of IoT design.

Yep, my goals are largely two-fold:

- "Everything 'smart' must continue to function if the internet is disconnected"

- "Everything 'smart' must fall-back to normal 'dumb' operation if the automation server is not available"