For my last house, I had spent years on smart home automation, I had a binder that contained clear instructions I wrote for everything, and receipts for every upgrade I ever made on the home, warranty docs, QR codes to download smart home apps to control the devices, plot maps, floor plans, a 1-page list of repairmen for everything- you name it. I made short YouTube videos for everything like turning the water on/off, hose bib and sprinkler shutoffs, device pairing, etc. I put dozens of hours into documenting my home, and felt a sense of accomplishment that I was doing a “warm handoff” of the home.
The new owner sold the home after two years. From the listing photos she had ripped out most of the smart home stuff and had crappily remodeled (painting river stone hearth, etc). YouTube showed zero hits on it he videos I made. I sincerely doubt that she even bothered to look at the binder I handed over.
I will never put that amount of effort into documenting a home again. I know what I’ve done and I keep just enough docs around for my own purposes.
Home automation is for me exactly the same as designer kitchen or designer day room.
Yeah it was great for the previous owner but it sucks for me as I have different tastes and needs.
I am going to rip it all off and do what I want.
But in reality I just don’t buy anything that is advertised “one of a kind” because I know it will be more of a hassle to deal with it even if it looks cool.
For me cool looking fancy stuff does not add value but rather lowers the value because I know I will have to rip it all of which is just more work. I also rather buy apartment/home with some default IKEA kitchen because I know then it will be super easy to rip it out and replace with what I want. Where most of the time I think I would just stick with that default IKEA depending on how long I plan to own the place.
I put in a bunch of Caseta smart switches. They are indistinguishable from normal light switches without any smarts, but if I want to, I can also control them via local network. It's nice to go to bed and turn off the entire house with one button. Lights turn off automatically when we all leave.
The thermostat is an ecobee, which is a pretty polished IoT device but I'm frustrated i couldn't get something _more_ local. It speaks homekit so I can do a number of actions entirely locally, and if the internet is down it still works, but I do wish it were more self-contained. So again, if I sell or get angry at technology and chuck my HomeAssistant Pi out the window, the thermostat will just work as a thermostat.
Likewise, my blinds are motorized--but they have a working remote paired directly to them. It's incredibly convenient to raise the blinds in the morning for some sunshine automatically and close them after sunset, but they'd work perfectly well without a smart home.
If you purchased my house, you probably wouldn't even know to rip out the "smart home" components because they fail over to just being normal components.
It is not particularly hard to make this method of operation happen, although it admittedly requires a budget above "dirt cheap."
The new(ish) Caseta paddle switches are pretty indistinguishable visually from normal paddle switches, and operating them is natural even though they don't stay toggled up and down. If that's the sum total of my concession to "these switches are smart", I can't say I care.
I love the Caseta paddle switches. Even more that (strangely belatedly) they introduced the three/four way 'dummies' (each three/four way needs a smart switch, and the dummies can tell it about the state change, and reflect it, but they can't/don't talk to the 'hub').
The kind of switches described are rocker switches with a small led to indicate state. In-person they provide every feature of a toggle switch, while also having a remote state change capability.
> The kind of switches described are rocker switches with a small led to indicate state.
Also, in most applications, a big LED to indicate state. Often installed on the ceiling in a central location where it's easy to see from any point in the room.
Home automation is a mystery to me. I have a coffee maker I can program to turn on in the morning, some ring cams for deterrence, and an automatic thermostat. I feel like everything else is overkill.
Also starting and maintaining a fire in the wood stove is something I enjoy.
Big use cases can be overkill, but I like to take on the small things as automation projects. Easy one - if everyone has left my house for a time, turn off all the lights. If we have left but the dog is home and the sun sets, turn on a few lights for her (my dog has a wifi collar). If I arrive home after dark and open the garage door, turn on the mudroom lights so I don't walk in to a dark house, then turn it back off 10 minutes later when I forget. I've left town before and had to let my parents in my house, and it was nice to be able to let them in without a key, and see that it was them on a camera. Then there are the fun ones, like setting the lights or closing blinds when I start a movie.
I'm glad you enjoy maintaining a wood stove. I like asking my house to turn things on and off when my hands are full, or automating my bad habits and forgetfulness away.
It is and it isn't. It's definitely on the "you don't need it" side of the scale, but if done thoughtfully it can make everyday life just a bit easier.
Some of my favourite automations:
1. Whenever someone arrives home and it's started to get dark outside, automatically turn the hallway lights on if they're off
2. When turning off the TV in the lounge, and it's dark outside, and the lights are dimmed, bring them up to 100% warm white so you can see where you're going
3. Motion sensors in the hallway and landing to turn the lights on when they detect motion at night.
Do I NEED any of these? Of course not. But I like having them.
Talking about preferences I hate motion sensor lights I usually rather to walk in dark and get my eyes used to darkness. I still turn on lights when I get to bathroom or I get a glass of water in the end but somehow it feels better if I turn it on at the destination.
Other thing is I hade all kinds of status LEDs - it is just insane with the bright ones. I know it is nice for quick troubleshooting during the day to know if the internet is on or not - but in the middle of the night they should be lowest brightness on all appliances or turned off. But not all vendors provide the option.
> Talking about preferences I hate motion sensor lights I usually rather to walk in dark and get my eyes used to darkness. I still turn on lights when I get to bathroom or I get a glass of water in the end but somehow it feels better if I turn it on at the destination.
I agree, it'd be super annoying if it turned the lights on full power. I had a motion sensor light in my old apartment. It was part of a Hue system and it would turn on a single bulb in the hall or bathroom (can't remember which) to the very lowest dimness level if someone was walking to the bathroom at night.
I use electrical tape to tape over bright LEDs, especially ones in the bedroom. The light generally will still be visible and you can add layers to get the brightness you desire. The tape also comes in many colors so you can match the device you are fixing.
I love the status lights on Caseta switches, there's no 'ambience' to them, you can see it's on, but even in a dark room it's not obtrusive, not even remotely (it's like a barely lit off white LED, and I do mean barely).
On my office desk with my computer setup, I have a pair of Vanatoo Transparent Zero speakers, which had a bright blue obnoxious LED that was way over the top... until I looked in the manual for some other reason and discovered you could actually hold one of the rear switches and turn a knob to dial the intensity all the way down, or off. I love that.
I have six can lights in my living room, 2 x 3 layout.
My partner has a corner desk and works from home 3 days/week. I also have a backlight "rope light" behind the TV.
During the day, when she's working in that space, the lights are 100% intensity daylight white, and the backlight a cool turquoise. At sunset the lights go to about 70% warm white.
Automations are also hooked up to my Harmony (I really hope someone dives in to this space, but I don't hold up hopes - there are a couple of options, but right now no-one seems interested in picking up from Logitech unless you're going to the ultra heavy, and ugly, last I checked, offerings from Creston, etc.), such that if you turn on the TV, then it turns off the front row of lights (parallel to the TV wall) so there's no reflection, and the second row, which is just behind the couch back, goes down to about 10-15%, slightly warmer still, giving a movie theater vibe. And the backlight on the TV turns off. I debated the Hue accessory to match color to HDMI output, but I think that seems like more of a distraction than an aesthetic.
Lights. In my living room I have two spotlings over book cases, a bright center light, two standing lamps and a light illuminating my electric piano. I touch one button and they all come on together. Another cycles through modes (bright, movie, reading). I have the same type of setup in the kitchen. On my upstairs landing, the light illuminates dimly of someone triggers the movement detector (so they don't get blinded at 4am). In my bathroom if I walk in at night, a single spotlight illuminates very dimly directly over the "throne", but if i tap the light switch all spotlights light up.
So in some rooms I have many separate lights operating together, and in my bathroom I have a one of 6 spotlights (which are all in the same electric circuit) operating independently.
As for "hassle", i probably spent a week setting up Home Assistant on a raspberry pi a few years ago and haven't touched it since, apart from replacing switch batteries whenever they get low.
I'm never going back.
Having said that, I'm not interested in automating anything else. Maybe home heating. I have an old 2 zone system, so adding smart thermostats to my radiators would provide completely independent control from every room in the house, whereas right now I just have a dumb-dumb "upstairs" / "downstairs" setup.
> Also starting and maintaining a fire in the wood stove is something I enjoy.
Yes, definitely. There's something satisfying about it.
I've spent the last few weeks splitting logs - some by hand, most with a hydraulic splitter - and it's been so peaceful and good having fires on the back deck the last few weeks. It's not super cold here (Texas) but just chilly enough to make it fun.
Speaking of overkill, you might reconsider the Ring cams to be replaced with something more local. Public-facing Amazon data ingestion isn't the most polite home decor.
> Also starting and maintaining a fire in the wood stove is something I enjoy
Funny that, I'm sitting on my boat and it's soooo pretty, but one thing I really won't miss about moving off it is maintaining the fire in the stove. And especially the temperature when it burns out or dies out...
I feel the exact same way about car modifications. I know you spent a fortune on those rims and you love them but I don't. Now it's a liability to have to replace them.
The last time I bought a house I paid about $600 for a pre-purchase inspection and the inspector basically prepared such a binder for me. A few hundred pages of photos and suggested fixes for not only all the defects she found, but also suggested ongoing maintenance schedules and routines for all the systems of the house, photos of the water shutoff, etc. and even a thumb drive with a few videos she shot and a sewer scope. I was updating the binder as I added/changed stuff but ultimately figured it's probably easier to just a hire another inspection when it's time to sell. There were no smart devices, though, that may have added a premium.
A few years ago, I wrote the following comment in another thread here on HN. It is germane to this thread:
Back in the early 90s — on a recommendation from a realtor who was a close friend of my brother's — I hired an inspector who was close to retirement. He worked with his wife who served as his assistant tasked with, in essence, taking dictation of her husband's near constant commentary as he conducted an incredibly thorough inspection. Every outlet tested for proper ground, every nook and cranny looked at, wood moisture content, HVAC pitot readings, masonry, roof … just a super-duper detailed inspection that took about 6 hours to complete.
At the end of the inspection, he summed up by saying the house was good and that he had no qualms recommending the house.
Two days later, he stopped by with a three-ring binder that contained his inspection report. It first contained a summary that concisely covered the positive and few negative aspects of the house. Then there was a section about the history of the house: the year built, the name of the builder, changes in the neighborhood since it had been built, earthquakes it had gone through, flood events in the area, and so on. It also included the manufacturer names of things such as the windows, door hardware, etc.
The third section was lengthy, covering the precise state of the electrical, plumbing, structural, envelope, etc, and included all the notes his wife had taken during the course of the inspection. It included a sub-section with warnings about certain materials that likely contained asbestos and would need to be dealt with if we ever did remodeling.
Finally, the largest section was what he called a "maintenance work order" arranged as a schedule for the ongoing, recurring upkeep of the house but beginning with things he thought needed to be done immediately, replacement of the circuit breaker box, splash blocks under each outdoor faucet, tuck-pointing some of the chimney's brickwork, etc. And then his estimates as to when he thought systems might need to be replaced, the water heater, furnace, roofing, etc. As I discovered when the water heater burst, his estimates were pretty much spot-on. Over time, I added notes as we upgraded things, added low-voltage wiring, and remodeled the basement.
Nine years later, when I sold the house, the buyer was elated to have this owner's manual and I am fairly certain that the book was key to a very fast sale of the house which we did without a realtor.
As I look back on it now, I realize that inspection was perhaps the best $350 I have ever spent.
When we bought our next house, the inspection took about an hour and produced a few page report, most of it boilerplate.
You got a good inspector. Most give you a binder that’s mostly boilerplate legalese how the inspector does nothing, a few photos, and a list of very obvious defects that usually aren’t much.
After some length of time, there’s a reasonable likelihood that the anode rod has corroded to the threaded boss and attempting to replace will condemn the water heater. (If you’re not DIY, it’s also a $200+ trip charge and a $75 marked-up part.)
When we bought this place, the water heater was old and I decided it was a better plan to just leave it alone and replace when it leaked. (There was nothing valuable on the mechanical room floor.) A year later, we had a new heater and 15 years after that, it’s about due again.
I can definitely understand the “do nothing” approach, particularly if the rod is 10+ years in situ.
> Though I wonder why they didn’t recommend preventative maintenance on the water heater- if it was electric, why not replace the sacrificial anode?
I tried to do that on my old water heater, and it's probably good I gave up. I couldn't get that nut to budge (even after buying some pipe to make a long breaker bar), and I think there's was a good chance I might have wreaked it if I did.
The thing was small, and we eventually just replaced it with a larger one that has the benefit of being new with a much more reliable control unit.
Mine was a fifteen minute jobby where the guy glanced down the crawlspace and took a picture of the (flat) roof with a selfie stick. Basically a box ticking exercise for getting a mortgage. That said, it was a fairly new house (late 2000's) and not lived in much due to the owner finding a new partner pretty quickly and living there mosts of the time.
For a fair part of the population, especially those using at home a crappy PC crashing twice a week, 'smart home stuff' means that some bug or backdoor may lead them into a mess: lock them out, let an intruder in, over/under-heat for weeks while they are out of town... They don't want any part of this.
Even as a tech-savvy person,'smart home stuff' does totally means bugs and backdoors everywhere if you just plug and play things.
Of course there are available possibilities to take somehow full control of your automation with some Home Assistant or the likes but honestly, it’s really not that easy if you are not already a tinkerer.
Great automation will also require more work and knowledge. As soon as you start playing with heating or venting, you are doing work that could require some background. It’s something to buy a nice smart thermostat, but it’s something else to understand where you may place it, how you may program it …
It’s an interesting topic for those who like to tinker, but it’s very understandable that most people aren’t going to invest their time on it.
I don't think I could bring myself to extensive home automation installed by a previous owner, especially if there are cameras in the system. I have no way to know they're not maintaining access somehow without re-installing / re-flashing everything and linking to "fresh" cloud accounts.
At the same time any home automation needs to be able to be cloud and vendor independent.
It begins with registering the property an independent email address for any accounts used during setups before taking them offline. Easy to manage for future tenant or sale.
Gear is more able to be cloud independent or be made cloud independent, leaving a greater chance to leave at most a local wifi network and local appliance with touch screen (pi) that can peacefully operate without the internet, plugged in and hung on a wall like any other appliance in a mechanical room of the home.
The more off the shelf parts can be, the greater the chance of it surviving.
You have a wishlist not something that you can buy. What's available now is a mix of random open and closed source hardware and software that requires a lot of time and HA to tie it all together
For myself HA has been the best thing since, like, forever. I personally love it, if not obvious.
The hardware part is still complicated because of this pull-down stuff and just a mix of randomness as everyone is developing all kinds of things to do "stuff". HA ties it together enough to be useful and more. Just this morning I was thinking it's really cool I can try to correlate my waking with CO2/humidity levels and what happens when the furnace runs? For the curious, having furnace run helps everything
Exactly. What little smart home stuff I have that is still operating smartly will be ripped out when I sell, or just left to rot.
It definitely changes my decisions on further purchases. No smart switches that don’t revert to being dumb if the smart stuff fails (as it always does).
I have a home-built system for monitoring the levels in our water tanks (we live on rain water).
Of course some people get by with a simple float indicator, but why would I do that when I could be using high accuracy hydrostatic sensors, esp32, influxdb, grafana, spring, keycloak and mysql running in AWS?
I certainly wouldn't want to be getting support calls if we were to ever sell, so I would probably remove it myself if that happened.
Managing storage and more can still be work and worth doing as a second step since most of the time it’s worth doing the setup over at least one more time.
Nah, sell them a monthly subscription for the cloud service. Or put ads in their dashboard and alerts. (Or both. Then work out how to sell their water usage data to 700 "partner" 3rd parties...)
Smart home automation isn't for everyone. Many relatives see it as that weird hobby I have and don't see much of the value. (And I agree given the time I spend tinkering.) Even I would likely rip out most of the inherited smart home stuff in order to replace it or at least flash opensource firmware on it. Another important point I learned is that everything should work as a dumb home when the wifi, gateways, HomeAssisant or some sensors are down.
There is also the option that she did read the binder and decided "No way am I going to deal with all the crap" and had all the "smarts" yanked out an replaced with something that requires much less maintenance. That would have been my reaction.
While I sympathize with your position, it is entirely possible that a person inheriting the smart home might benefit. I'm reminded of wmsmith's anecdote [0] two months ago about a smart home de-ghosting of a widow who couldn't drive the smart homing.
The good news with smart bulbs is that they're easy to unsmart. Just unscrew them and put your dumb bulb back in.
I replaced almost all my bulbs with smart bulbs, and then got annoyed having to ask Google to turn on the lights all the time. My solution? Even more technology of course. I found these little buttons that fit neatly over my existing switches so it not only keeps the switch in the correct position but makes it just as easy to turn off/on as before. But now they're dimmable and remotely controllable which is a plus in my books. Also my apartment is dumb and barely has a single built-in light so it's just lamps everywhere; without smart bulbs I'd probably have to flick a million switches or lamp-ropes.
To be fair, smart homes absolutely suck. Especially about four or five years removed, or, in this case, an owner change.
This is like writing code vs figuring out someone else's code. Those are totally different things, and code is a bunch of readily accessible text files. Smart homes? Some device in the attic, some device in the basement, some wiring that goes who knows where, where does all this info go? What was the model of this shit? Oh it has NOTHING on the front because serial numbers are gauche.
I have a (mostly) DYI smart-home, I mean, DYI as in "a Frankenstein of vendors and devices glued together by Zigbee, MQTT and Home Assistant", with some hard-deps on it in a couple of rooms and that gave me some bad nights when thinking about "what if I sell the home one day?" but reading the threads here I feel reassured: they will probably just rip it away and put some low-tech solution and call it a day.
most of them, totally. The issue is that in some room there is no way to control directly the power to the bulbs, they are always on and you can switch them off only from central electric panel (because they are all zigbee bulbs)
I have trouble finding the right code for my hardware projects and I check things into github including schematics, gerbers and code. then come back 3 years later and realize yeah I forgot to push that last actual commit. now I imagine someone else debugging that.
But ... you might have to tear open a wall. Climb a ladder. Unscrew a plate cover and hope you can see it. Oh crap, now you have to remove it from the wall. Might as well tear out everything.
And this is on the hardware side. Software? Did the former owner have passwords and everything tied to HIS ACCOUNT? Does he hand over some account? What personal info is in that former account. NOPE, big nope.
The problem with smart home is this:
- if the company wants to make money on the software, it will go with lock-in or fake open, which is what it is today. And that is a miserable failure
- if the company wants to make money on the hardware, the software is a cost so it sucks.
The solution is PROBABLY that the hardware vendors can only implement protocols, but CANNOT implement middleware. It can basically only provide information and take commands.
The a software company makes the hub. It cannot have any interest in any particular devices, it cannot "partner" with a hardware firm.
But of course that's only one part of the problem, with security and the central account. The software hub would need to provide some way to "move" an account with transparency on historical data reset.
But the industry is so effing far from this. Maybe SmartThings was close, but they got acquired by Samsung and now push Samsung products and basically discontinued everything pre-Samsung. They highlight that there's no good money in pure middleware.
The device vendors have to come together and do some sort of independent software company that they all can't meddle in. But then there's still soft pressure to only support devices in the "in group", so that still doesn't work.
Really, this is an operating system + driver problem. The central core is the OS, and the devices are "drivers". A consumer OS can be priced at about $50 tops, and it needs about 10 million people a year buying it. THen it gets the critical mass.
The other option is that some group close to the core of Linux take this on as the next big project. This could have important implications for Linux desktop, because it would create a Linux-aligned group that all the device manufacturers have to prioritize, and that provides the outreach to them also supporting device drivers for the Linux OS.
I mean, that is a BIG undertaking. It would take someone like Torvalds with talent, hard work, and some form of charisma (not necessarily Torvalds' brand)
I mean that sucks, but… the thing I did when I bought my house, is rip out all the perfectly nice brand new carpeting. I don’t want carpeting, I want hardwood. Not everybody is into smart devices.
When I was new to house shopping my wife and I found this house we loved. It had intricate patterns of mixed woods in the hardwood, French doors closing off a super nice dining room with wainscotting, and this super cool mid century river stone fireplace.
We had made all these plans to renovate the upstairs which was all that was needed. Then the day of the sale came, we got massively outbid, it sold at a silly price. We figured whoever bought it loved it equally.
Nope, a year later it was back on the market. The dining room had been torn out to make the ground floor open plan, the hardwood was completely replaced with cheap grey vinyl floor boards, and the fireplace was replaced with a small dining area.
It was painful to look at was clearly a well finished house turned into a cheap looking listing on AirBnB.
The binder I wish I had would have schematics for the structure and systems, maintenance records, checklists, vendor receipts, and manuals. No such luck.
There's a pretty enormous gulf between what you did and nothing (also it sound like you went a bit wild with home automation). I think you'd be doing your due diligence by just providing a list of products littered around the house, without also spending dozens of hours.
I love the idea, but yeah that outcome was predictable. Home automation is very much still in the hobby stage and most people simply don't care about it.
I own my home & am into automation - but I don't plan on living in this house forever. As such I try to only install things that can be easily reversed when I move out, e.g wireless instead of hardwired smart switches - devices that piggyback on 'normal' home things. Otherwise I'm just giving the next owners thousands of dollars of things they don't want & unnecessary headaches.
You’re (presumably) an informed tech geek based on hanging out here - so your view makes sense. I do not believe that’s the case for the general not tech-informed public though. When I think of friends and family not in tech most of their view seems to be “neat, would love it, don’t want to put in any effort to make it work, so I’m fine without”
The only thing I was handing over when I sold my last house was a Nest and a few Hue lights. The Nest was easy to factory reset, and the Hue stuff was operational without being plugged into a router, so hopefully they were able to continue with it as it was, and get it linked up to the phone app if and when they cared to do so.
She did herself and the next owners a favor by ripping out the smarthome crap.
It's like shag carpet: faddy, kitsch, and high maintenance. Smarthome stuff in particular is just so overkill. I don't want to overengineer my home. I don't want apps and QR codes and documentation just to water my garden or operate the lights. I'm not a nerd who enjoys tinkering with this stuff. I have shit to do. I want my hose to work like a hose, my washing machine like a washing machine, etc. And that's the case for most people.
Playing with smarthome gadgets is a fun niche hobby, but it's not a hobby most people want.
I agree that smart home stuff can be excessive however I really like the Hue white ambiance bulbs. I live in Vancouver and so in the winter it gets dark early - and the days are often gloomy too. I can have cool. Lighting from morning to evening and then have it get warmer as it gets towards the evening. That alone is worth it for me.
The new owner sold the home after two years. From the listing photos she had ripped out most of the smart home stuff and had crappily remodeled (painting river stone hearth, etc). YouTube showed zero hits on it he videos I made. I sincerely doubt that she even bothered to look at the binder I handed over.
I will never put that amount of effort into documenting a home again. I know what I’ve done and I keep just enough docs around for my own purposes.