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What’s the Matter with the smart home?
(www.theverge.com)
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this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2023
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As someone who does live in a "fully smart" home, used quite some time to plan it and had to fend of "smarthome" manufacturers like flies aroud a shitcake:
90% of all products on the market are a scam and shouldn't be called smart at all - they are fancy "remotes" either via voice or mobile phone. Nothing about that is smart. That's dumb. It is not more convenient compared to a proper lightswitch if I need to know a long specific voice prompt or take my mobile out of its pocket to switch on a certain light.
What the autor of the article requests is already on the market for decades - KNX/EIB any a few other standards (Modbus, Onewire, etc.) are available for ages, are not depending on one brand and one central component. There is no fucking need to stay within a walled garden but the point is: These systems exist for such a long time that they do not show up as "big introduction" at IFA or CES. They evolve gradually and to stay within German exhibitions are found at the Light and Building rather than the IFA. Because the first one is a builders/electronics exhibitions, the later a multimedia/TV trade fair. The Verge is simply at the wrong place.
To give you an idea of my (actually very common, nothing about it is very special) setup/usecases and what I mean with "smart": KNX does everything that requires switching, all sensors, basically all background work excluding the doorbell (works via LAN) and Fingerprint (works via LAN).
Lights:
The system does recognise people automatically when they enter a room and their positioning in a room. Paired with enviromental data (natural light level in the room, outside light, time of the day, our schedule according to our calenders*) it determines the appropriate level of light based on the human centric lightning concept. Light will be brighter and more blue in the morning (unless I am coming home from nightshifts), darker and more orange in the evening (unless we have a party), very dark if you go to the loo at night. It furthermore recognises your positioning in the room (e.g. when you are in a certain part of the kitchen certain lights go on) or that certain power sockets draw power according to a certain charateristic (e.g. the TV goes on)
Temperature:
The system knows current inside and outside temperature and the expected forecast*. It will heat the rooms accordingly, e.g. will turn down the kids rooms during schooldays but have them back at temperature when school ends. If the system recognises that someone is still in the room for long after school should have started it determines that someone is sick/schools off unexpectedly and temps are adjusted accordingly. In the summer the system shuts the blinds according to the light level to keep the heat out - based on the current position of the sun(e.g. the eastern blinds are lowered in the morning but not the western ones) and outside light levels. It will let enough light in for everyone to work but at the same time keep the heat out.
Air quality:
The system measures the air quality of the rooms and outside air quality&temperature and does ventilate accordingly - or ask us to manually open a window if that doesn't provide sufficient clean air. (But won't do so if the Air quality outside is bad)
Windows/Doors:
All of them have sensors showing their opening status, some if they are properly locked.
Doorbell/Fingerprint:
The Doorbell/Fingerprint system is the only system not on the bus as Video is beyond the scope of what the system can transfer.
Devices/Appliances:
Most things are "dumb" integrated first- we see when the washing machine is done because of the power charateristic, we see if the refrigerator is broken the same way. While we use Home Assistant for additional comfort, it is not really necessary.
Visualisation:
We use both KNX only as well as Home Assistant. But I could change over to openHAB, ioBroker or whatever we want tomorrow.
*: This data has input from external sources.
My point is: This is done without much user input. And by using around 30 different brands. With dumb actors and sensors (blind e.g. are just a "on off" motor, windows are binary contacts, same goes for leakage, etc.) so the components can be exchanged easily. And you don't pay the hefty premium everyone tries to sell you for their "remote controlled blinds" (twice the price for a shitty remote,another useless gateway and Alexa...) and it's far easier to use different brands. And if the blind actuator brand goes bust (way more unlikely compared to a smarthome startup) it will work without a cloud and can be exchanged seamlessly with any other brand.
We are there. But it is not fancy enough for the media.
Would you mind sharing an approximate cost to have that all done?
As we had to redo all wiring anyway (renovation of a 80 y old house) and worked in stages it's a bit difficult to do an estimation. Generally we found KNX is about +15%/+20% to comparable conventional wiring depending on the complexity (conventional wiring is cheaper for simple "one switch one light" situations but gets immensely expensive for more complexity - we found KNX was cheaper for some situations like "four different switches in four different locations all switching different combinations of lights"). In total around 40k € for a large house- that includes rerunning all wires, a few specialities due to age of the house and installation by a master sparky but no programming by them(did that myself - it's not that difficult actually but takes a bit of time to get into).
The KNX wiring in theory could be done by a amateur as it is 24v only, but 240V needs a professional here. If we had done all KNX wiring ourself and let the sparky only do the 240V part (which in retrospect we should have done) we would have actually gotten out cheaper than conventional wiring, but I had no time to do so.
Of course the level of integration we opted for is far beyond what you normally put into a house - it's a hobby more or less and we will not break even in terms of energy savings ever - but as we had to do something anyway why not do it right. Additionally it is heavily geared towards us getting older (e.g. we have motion detection at the ground level beside the bed - this recognises if you get up at night and now switches the bedroom lights on at 5% red so the wife does not wake up and then switches the lights on towards the loo. The whole routine is capable of recognising that someone has fallen or is unable to get off the loo)
It all depends on the brands you choose - as KNX has a huge spectrum of suppliers there is everything from cheap switches that are hardly more expensive than regular ones and top notch switches that cost 500€ each...we went with rather cheap but flexible ones.
A friend did some calculations with normal "off the shelf" smart home stuff like Hue, etc. and was 20% above what we payed for comparable level of integration.
The system environment does have radio based components - but you are right, some things cannot be achieved without deep integration with the house. But yeah, I rented for a long time and while I used radio based systems it is not as good. My hope is that it does get common enough that more and more landlords adopt it,at least for the midrange segment. We do actually provide some limited integration for a small apartment we rent out but currently it's not something people care about tbh and the law here is a bit problematic in that regard, but that's a very local problem.
Actually our building is much older...But as written elsewhere, we had to renew everything anyway. I used Homematic before switching over to KNX (/KNX:RF) and while it was okay for a rental (and can do much more than people think) it's still clunky unless you use HA as an additional layer and you waste a lot on batteries. But still, better than nothing.
We are lucky that we actually have the best renters we could ever imagine but their flat was renovated cabling wise before we bought the object so there was little use of implementing something that would require rewiring AND puts me deep in the "functional liablity and GDPR" hole. But if I ever need to rewire it, it will be done with KNX simply because I can do that myself. German/GDPR law sadly is a bit uninnovative in that regard - I would happily offer my renters fingerprint access but the fact that I then would need to do four different data transfer aggreements is a hard reason to not do it.
When renting out you very soon find out that the law is heavily geared towards big corperations like vonovia and fucks over the smaller landlords whenever possible, sometimes even to the disadvantage of the renter. E.g: I can easily produce heat consumption directly from the heating system for each renter, even can automatically send them this. It can hardly be manipulated and is seen as evidence in other countries.. BUT: As we rent out two apartments I do not fall under the "small landlord clause",even though the smaller one is just a studio. So I need to install a wireless heat measuring system on all radiators and warm water outlets. Now here comes the problem: These measuring devices need to be capable of wireless measurement soon. Funny, as all of them are in the same room...where the heater is. right next to the gateway.
But you need them by law and now I need to put this shit on my renters side costs... almost 25€/month (and that was the cheapest offer by far) per apartment. I rent out for somewhat reasonable prices (well below Mietspiegel), as I rather have friendly renters than max out what I get...but that shit makes me mad. (We "refinanced" it by me taking over smoke detector maintenance so we could keep costs the same)
How did you come to all of these different rules for managing eg the lights? Did you have to program them all manually?
Yes and no. Each component comes with an "app"(basically comparable with a driver for PC hardware) within the programming software that does the setup.
So you don't have to decide what triggers what and some part of the logic behind it - but the app often does most of the work and you do just some fine tuning.
To give you an idea: I decide which switches (I always have regular switches even if the light normally goes on/off automatically) and what detection zones should trigger the light X1. I then link the "Switch Action" to the bus address of the LED controller L1. The LED Controller then gets told what to do with that information. In my case I have two different modes: Normal and Partymode (I use Day/Nightmode for that). In Normal mode the App gets told to interpret a "On" Action as "start HCL" and a "off" as a,well "turn it off,dude". The HCL mode then is started with the HCL Settings according to the time. I can adjust the settings for the HCL mode (e.g. I want it darker in the evening) or I can just use the preset.
Now for party mode the same switch action does not mean "use HCL" as the same light that I want at 1am might be nice if I am on my way to bed but not If my guests need to find the loo or their staff when leaving. So it's now a simple "turn the light on at 100%".
Once that is done you commit the change by programming the module and you're done. (The components always communicate directly without a central module that could fail)
Now the beauty of the system is that you can be as flexible as you like. You want that switch to no longer switch on the lights but rather close the blinds? Sure. Just link it to another address.
To give you another example what the app does itself: The blinds do close according to the sun's elevation. I basically just linked the relevant module addresses to the respective sensors,told the module the size of the blind parts (used for calculating the optimal closure position) and linked it to the "veto object" that is calculated by the home Assistant and send to the bus via IP Gateway (basically a object based on the estimated weather. I live in an area with heavy temperature drops). Everything else is done by the weather sensor - raising or lowering based on temperature and of course wind speed.
Each app can be automatically loaded but you can also load it yourself if working in an offline environment - as they need to be 100% downwards compatible you can always work with your hardware even as long as you have the app. I therefore have them all saved/backuped in case some company might go bust. (In theory you then can still get them through the association but I don't want to rely on that).