My Smart Home Mistakes

On the whole, my smart home is something I am quite pleased with. However, there have certainly been some lessons learned whilst building it.

Requiring a Phone

To anyone who already has a smart home, this may be obvious. But to anyone starting out, it may not be so obvious. Especially when phone control is often touted as one of the big advantages of a smart home.

The mistake I made initially was buying smart light bulbs, rather than (or at least, without) smart light switches. The problem with smart bulbs, is they need to have power even when not lit.

If someone were to try controlling them off at the wall - the way they have been turning lights on and off their whole life - you’ll end up with a bulb that is disconnected from your network.

In the best case senario, trying to turn a lit bulb off, this will work. The bulb will turn off. However, you won’t be able to switch it back on again until the switch is switched back.

The even worse situation is if the bulb is unlit, but the switch is on (i.e, you’ve switched it off using your smart home), and someone tries to switch it on with the wall switch. In this situation, the unfortunate user actually kills power to the bulb, meaning it now can’t be switched on from the smart home. However, the bulb doesn’t light up as expected. The annoyed user then switches it back on and the bulb will either resume it’s last state (still off) or some will light up whenever they receive power. If you’re lucky enough to be in the second category, well done: you’ve now got an expensive dumb light bulb.

The solution I came up with for this initially was a piece of duct tape over the switch so it couldn’t be switched off. The result, every time a light needed to be toggled, you had to find your phone, open home assistant, find the right light and turn it on.

The Solution

The solution is actually remarkably simple. Smart switches rather than smart bulbs. Whilst RGB might look cool - you probably don’t need it. What you really want 90% of the time is the ability to turn lights on and off. That is exactly what smart switches do. If you really do want smart bulbs - to change colours or whatever - you still probably want a smart switch who’s relay can be controlled separately from the button you push. With this, you can ensure the relay stays on at all times, but use the touch event on the button to toggle the lit state of the smart bulb.

I use the Sonoff TX Switches in every room, flashed with ESPHome.

💡 Tip

Get the 3 button variants, even if you don’t need to control 3 circuits. It’s handy to have the extra buttons to control things like lamps or even your TV.

Forgetting About Sleep

We are on an electricity plan that has different rates every half hour. On occasions, the cost of electricity pops into the negative. This is normally because there is an excess of electricity on the grid. On these occasions, our smart home turns everything on. That sounds great, and is great, until you’re woken up early in the morning by your bedroom lights coming on, your vaccum’s starting, the TV turning on and so on.

Needless to say, I only made this mistake once. This was probably the point at which my smart home’s Wife Approval Factor (WAF) was at its lowest.

The Solution

Don’t do this. I ended up with some time constraints in the automation that prevent it from turning on anything in the bedroom if it’s between certain times. It also prevents loud things turning on during these times.

Requiring Home Assistant

This one may be slightly misleading. Home assistant does a lot of things to make our home smart, and these things obviously don’t work if it’s down for any reason. However, like any system, it does occasionally require maintenance. Whether this is a restart after an update or a bad configuration down to me tinkering, there are times that home assistant is down.

My wife has an amazing ability to try and use Home Assistant at those moments that it’s unavailable.

The Solution

Make as many things as possible work without Home Assistant. A home assistant automation probably isn’t necessary to switch a light on when you push a light switch. ESPHome (and probably most other firmware) has it’s own automations. So, when you push the button on the light switch, ESPHome can toggle the appropriate relay to turn on a light.

Automation Without Overrides

This one covers a lot of things. But, for instance, let’s say that you have an automation that turns on lights when motion is detected in a room. Because you’ve learned from my second mistake, it doesn’t turn on your bedroom lights when you normally sleep - even if it detects movement. However, there are times when you’re sleeping outside of normal hours, so add a way to turn them off.

Similarly, perhaps you have your lights dim when you start watching TV. That’s great if you’re the only one in the room, or everyone is watching, but it’s annoying if you’re in a room with someone else who isn’t watching.

The Solution

Home Assistant automations are actually entities that can be acted upon like any other. You can have toggle switches on your dashboards that turn off automations.

💡 Tip

Add an automation that triggers at midnight to turn your automations back on. This way you don’t have to remember to turn them back on again manually.

💡 Tip 2

The auto entities card below will show any automations that have been run in the last 3 minutes, making it easy to disable them

type: custom:auto-entities
card:
  type: entities
  title: Automations run in the last 3 minutes
filter:
  template: |
    {% set mins = 3 %}
    {%- for state in states.automation -%}
      {% set last = as_timestamp(state.attributes.last_triggered) %}
      {% set current = as_timestamp(now()) - (mins*60) %}
      {%- if (last != None) and last > current -%}
        {{state.entity_id}}
      {% endif %}
    {%- endfor -%}