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All smart home is great to you and you family until author maintain it. What happend when you have to leave for a month or for some reason unable to maintaint it ?

My experience is that beyond some stack complexity level simple power outage render open source solutions to the point my intervention was required. Additionally this software is full of bugs due to how it is developed.

I had situation when I was on a business trip and one of my hall light went strobe mode :) Turns out there was a bug and race condition was triggered because someone activate PIR sensor the same micosecond previous action was turning light off (NodeRed)

Wife went crazy, called me to turn this madness off :)

Home is smart when users can handle it without you in any daily scenarios. Otherwise it is just our fun/hobby not real solid solution :)




That's really what keeps me off smart homes in general, I don't want to fiddle with it. I do see some of the value, but mostly I don't see it as proving enough benefits to justify that added complexity. My dad likes to dabble with smart home devices, and some of it is really good, and some is just junk. For three months he could adjust heating, because a server in Norway was down, and apparently not monitored.

I recently bought a new house, and while a lot of modernization is required, I'll still be excluding all IoT and smart home devices/features, and I've given up on wireless for most things as well, there will be a plethora of ethernet jacks.


Thank you for sharing your experience, without any personal experience I always thought that the issue with these is essentially that of "maintenance", in a ideal/perfect setup, there should be something like a by-pass switch to allow manual operation of the lights/devices, but I don't think this is possible at all without modifying heavily the electric circuitry of the house.


Manual fallback is must have. Unfortunatelly not all solutions are design that way. It is my No. 1 option I check.




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