I’ve been using SmartThings for home automation for about 6 months now and figured it’s worth getting some of my thoughts down.
I’ll start in this post with what I’ve got set up:
5 GE Link LED bulbs in my family room. I actually needed to get an updated firmware for these to work, so I put in a support ticket on a Saturday after noon and got a response saying the firmware was updated in less than 10 minutes. I was impressed enough with their support to remember all that.
When I started going down the home automation path I was thinking about what I had done with X-10 many years ago and expected outlet switches to be the way to go. It turns out that a $15 LED bulb is cheaper than a $40 outlet switch.
I originally had them set to come on at sunset, but that became kind of annoying because it was still light out, so now we just turn them on with the app. Still easier than turning on 5 lights individually, and I can turn them off from my bed.
My bedroom lamps on some Z-Wave outlet switches. It’s been extremely nice to come upstairs to a lit room; the placement of outlets and switches in our bedroom made it annoying to turn on lights when we got into the bedroom. But I also have to open the app to turn off the lights, which can be annoying. (I’m hoping the iOS 8 widget will smooth this process)
A water sensor in my basement. I’m paranoid about water down there and this gives me peace of mind. I also moved it to my bathroom after doing some plumbing so that I knew I wouldn’t walk into a flood zone some morning.
A smoke/carbon monoxide sensor, also for peace of mind and if my family is out and there were an emergency I could get the fire department over ASAP (assuming that the internet didn’t go out first).
A window sensor in my daughter’s room so that my wife and I can figure out if we left it open without having to wake her.
2 super cheap IP cameras – again, great for checking on a toddler without waking her. The second one is deployed to watch the front door, mostly so I can see what the dogs are barking at while I’m in the basement. When baby #2 comes in October that one will get moved to childcare duties as well
Finally, SmartThings can host applications, so I’ve installed SmartTiles (née ActiON Desktop) as a simple way for house guests like my mother-in-law to turn stuff off and on:
The thing I like about this hobby (and it’s totally a hobby) is that it can be iterative and cumulative. When I want to play around with it, I can start adding new things and integrating them. Then, when I don’t have the energy to mess around with it, I can let it coast in its current configuration for a while until I’m game to playing with it again.
What I want to focus on next is providing more physical access (switches and buttons) so that I don’t have to use the app (and so that house guests don’t need a web interface).
