Automations that nearly cost me my marriage

The phrase I’ve heard most from my wife over the years is ‘the house is not a toy.’ And you can’t imagine the fights I’ve had at home over the years because of some automation that didn’t work the right way or some misguided idea. You’re reading these lines for the same reason I write them: we like technology. But at home we’re not always surrounded by people with the same ‘appetite’ for technology as us, and in some cases, resistance to change can be significant, so today I want to tell you about some automations that nearly cost me my marriage. And yes, sometimes the device failed (the fewest times), but other times the problem was a conceptual error or a poorly configured automation.

It’s Been a Long Road

The current state of compatible home automation is a far cry from where everything stood when I first got mixed up in this mess xD. I’ve mentioned it before, but the first Aqara bridge I bought, the m1, wasn’t even compatible with HomeKit at the time—the integration came later via a firmware update… and it wasn’t even as simple as the firmware updating and us just seeing the devices show up in the Home app. No, you had to re-pair them, automations were lost, some devices weren’t compatible… a total mess. Also, the early days of the Home app had nothing to do with the app you see now. The integration with Shortcuts, which now lets us set conditionals and complex automations, didn’t arrive until iOS 13 (a couple of years before writing this post), so functionality was very limited. Imagine, for example, that it wasn’t possible to have a single button turn a bulb on and then off again when pressed a second time! The button would simply turn the bulb on, and if you wanted to turn it off you had to go to the Home app. Back then, some of us started using the Home+ app, which we’ve talked about before and which did allow this kind of conditional logic, even though it always cost a fair bit of money… but we could create conditional automations and link devices together… for example, if the Aqara temperature sensor (the HomeKit-compatible version, not the Xiaomi one, which wasn’t) dropped below X temperature, you couldn’t do anything from the Home app because it simply displayed the temperature coming from the sensor, but it couldn’t actually read it—it didn’t know what temperature it was showing—so you couldn’t automate anything with it… you just had the data as a monitor and little else. However, from Home+ you could actually read that data and act accordingly, so you could turn on the heater via a HomeKit-compatible plug if the Aqara sensor dropped below X degrees. Anyway, as you can probably guess, getting to where we are today hasn’t been easy at all… not for us, and not for the people living under the same roof.

Automation Failure

– The Dwarfs’ Song: As you know, I have 4 kids, each one a little sun. It’s not always easy to coordinate them for everyday tasks like getting up, going to bed, leaving the house, sitting down to eat… so a few months ago I created an automation so that when it’s time to put on jackets, grab backpacks, and put on masks (on weekdays, at 8:45, and only when someone’s home), the lights in the common areas turn off, the lights in their bedrooms (where they usually are before leaving the house) turn off, and quickly turn back on while the dwarfs’ song from Snow White—the one they sing on their way to work in the mine—plays through the HomePods around the house. Pretty cool, right? The problem is that I didn’t tie that automation to a holiday calendar, and one Monday holiday when we didn’t have to get up early, the song started blasting at full volume while the lights in the house turned on and off. Pretty scary when you’re asleep. – Philips Hue device updates: Currently, the Philips Hue app lets you select the time at which the devices in the house will update whenever a firmware update is available. A few versions back it didn’t have this setting, so the lights would update whenever a new firmware version was released. Philips does warn in its app that the bulbs need to be properly connected to power (even if turned off) and that they may flicker during the update process. And sure enough, one night when I was traveling (before COVID I used to travel a lot) some bulbs updated overnight, turning on at 100% brightness and then flickering away in ‘candle’ mode… or at least that’s what my wife told me when she called to yell at me at 4 in the morning. – Delayed Aqara switches: I told you this story recently since it took me a few months (and a lot of money) to fix it… and it’s not even fully fixed, but it has been considerably minimized. The thing is, for a few days the Aqara switches had a delay. I don’t know if it was because I had the original Aqara bridge, the m1, which was getting old… or if I had too many devices connected, or if the problem was that the bridge was set to the China region… but the fact is that when you pressed the switch to turn on the light, a good 5 or 6 seconds could pass, sometimes even more. Imagine the chaos… when someone was about to enter a room, the normal thing is to press the switch as you walk in. In this case, though, you’d find yourself standing in the middle of a dark room. And since the light didn’t turn on, you’d press the switch again, which meant sometimes the first command (turn on) would arrive just as the light turned off again, so you’d press it once more… and the whole time you were standing there in the dark. It really bugged me, and sometimes I’d just ask the voice assistant directly, but to the rest of the household or to guests, it seemed like nothing worked and that ‘this home automation stuff is garbage.’ – 480€ on heating: One Easter break we went to visit the grandparents in Valencia. Once there, we met up with some friends to spend the day together, and the topic of compatible home automation came up, so I positioned myself as the expert and showed them how, from 400km away, I could turn on my house’s boiler, which as you know was one of the first automations I ever set up. And sure enough, the boiler turned on and the house temperature started rising. I turned it off again right away. The thing is, I hadn’t set up any presence or geolocation rule, nor any maximum temperature the house should reach before the boiler shut off… and when I pressed the smart plug powering the boiler again in the Home app, the little wheel just kept spinning and then it showed ‘No Response.’ I didn’t think much of it and figured it was just the app glitching because I was connected over 4G, and that the command had probably gone through fine anyway (because the Home app used to fail like this before too, showing everything as ‘No Response’! You’d have to close the app and reopen it, and sometimes it would work after that and show the real status of everything. Sure enough, the boiler stayed on with no control whatsoever the entire Easter week. When we got back home and walked through the door, we could already tell it was ‘too’ warm in there. That little blunder cost me 480€ in gas. – The police right outside the house: I don’t know if you’ve ever set up the Aqara bridge to act as an alarm. We’ve talked about it here before—we even have a post on how to route the alarm sound through the HomePod so it’s louder—but the fact is, it’s one of the bridge’s main functions. You simply set up one of its sensors, like a door contact or motion sensor, so that once the alarm is in ‘Armed’ mode, it starts going off if the door opens or something moves inside the house. The sound is also customizable—you can choose from several options—and I decided to go with a police siren sound. That would make any burglar run off, damn it. So I created an automation so that the Aqara alarm would arm itself whenever nobody was home. And I went off to work. My wife wasn’t home either, so NOTHING could go wrong. Whenever either of our phones entered the zone, the alarm would disarm. You won’t believe this, but my son came back from school earlier than expected, and my wife’s phone battery died. When they walked into the house, the police siren started blaring, but since the Aqara bridge’s sound isn’t all that loud, they thought a police car was just passing by outside. After a bit it would stop, but then the motion sensor would detect them again as they walked past the entrance, and it would start blaring all over again. My wife says they spent half the morning peering out the window, unable to figure out what was going on and not seeing anything unusual. Another fight. Something similar happened with my kids’ babysitter—I’ll tell you that story another day… but seriously, who doesn’t own an iPhone that I can add to the Home app so I know when someone’s home?!

Failure in the Idea or Concept

– Motion sensor in the bathroom: Fighting with my 4 kids again! It’s very common for them to leave the light on when they go into the bathroom. I don’t know why, but they always leave without turning it off. That switch is a smart Aqara switch with a condition so that when they turn on the light at night because someone gets up to use the bathroom, it only turns on at 40% brightness and then automatically turns off after 5 minutes, since at night they’re sometimes so half-asleep they forget to turn it off. Fine. But what about during the day? I couldn’t turn the light off automatically since sometimes someone goes in to shower or shave or whatever, and that can take more than 5 minutes… so I figured I’d add an Aqara motion sensor so the light would automatically turn off when it detected no movement. That way, when my kids left the bathroom they wouldn’t even have to worry about turning off the light… but if they did turn it off, even better. The thing is, my wife went in to shower in the kids’ bathroom, and when she closed the shower screen, the motion sensor stopped detecting her, so the light turned off. Picture her sticking her arm out over the screen and waving it around so the sensor would detect her (which wasn’t easy, since it’s angled quite low toward the floor and tucked into a corner to avoid triggering whenever someone walks past the bathroom door). And all this while making sure I understood her displeasure and complete disapproval of that automation, in that oh-so-sweet way only women have… she ripped the sensor off—it was stuck on with double-sided tape—the moment she got out of the shower. I’ll say no more. – Resetting the bulb by pressing it 7 times: Hahahaha, I just write the title of this failed automation and I’m already laughing. When I replaced every bulb in the house with the very pricey Philips Hue bulbs, I wanted to make full use of them. I had those ‘Wake up in the savanna’ automations so the lights would play with tones and brightness levels during the wake-up minutes, making waking up feel more natural and pleasant. Also, at night they’d turn on at only 50% brightness in warm tones. A whole showcase of automations and conditions. You already know what happens with a smart bulb when it’s off and the power gets cut from a non-smart switch… it doesn’t turn on because it has no power. If you flip the switch again, it still doesn’t turn on—it has power now, but its state is ‘off,’ so it stays off. You and I get that clearly, but what about the rest of the household or guests? One night, my youngest daughter started crying, so we ran to her room. My wife got ahead of me on the right to be the first one into the room, so the first thing she did, half asleep, was press the switch… and sure enough, the light didn’t turn on—it was simply left without power. She backed up to try the switch again… and nothing. Can you imagine the panic on my face as I fumbled with my Apple Watch trying to find the Home app to turn on the bulb? Back then there wasn’t even a HomePod yet! After flipping the switch several times, the Philips bulb reset itself (its state resets when you flip it on/off quickly 7 times in a row) and the light finally turned on, so my wife rushed to the crib to get our girl. Afterward I tried to play it cool, saying nonsense like ‘Thank goodness she’s fine, what a scare, huh?’ but it didn’t help at all… she snapped back with ‘tomorrow I want all of that out of my house, and I’m not ripping it out right now only because I don’t want to wake up the other kids.’ I’m sure there are plenty of other situations I’ve left out. I haven’t told you about the times everything got completely reconfigured (it used to happen every now and then with the Aqara bridge whenever the firmware updated), or when the power went out for whatever reason and, once it came back, nothing would work until the router got the Wi-Fi back up and the Aqara bridge reconnected with the devices… but you know what, next time your partner complains because the balcony light stayed on all day, or because the blinds didn’t come down automatically to keep the windows from getting dirty even though it was supposed to rain that day, just send them this post.