Not your typical "Let me show you my smart home" video

Today I want to talk to you about some of those videos you can see on YouTube about ‘Let me show you my smart home!’ where they do this sort of Home-tour thing, showing you every device they have and every little gadget lying around. Well, I think it’s a silly idea and I’d never do it, let me tell you why. Heads up, this post is a transcript of the corresponding podcast episode, so the writing style or some repeated expressions might feel a bit odd — don’t hold it against me. So here’s the episode in case you’d rather listen to it: Although it might surprise some of you, my reluctance isn’t about privacy. It’s not that I’m saying «I don’t want to make this kind of video because I don’t want you to see that my bed’s not made, or that I keep junk in the shower of the small bathroom nobody uses.» It’s not about any of that. It’s true that a lot of people don’t want to show their home because you can more or less tell what area you live in, you can see something through the window and so on, and in the end you’ve got a bunch of haters or fanboys or sticky-fingered «friends,» right there at your door, and that can turn into something… not so good. In my case, that’s not it. As you know, when I record my YouTube videos, I film them in my living room, no green screen or anything, you can see the family photos and it doesn’t bother me at all. So the privacy angle doesn’t really apply to me. At least not that kind of privacy. But it is true that when you’re just starting out in home automation, you have a huge appetite for it, so to speak. And it’s true that you buy every gadget you think might be useful in your home. At the beginning, well, you buy every gadget that’s more or less within reach and fits your budget, telling yourself «I’ll figure out what to do with it later» — for now you just stash it away and see what happens. However, once you’ve been into home automation for a good number of years, you reach a certain level of maturity, and there are devices you know you’ll never buy because they don’t solve any real need for you. In my case, for example, I’ve always said from the very beginning, that Aqara presence sensor, the FP2, which had a ton of hype when it came out. Plus, now they’ve released a new version that’s much smaller, and so on. And honestly, it wasn’t even that well made to begin with, but anyway… The thing is, that presence device had to be mounted on the wall at mid-height, and it also had a cable because you had to power it directly from an outlet — so, hideous — it had to sit at mid-height so it could properly detect the whole room, even uglier, meaning you couldn’t hide it anywhere. And in the end, that sensor got huge hype on social media, people were hunting it down everywhere because it also launched at a pretty steep price, €80, although it’s true that nowadays it’s dropped a lot in price, especially the new model, the FP1E… but even so, it’s still expensive for something so ugly (no offense). But the thing is, that device doesn’t solve anything for me! It’s true it has some uses — for example, if you have a pet and, I don’t know, you’ve set up an automation so that when everyone leaves the house, the boiler turns off, right? I don’t care what temperature it is inside, the lights turn off and so on — but of course, if you have a pet, you don’t want the boiler to turn off because you’re not going to leave the poor creature freezing in there, right? Or you don’t want the lights to turn off if you’ve got a dog or something — well, since I don’t have a dog, maybe you do want the lights off, I have no idea — but the point is, if you’ve got those automations to turn off the boiler, say, and you have a motion sensor while your dog is sleeping in the living room, the motion sensor is going to turn off the boiler because the dog isn’t moving, whereas the presence sensor knows it’s still there. Or the classic case of walking into a bathroom that has a motion sensor, at a bar, a restaurant, etc., and if you’re in there for more than X minutes, you end up having to wave your hands around because the light’s turned off. In the end that’s just annoying — we’ve all been there flailing about in the bathroom. With a presence sensor, that doesn’t happen, because the presence sensor knows you’re there even if you’ve fallen asleep sitting on the toilet. It knows you’re there, so the light doesn’t turn off. But in my case, honestly, I’m telling you, it didn’t solve any real need of mine, so I passed on all those presence sensors. Motion sensors, though, I haven’t given up on — I just use them for other things, not for turning on a light. Well, maybe if it’s nighttime, I might turn on the hallway light with that motion sensor. For example, I have one inside a coat closet, and when I open the closet door, it turns on the entryway light where the coat closet is. Sure, for that, I could’ve just used a door-opening sensor, but that would’ve been visible and looked really ugly, whereas the motion sensor inside the closet is hidden, and since it runs on a battery, it was super easy to set up. Like I said, once you’ve been in home automation for a while, you start noticing which things actually work well for you and which ones you end up discarding, so over time you end up with fewer devices, or the ones you keep are devices that solve your actual needs — you don’t end up with a huge range of gadgets just to do stuff. People, when they walk into my house, think you need a PDF user manual to operate the whole place, and no — really, the house just works on its own, as I’ve told you many times before. Don’t expect to walk into my house and see some screen showing the temperature of every room, or something telling you it’s going to rain in the next three minutes like in Formula 1 — no, honestly, I have things that genuinely solve my needs and that work really well for me, but I don’t know. I think people would be a bit disappointed walking into my house, because even though it does a ton of things automatically, even though I have loads of sensors, it’s not a museum house, so to speak. In the Telegram group, for example, there’s a member who automated a sofa — one of those reclining sofas where you’ve got a little button, right? The classic armchair our grandparents used to have has now gone electronic. So you’ve got a little button to recline, to raise the footrest, that little stool thing, whatever you want, right? Well, there’s a member in the Telegram group who set up a Shelly on that sofa so that when he activates «movie mode,» the blinds go down, the sofa reclines, and the TV turns on — great, awesome, I mean, that was a real need for him. There’s another member in the Telegram group who made a sort of little door under the kickboard we have on kitchen cabinets — that big wooden panel we often remove to clean behind — so that when his Conga, his robot vacuum, finished cleaning the house, it would tuck itself away under the kitchen cabinet. Spectacular. Another member has a mural, looks like a painting, but behind it is the air conditioning unit, and when he turns on the AC, the painting lifts up and reveals the unit. And all of that is great, but like I said, I prefer conditional automations over visually spectacular stuff, because in the end I think you get tired of that. I mean, I’ve told you before about the bathroom lights that used to turn blue when I got up in the morning and headed straight to the bathroom — if it was going to rain that day, the light would turn on blue, and that told me to grab an umbrella. I don’t even use that one anymore. Through your watch, your phone, through weather alerts these days with the DANA storms and all that, we already have a pretty clear idea of what the weather’s going to be like, so sure, it could be useful, but in the end it’s one of those things you just stop using. The same thing happens to me with notifications. At first you set up a ton of automations in your house and you realize your life is a lot less predictable than you’d like — I mean, some people would love to have a more organized life, clearer schedules, set meal times, set dinner times, «I get home at this hour» and so on — and all it takes is setting up an automation to turn the lights on, say, at 7pm because you’re supposedly getting home at 7pm, for you to realize that you don’t actually get home at 7pm every day, even though you thought you did. And some days, well, who knows, you need to stop and buy something, pick up a package, pick up the kid, whatever, or you leave work later because they scheduled a last-minute meeting — a ton of things that mean you never get home at exactly 7pm, or at least most days you won’t be home right at 7pm, so automating something to turn on at 7pm doesn’t make much sense. It’s much better to set up a conditional automation instead. The same thing happens with notifications. I don’t know if you remember, a few years back the iPhone didn’t have that notification center, and everyone missed it. Now we get too many notifications, and what people end up doing is filtering them so they arrive as a summary, cutting out anything from apps that are useless to us — some are just ads, others say «hey, it’s been a while since you opened the app, don’t you want to…?» All of that, over time, ends up getting filtered out too. And little by little, like I said, we keep fine-tuning things. There’s a channel called Home Assistant y Domotica Fácil, by Luis del Valle, which I recommend you check out if you use Home Assistant, because you learn a ton — Luis cracks me up with the way he talks and the things he comes up with — and just recently he explained how to see league or Champions League results, even Formula 1 results, in Home Assistant. Look, I think that’s great, I mean, it’s an integration — hell, I’ve done weirder integrations myself, plenty of them. I’ve told you before how I integrated BMW Connect services with Home Assistant so that if the motorcycle was running low on fuel and I needed to fill up before heading to work, it would move my alarm clock 10 minutes earlier. That way, when you hop on the bike already in a bit of a rush to get to work, you don’t go «damn it, it’s almost empty, guess I need to stop at the gas station.» Yeah, that’s an integration you can build as a proof of concept, I’m not saying otherwise, but the same goes for league and Champions League results — I mean, really, are you actually going to go into Home Assistant to check that? Maybe it makes sense if you’ve got a panel at home, an old iPad or something, with all your automations on display, sure, you can see every device you’ve got in the house, but honestly, I think those are things that are fine as a proof of concept, but in my opinion it doesn’t make sense to check league and Champions League results in Home Assistant… No matter how many things you can integrate into Home Assistant, I think you need to focus a bit more on what you actually want to see. This post was meant as a bit of a reflection, precisely because I wanted to emphasize this: you don’t need to have lots of devices, you need to have the right devices — the ones you actually need at home. And sure, they can give you ideas — you might see a fellow enthusiast with an automation that would fit your needs perfectly — but, as we were discussing in the Telegram group the other day, having some sort of repository of other people’s automations to pick and choose from, I think that just leads you into chaos. It leads you to think, «oh, how useful is this? I could set up this automation so that when I leave work and my phone connects to the car’s Bluetooth, it sends my wife a notification telling her how many minutes I’ve got left based on traffic,» and so on. Sure, great, but in the end, if it’s not something you actually need, you’re not going to use it. It’ll just fall into disuse, like a lot of devices around the house that end up with dead batteries and that we eventually stop using, or those gadgets we bought «just in case,» thinking, I don’t know, maybe I’ll integrate it into the door lock so the motion sensor does something-or-other, and we never get around to it. So, like I said, it’s much better to have a very clear sense of your actual needs and buy devices as you need them.