the recent LTT video where he runs down all the problems with his house feels so vindicating towards my decision to never do smart control of anything in my house.
I did try a bit of it years ago when it was just getting popular but I quickly realised how many constant little frustrations and frictions it brings. these days it's so much worse because every vendor wants to tie you into their ecosystem, so you end up having to enter into adversarial relationships with products if you want to gain local control over them.
@gsuberland my headmate built a "smart home" network with openhab and a bunch of zigbee things (only zigbee) and although it took her a bit to set it all up, it's been working essentially perfectly for 2.5 years with no interruptions outside of brief power outages and no ongoing maintenance that we frankly have no effort to spare for
very happy with how it works
@gsuberland she used lightbulbs that treat a power cut as a command to toggle state so the lightswitches work even if the entire network is down, so everything that's safety-critical like lighting has a local override
@gsuberland in retrospect and from seeing others talk about it, i think her decision to go "zigbee only, no proprietary tech, no 'hubs'" was probably what made all this shit work reliably enough that i forget it's even there
@gsuberland (when reading this, keep in mind that for me "standing up to flick a light-switch" can be a multi-hour process, so a smart home system isn't just a toy but something that i need on an everyday basis, and it has to be reliable too)
Edited 15d ago
@whitequark yeah for accessibility it's a gamechanger for sure, if it works well.
but yeah, getting it to work well is... oof