What do you guys think of the idea of smart homes? I could make a basic setup using https://home-assistant.io to control my home temperature and lighting; the tools for doing this are everywhere nowadays and implementation doesn’t seem too horrific anymore.
But setting aside what I “can” do, is this something that I “should” do? How can a person implement this without connecting any devices to the internet?
I think you need to ask yourself a few questions: why do you want this? What things do you want to accomplish and how do you see them improving your life? Is the benefit that you gain worth the expense in money and time that it will take to set these things up?
One of the things I made ‘smart’ early on was my garage door. I live in an older house with a tuck-under garage and I had woken up one too many times to find someone had left the garage door open all night. I was tired of constantly going up and down the stairs at the end of the night to make sure everything was closed up and I just wanted a simple way to check, and to close (or open) the garage door if necessary. After the garage door I decided to put sensors on all the doors. Now I didn’t have to run around checking all the doors after everybody went to bed, or if I wanted to turn the a/c on. Next came lights in high-traffic areas, the ones that would get left on all night if I didn’t follow behind everyone turning them off.
In creating all of these wonderful automations where lights would come on magically whenever someone would enter a room I created another problem. Eventually, something important will fail, and the system will break down, and suddenly you realize you have an implicit, unspoken SLA with your partner. I had created an entire household that seemingly couldn’t figure out what to do with themselves in a darkened room if a careless Home Assistant update broke the whole thing. You have to set realistic expectations for these things because no matter how reliable your setup is, one day something is going to fail and you’re going to need to troubleshoot why.
I have provided only a handful of examples but each one served a need that I had at the time in a very busy household with small children and not enough hours in a day. For me, I believe the benefit I received was worth the expense and the hassle of automating these things in my home. If I had to do it all over again today I believe the benefit would be even greater - or, at least, the hassle would have been far less - everything is so much easier now especially with what Home Assistant has become.
Ultimately, you are the only one who can decide if the expense and effort are worth it for yourself.