The Essentials: Adventures In Building an IoT Home (Premium)

Technology allows us to be wonderfully lazy; it can make tasks that are a pain in the butt simpler and also allows me to knock the thermostat up two degrees at 6:30 a.m. so that when I crawl out of bed, the experience is a little less jarring. But, there are downfalls to this technology, and in my effort to make my home ‘smarter,’ I have also come across a few issues.

The good news about the IoT segment is that no single vendor is dominating the arena, the bad news is that there are still far too many platforms that can result in you having a system of fragmented services. For examples, Philips has Hue hub, Google’s Nest has it’s own service, Apple has HomeKit, and the list goes on and on depending on the vendor.

During the past three years or so, I have been slowly adding devices into my house to automate or make my life a little bit easier (note that sometimes this is the opposite as IoT devices can be a huge annoyance when they do not work correctly). These devices include a Nest Thermostat, two Nest Protects, ten iHome control smart plugs, Sonos speakers, Phillips Hue lights and a wall timer for outdoor lights; I manage all of these devices with an Amazon Echo and occasionally iOS.

I have my house organized into two ‘zones.’ These zones are artificial and help me keep track of the devices in my house which I refer to as my Office and Everything Else. In my Office, I have Phillips Hue lights and iHome plugs for the studio lights, controlled by an Echo Dot.

Before every podcast, I say “Alexa, studio lights on” and magically, six LED panels come to life which is much easier than manually turning on all the lights every day. The overhead lights are Phillips Hue and are also controlled via the Echo and work just as well too; every morning I walk into my Office and say “Alexa, turn Office on” and my lights and fan all turn on.

What I learned setting up my office is that buying IoT light bulbs may not be the best idea as they lock you into a specific vendor. Because of this, I started buying smart plugs and using them for other lamps in my house; the plugs are typically less expensive, and you can use any bulb you want which gives you more flexibility in lighting options.

When it comes to building out your IoT home, there are several things to consider. As I noted at the start of this post, there are many different platforms for IoT and none seem to be completely universal. My recommendation is to stick to the bigger brands of IoT devices as most of these products will support several platforms which makes integrating all the experiences easier.

You will also need to figure out what type of device you want to be your control point, for me, this was an Echo. For others, this could be iOS or another brand but it’s critical figure this out first so that when shopping for your connected device you will know that they work with your control point.

I’d like to highlight that Hue lights are great but you get locked into only using those light bulbs; you also need their lovely hub which resets itself about once a week. If you go with smart plugs, you don’t need a hub and they are much more reliable at dealing with power outages as they don’t need a ‘hub’ to operate.

If you have Sonos speakers in your house, what I have done is plug an Echo dot into a Play 5, this makes the Echo voice response play through every speaker in my house and it is wonderful for music as well. I can simply tell Alexa to play some random music (or specifically something from Spotify) and it fills the house with tunes.

What I have learned when building out my IoT home is that never go with the super cheap stuff and that compatibility is key. The initial plugs that I bought didn’t work with anything other than their own app which was a huge mistake. Also, power outages take longer to recover from, for my entire house to ‘reboot’ after the power flicks, is about 10 minutes.

But, when everything is working together in harmony, and more often than not it is, it really does make your life simpler. Being able to turn on or off lights with your voice when you walk into a room or closing the garage door while laying in bed is a simple convenience that improves your life just enough to make it worth the hassle of connecting everything to your router.

It takes more planning than most realize when building out a network of connected devices. If you do plan do start adding these things into your home, I strongly recommend you decided on your control point first, and then look at devices. If you start with devices, you may end up with a disjointed experience and lose a bit of the magic that is IoT.