Paul’s Tech Makeover: Baby Steps to a Smarter Home (Premium)

Anyone interested in smart home technologies will immediately run into a long list of issues: Cost, the complexity of dealing with multiple ways of doing the same thing, and the difficulty of retrofitting a traditional home with cloud-connected, smartphone- or voice-controlled devices. It’s hard to know where to start. And how deep you should dive in.

And then there are the people who have to deal with this unfamiliar technology. About a year ago, when we were plotting our move to Pennsylvania, I convinced my wife that part of the home renovation we’d be doing should include some level of smart home integration. But she was worried about the costs and complexity, understandably. So I told her we’d try to be, ahem, smart about it. Move in measured steps.

Flash forward several months and I finally noticed that when my wife walked around the house, turning off lights before she went to bed, she would leave one untouched: A lamp in the living with a Philips Hue smart lightbulb. I asked her about that and she said she was afraid to touch it. That if she turned it off normally, it might stop working. And … that’s on me.

We often joke about “spousal acceptance factor” when it comes to big purchases. But it’s real, and there’s also a familial acceptance factor, if you will, to consider when it comes to adding smart tech to your home. It’s not smart if everyone living there doesn’t understand it. Or won’t use it.

Also, what if you don’t even own your home and can’t rewire the place? Or simply don’t want to pay an electrician, or do the work yourself, to handle more complex in-wall work? You need to understand the options. And then you need to make the right decisions for your own situation.

There are all kinds of ways to start. But I think it helps to think about what, exactly, you can make smart—interior and exterior lights, light switches, power receptacles, thermostats, home security of all kinds, shades, doorbells, and more, plus items on the periphery like TV, music, speakers, and the like—and then go from there.

And then you can choose where to start. Think about what makes sense what doesn’t. Where you can (or should) mix and match. And where you should leave well enough alone.

I like to think of these things in terms of rooms.

Looking at my home office, as an example, I see three lights (a lamp, a table lamp, and a ceiling light), one wall switch (which controls the ceiling light), and sets of power receptacles, and, a control box for the room’s heating.

(That last bit is unique to my home, as we have electric heat and every single room has its own heating control. This is good in some ways, but ponderous and complex. And it makes a single whole-home temperature control system both difficult and expensive since we’d have to replace every single control box in the house. There are at least 16 of them, off the top of my head.)

So what are the options for making just this one room “smart”?

The sheer expense of centralizing each room’s heating control means I’ll be skipping that bit. So that one is easy to eliminate.

When it comes to smart lights, I’ve pretty much decided that those lights where color could make sense will be swapped out for Philips Hue smart lights. And that those which will remain white will not. The three lights in my office will never need to be colorized. So there’s no need to spend as much as $50 per bulb adding Philips Hue color smart lights to my office.

And there’s no real need for automation in here: I keep the shades closed most days and nights. And I turn on the two lamps when I start work each morning, and then I turn them off when I’m done for the day. Neither of which happens at exactly the same time. (I suppose I could disable the power to the computer and the Xbox One every night, but I’m worried about the problems that might cause, and I like them being on, if only in a sleep state, at all times.)

But if I did want to automate those two lamps—by turning them on and then off at set times each day—the cost of doing works out like so. I could use smart lightbulbs—Philips Hue white bulbs are about $12.50 each when bought in packs of four—or smart plugs. I’m testing two elsewhere in my house right now: The Lightstory Mini Wi-Fi Socket is about $13 at Amazon right now, while the Insignia Wi-Fi Smart Plug is a bit more expensive. I’d probably choose Philips if only to simplify things, as we’re using Philips Hue elsewhere in the house.

But I’m not doing any of that, and this room will remain dumb. (And not just because I sit in it all day.) That’s what makes sense to me, at least. And it’s certainly the cheapest solution.

Other rooms are more complex. And each requires its own evaluation.

We’re all very happy with the Hue lights we do have around the home, in the sunroom, in our living room, and in our daughter’s room. And that makes us all more inclined to use them again where it makes sense.

In addition to the weird heating system in our house, we have two AC controls, one for the upstairs and one for downstairs. They’re completely different: The downstairs unit is that old-fashioned and analog circular unit everyone in the United States has seen at some point in their life. And the upstairs control is a touch-screen that is, perhaps, five years old. Replacing them with Nest or similar units would only be a nicety—one place to control the AC only, but not the heat, instead of two—and an expensive one at that. So we’ll probably never upgrade that. At least not anytime soon.

We have exterior lighting needs that are specific to our neighborhood, in which there are no street lights at all. So each home provides its own exterior lights. We have two sets of lights, one over the garage doors and one out back under soffits. And I’ve thought about putting them on timers. But for now, we’ve gone with simpler, solar-powered standalone lights next to the walkways. It’s not super-smart. But it was very inexpensive and requires so real maintenance or management.

I am not a fan of smart home security systems, especially anything that involves a camera. For many reasons—including the fact that we swap homes with other families every summer, and I don’t want them to ever worry about us spying on them—I will almost certainly never install anything that involves video cameras in my house.

As you examine your own smart home needs and wants, one thing you won’t have to worry about all that much is which digital personal assistant to use. All of the top-rated smart home devices will work with Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa, and most work with Apple Siri and HomeKit as well.

Even if you’re not yet sold on voice, the ability of these assistants to tie together different systems is a huge win. And it may just change your mind.

For example, in my living room right now—mostly for experimental reasons—I have three sets of “smart” light solutions, each running on a different system. There’s a Philips Hue smart lightbulb (connected to the wall via a traditional “dumb” plug) and then two “dumb” bulbs in lamps that are connected to the wall via different smart sockets, which are small Wi-Fi-connected go-betweens. (The Insignia Connect Wi-Fi Smart Plug and Lightstory Mini Smart Plug I mentioned earlier.)

Each of these lights can be controlled individually by their respective apps. But by adding them to the Google Home app on my phone and providing each with a unique name and configuring them to be in the same room (as understood by Google Home), I can use Google Assistant—on my phone or via any of the three Google Home speakers in my home—to turn off the lights individually or as a set. It’s as simple as saying, “Hey Google, turn off the living room lights.”

That’s at least pretty smart, I think.