Smart Home 2026: Smart Light Switches and Automations ⭐

In Smart Home-ish in 2026 ⭐, I wrote about the first steps I took to upgrade our condo in Pennsylvania with some basic smart home capabilities. This involved taking stock of what we had, basically several Sonos speakers and some Hue smart lights, and updating and organizing everything in Apple Home and Google Home, and then getting a few new smart home gadgets like two more Hue lights for the porch and garage and four smart plugs for the indoors.

It’s been a while, and though the basics are the same, Apple Home and Google Home have both benefitted from some long-needed smart home standardization, most obviously via the Matter protocol. (With the caveat that the owners of each smart home ecosystem still keep key products sealed off from rivals. For example, our Apple HomePod speakers are unreachable outside of Apple Home. And our Blink cameras only work with Amazon.)

But smart home tech is still complicated and unreliable, especially when you move beyond the basics. I’ve experienced this problem repeatedly in the past month, and pretty much across the board with the products mentioned above and, most recently, with a few new products and other changes. This reminded me of why I scaled back my smart home ambitions when we had the big house. And that more sophisticated smart home setups may never be simple enough for mainstream users.

I will elaborate.

? First tests automating the lights

In late November and early December, I bought a set of four Matter-compatible smart plugs and two Philips Hue Essential smart LED A19 smart light bulbs so that I could automate the outside and interior lighting, respectively, when we’re away. This is useful because we’re often gone for months at a time and the lighting will help give the appearance of someone being home.

I don’t really need all four lights to come on inside the place, but it was a set, and so I plugged each into a receptacle and configured each plug in the Apple Home and Google Home apps. Three are in the living room and attached to (dumb) lamps. And the fourth is in the kitchen, though I had it attached to the Christmas tree lights over the holidays.

I had to pull out a ladder to install the outside lights, but there are just two of them, one over the front door and one over the garage, and both are controlled via the same light switch just inside the front door. So that was easy enough, as was adding them to Apple and Google.

That was the end of the simplicity. Everything I’ve done since, or tried to do, has been a struggle.

? The basics

When we’re in PA, we don’t (and won’t) use the smart plugs. Instead, we just use the lamps normally. When we’re away, I basically just need to make sure the (dumb) lamps are each turned on. Then, I can control them using either Home app manually, and turning each on and off that way is obvious enough, if tedious. Obviously, some automation is required.

Ditto for the outdoor lights. The on/off switch inside the front door is obvious enough when we’re here, but some automation is needed for when we’re not.

How difficult could that be?

Well, for starters, using automation pretty much requires me to pick one ecosystem. Otherwise, automations created in one might fight those created in another. So I settled on Apple, mostly because it’s more compatible with all my devices. The HomePods (in both PA and Mexico) and Sonos speakers (PA only) don’t work with Google Home. And I do love AirPlay.

The Apple Home app has three top-level buttons in its toolbar, the middle of which is Automation. Apple had already created an automation called “When the Last Person Leaves Home” that pauses the audio playback on the HomePods when, well, you know. So I looked at how that was put together and then created a first automation attempt called Outside Lights On that turned on those lights at sunset. Simple.

Well, not exactly. I also want to turn off those lights after some reasonable amount of time or perhaps at sunrise. And there is a Turn Off option in the automation that’s set to Never by default. But the times you can choose only range from “After 1 minute” to “After four hours.” And that is not long enough. It’s not clear why this can’t go longer, but the sun sets at 4:30 pm in the winter here. I don’t want the lights shutting off at 8:30 pm.

The obvious workaround was to create a second automation called Outside Lights Off that does the opposite. Automations in Apple Home are triggered by events, and the only one that makes sense for this use case is called “A Time of Day Occurs.” So I could choose sunrise there or just specify some time, like midnight; I landed on 11:00 pm because having the lights on all night seems excessive and that’s a normal bedtime. From there, I chose the two outdoor lights, which was obvious enough. But the final screen in this wizard wasn’t so obvious: I could see that the time and lights were selected, but I wanted the lights off, not on. So I had to select each and use an on-screen slider to change the brightness of each to off.

After testing the automations, it occurred to me that I could just add the smart plugs to each, so that the inside lamps (and, for the season, the Christmas tree lights) also turned on and off using the same schedule. So I did that and renamed them to Lights On and Lights Off. Keep it simple.

We were in the Boston area for a family Christmas get-together in early December over a long weekend, and that seemed like an ideal time to see whether the automations I created were working correctly. It mostly worked. The issue is that the outdoor Hue lights support color, and I had configured them in the Hue app to use a holiday themed scene that rotated the colors. But each time the automations turned off those lights, they would lose the scene and come back on using some plain white(ish) light instead.

The interaction between Hue and Apple Home (and Google Home) with regard to these colored scenes is something I may never figure out. But in the end, I decided not to worry about it. We’ll only use scenes like that during the holidays, and we’re home then. When we’re away, the default light color, warmth, and brightness are fine. As I write this, the holidays are over, so we’re back to the normal (non-colored) lights.

That said, I had purchased a set of smart light switches for the panel next to the front door, one of which controls those outside lights. And I was hoping that (or at least curious whether) the switch might keep power going to the lights and preserve the color settings between uses. So that was the next step.

? Smart light switches

After researching smart light switches, I settled on a set of three Kasa Matter Smart Light Switches. This was cheaper than going with a Lutron or whatever other switch, and because I don’t need dimming capabilities, I saved there as well. They’re just on/off switches. I also bought a screwless plate to cover them. And then I waited: I don’t know enough about electricity to do this replacement myself, but my brother in law has worked in lighting his entire adult life and he knows what he’s doing. I had discussed this with him ahead of buying anything, and he’d have time to install it all over the holidays.

And this past Monday, he did so. We futzed around for a while to figure out which breakers controlled the electricity in that part of the condo, and then he pulled the old switches out, tested the wires to make sure the power was really cut everywhere, and methodically replaced each in turn with one of the Kasa switches.

I had previously determined that we had a neutral wire in there, which those switches require. And because they’re not dimmers, they don’t take up as much space. So there was a bundle of wires to deal with, but the whole thing packed back into the wall box more easily than expected. It was all done in under an hour.

The Kasa switches each have a dim circle of light on them so you can find them in the dark. You can disable that in the Kasa app if desired, and I initially did so before discussing it with my wife, who vetoed that decision. This is obvious in hindsight, but those light circles are on/visible when the switch if off, and disabled when it’s on. But I initially thought the opposite, so that was a little confusing. Anyway, they work fine.

What they don’t do is keep the power flowing when set to off, and so the outside lights will always reset when they turn off. As noted, that’s OK. But I guess I was expecting that not to be the case.

The bigger issue is that none of the new switches can be configured in Apple Home (or Google Home). You can add accessories like these switches using  a QR code, or I can get the Matter setup code for each in the Kasa app and try to add them to Apple/Google Home that way. But in each case, it failed, with Apple Home suggesting that the solution would be to power off the switches, and then power them back on and try again.

I haven’t done that yet. And maybe I won’t: I can remotely control the light switches using the Kasa app, and so I can be sure the switch that controls the outdoor lights is on. And that, in turn, will ensure that the Apple Home-based automations I created will keep working.

This isn’t a big deal, but it’s worth pointing out that I had hoped to just use a single app, Apple Home or Google Home, for everything. And while I can mostly do that, I still need the Kasa app to control the smart switches (until/unless I do reset the power and get them configured in Apple Home). Likewise, I still need the Hue app to control the colors and/or scenes used by the Hue smart lights. (It’s not just the two discussed above, we have three color lights around the TV as well.) I’m trying to keep this as simple as possible, but that’s not how smart home tech seems to work.

?‍? The human factor

There are other complexities of a less technical nature, too. One thing I learned during my initial foray into smart home technology back in the house was that if it didn’t just work, my wife would reject it out of hand. She expects to walk into a room, flip whatever switch, and have a light turn on or off, or whatever. This is reasonable. And so something like the smart switches next to the front door “works” for her because the automations won’t be used when we’re not home, I can remotely turn them on and off while we’re away, and if she taps one of them, the expected occurs.

But we have a neighbor who brings in our mail and packages when we’re away. And when I was testing the automations during that long weekend trip to Boston, she brought in a package and texted Stephanie because there were multiple lights on, including the outside lights, and she wanted to make sure we knew about that. We did, of course, I was testing the lights.

Now we have to at least mention to her what it is we’re doing to her before we go away again. And when we are away, as we will be starting next Friday, I will need to check in from time to time to make sure our neighbor didn’t turn off the switch controlling the outside lights. I would prefer it not to matter: If the switch delivered power in the off position, the automations would just work. But it’s not the end of the world because I can control the switch remotely. It’s just another thing I will have to think about sometimes.

⏩ Still just baby steps

We’ll be in Mexico for about four months, or through sometime in early May, and while nothing I did here was in any way dramatic, it’s a nice step up from not having any automations at all. We have a security system at the condo in PA that we also only use when we’re away, and a neighbor who’s always paying attention whenever a delivery truck or other vehicle enters our shared area (which is apparently called a quad because there are four units). And now we have those inside and outside light automations. Which I believe will work.

As with the NASes I got last year, a big part of this is about just letting time go by to see what happens. And that means I will be babysitting our automations with the Apple Home app while we’re away, just checking in to make sure that the lights are on when it’s the right time for that. But that’s the drill. I think it’s OK.

There’s also Mexico to consider. Right now, the smart home tech there is about as minimal as it can get, basically just a single Blink camera that’s pointed away from our balcony so we can see the sun setting and a Google Pixel Tablet used as a smart display in the kitchen. We don’t need a smart lock given the building security, and we have neighbors we trust there as well, which is ideal. Smart lights are not necessary. But maybe I can use Google Home there and Apple Home in PA. I’ll see whether that makes sense, though we do have an Apple TV and two HomePod Mini speakers there. I don’t know.

What I do know is that the Google TV Streamer has a slightly more complete UI for smart home control than does the Apple TV. All I can access on the TV here in PA is Scenes, which I’m not using. Automations are not available.

And when we get back to Pennsylvania in May, we have a lot more work to do, most of which is not smart home related. It never ends.