Paul’s Tech Makeover: Here’s to an Even Smarter 2018 (Premium)

In 2017, we moved to Pennsylvania and underwent what I think of as Phase 1 of our smart home makeover. For 2018, I have bigger plans.

To recap, here is what we accomplished—and failed at—from a smart home perspective in 2017:

Lighting and electric. This wasn’t so much “smart home” as it was just “smart”: We spent 10s of thousands of dollars upgrading this aging home’s electrical systems and consolidating and replacing every single light switch and power receptacle.

Cord-cutting. We tried to exist without cable, but the existing cord-cutting services—YouTube TV, PlayStation Vue, and Hulu with Live TV were the ones we tried—just aren’t there yet. Cable TV is cheaper and easier, sorry. A better approach may be to forego traditional TV all-together. Ultimately, TV is still too complicated.

Google Home. We are using Google Home for voice controls. It works great with the equipment we have, but I feel like Amazon Echo would work almost as well. (Google is better for certain things at the moment, as is Amazon, but I think this shifts back and forth as we move forward.)

Mesh networking. Because the new house is almost twice as big as our old house, I knew I was going to have to wire it with Ethernet or try mesh networking. I went the latter route, and the Google Wifi we use has worked flawlessly from day one. Highly recommended.

Entertainment services. Early in the process, I consolidated the many music services we were using down to just one, Spotify Premium, saving hundreds of dollars a year. But I missed Google Play Music, so I signed up for that again for myself.

Whole-house music. Because Sonos is too expensive and too incompatible, we standardized on Google Chromecast, and it works great.

Smart lights. We have Philips Hue smart lights in a few rooms, and we’d like to expand our use of smart lighting this year.

Looking over this list, and looking over my home, I see a few obvious areas for improvement.

Even though we underwent massive light switch consolidation at great expense, there are still too many switches, and some make no sense at all. That is, we have some switches—in the front hall, for example, and in (and right outside of) the garage that we still flip randomly to see what they do.

I’m not spending any more money on switch consolidation: I feel like we have already financed our electrician’s vacation home. But I still want to arrive at something acceptable for certain lights and switches.

For example: My father—a previous owner of the house—installed various floodlights on the outside of the house. Some are useful, like the downward-facing floods under the front and back overhangs on the garage. Some are not: There are security floodlights high up on the house with switches for them scattered around inside.

For the useful floods, I’d like to utilize some kind of timer so that these lights come on at a time—ideally “sunset”—and then likewise turn off at some other time, which could be “when we go to bed” or “sunrise,” I guess. The lights themselves are not smart, beyond being LED lights (another change we made everywhere). So this gets into an interesting discussion of smart lights vs. smart switches.

I think smart switches are the way to go for this scenario. And there are two approaches: You can replace the actual switch in the wall, which would require an electrician or someone knowledgeable about electricity. Or you could use a simpler (but bulkier) external switch that sits on top of the normal switch. I am experimenting with something called theSwitchmate Motion Activated Snap-On Instant Smart Light Switch That Listens, and it looks interesting. I will be writing more about my experiences with it soon.

On a similar vein, we allowed the electrician to install non-Hue light strips on the tops and bottoms of the kitchen cabinets. They work fine, but off of a set of switches. I’d like to replace those switches with smart switches and get them on timers. This lighting is especially good, dimmed, as a kitchen night light.

We just spent a few weeks with YouTube TV again. But the channel selection is weak, and channel navigation off the smartphone—the Apple TV app is still not ready—is useless. But we will look at cord-cutting again this year.

I’m not sold on most smart security products, and I refuse to install cameras in my home. But I could see an external camera or two, and some motion detection capabilities, if only for lighting. We will be looking at that as well.

Beyond this stuff, is there any smart home tech you’d like to see me experiment with in 2018? Let me know. I’m very interested in this being smart in every sense of the word.