Tag Archives: smart home

smart home gadgets

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This article from MIT says this year’s CES (Consumer Electronics…what? anyway it’s the big annual consumer electronics expo in Las Vegas) was all about voice-controlled home gadgets. I’m excited about certain things. I like the idea of a video doorbell and smoke detectors that can text me if they sense something while I am not home, for example.

The main concern people seem to have is privacy. While that concerns me a little, I am more concerned about repair and replacement of all this stuff as it wears out. There are a lot of little things broken in my house right now. I know how to fix some of them. I know who to call on others, although it can be a royal pain to get them to actually show up, diagnose the problem, and then follow up until it fixed. My “home warranty”, which is really just a contract with a network of independent repair people, helps a little to get them to be responsive and follow up, but dealing with them is still a pain. While I am fixing things, other things are going to break. Things like keyholes and doorbells last at least 20 years with minor repairs, and traditional dumb appliances last 10 or so years with minor repairs. It is better to just accept that things break at a certain rate and deal with it than to get frustrated, although they do seem to have a tendency to break all at once when I have other challenges going on in my family and work life. I know there is absolutely nothing special about me and everyone deals with the same issues, except the super rich who can just pay someone else to worry about it.

Now, when we add all the smart technology to the dumb things in our home, they are still going to have most of the same dumb problems they have always had, requiring occasional minor repairs and replacement after 10-20 years. But the added technology is going to need some combination of physical repairs and tech support frequently, and it will probably need to be replaced every 2 or 3 years like any other electronic device. Except now it will be 100 little things breaking and needing replacement in your house. Probably, you will need some kind of service contract for someone to come check and fix things at least monthly.

insurance and smart homes

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According to MIT Technology Review, some insurance companies are giving discounts for smart devices.

Insurers across the U.S. are offering incentives to install one of half a dozen connected devices, ranging from moisture sensors to video doorbells. State Farm offers a discount on your home policy for installing a Canary home security monitor, for example. Liberty Mutual will send you a Nest Protect smoke detector, worth $99, free of charge and cut the cost of fire coverage.

 

Sense what is using electricity in your home

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This is pretty cool – a device that can learn the patterns and measure the electricity use of individual appliances in your home, all just from being plugged into your fuse box.

The company says it can accurately disaggregate 80 percent of home energy use; it can do things like detect a microwave oven through its very specific startup and operating power “signature,” or sense a washing machine thanks in part to subtly increasing demand on the motor as the drum fills with water. As it identifies garage door openers, toasters, microwave ovens, washing machines, heaters, and refrigerators, it displays them on an app as a newsfeed and a series of labeled bubbles.

Sense—founded by speech-recognition veterans whose technology ended up in Samsung’s S-Voice and Apple’s Siri—consists of a box about the size of an eyeglasses case installed inside or next to an electrical service panel. Two inductive current sensors sense current, and two cables power the box and sense voltage. The box does some onboard processing, and then uses Wi-Fi to send data to the cloud for further analysis and aggregation with data from other users to improve its accuracy.