What People Want From Smart Homes

Hallie Siegel writes: Despite the energy savings and environmental friendliness that has often been associated with smart home technologies, a recent poll showed that consumers primarily want their homes to optimize for their comfort level and personal preference (45%). Security/Safety and Energy Savings tied in second place (18%). Environmentally friendliness came in at only 11%. Note that the three most voted choices have direct advantages for the user, as opposed to Environmental Friendliness, which is primarily a societal benefit. What would you look for in a smart home?

Comments

Nothing.

[weilawei]

I want my home to be stupid, to not have a telescreen, and to not track me or sell my habits to third parties. ;)

Re:Nothing.

[Anrego]

Yup.

Personally I'd be way more open to this stuff if it didn't want an internet connection.

Ultimately I see very little practical application for any of this anyway. As I said in a previous comment, I played around with home automation "back in the day" and while it's nifty, it doesn't really add a whole lot of value outside of some very specialized use cases.

Re:Nothing.

[TWX]

Fairly simple sensor equipment on the house could help you with those though, and we've been able to send notifications via all manner of methods for years and years, via technology as low-end as 9600 baud TAP gateways through your cell provider worst-case.

You could monitor humidity in known problem areas like near hot water heaters and HVAC condensate drip pans with simple sensors fed by a two-wire solution. You could monitor wind speed and direction, plus temperature and rainfall through an automated weather station that sits on the roof. You could monitor basements and other low places for flooding with simple sensors that could also pack-in CO and fire safety. You could install RFID interrogators at the exterior doors and put RFID tags on your kids' backbacks (or use the ones built in to clothes or shoes or the like) to know when they've passed through the doorway, and you could even compare their RFID tag versus no tag when the doors are opened to know if someone else is entering. You could even use heat sensors to turn off lights in rooms that people have vacated and to turn off multimedia equipment like video projectors when no one is there to watch, if you're really feeling fancy, control the HVAC ducting to stop excessively cooling spaces that no one is using, like spare bedrooms, offices, workshops, dining rooms, kitchens, etc.

None of those features requires an Internet connection to use, though for convenience the ability to notify the owner could be handy. A quick e-mail or text message would be enough for most, and for things like potentially unauthorized entry, a camera picture could help the homeowner avoid false-positives with the alarm company and police.

What I really want a home to do though, is to clean itself. Self-clean the toilets, the sinks, the shower and bathtub, the tile, the carpet, the kitchen, and to be able to lift dust off of things and dispose of it. Do the laundry and sort/fold/hang it. That would be where the usefulness to homeowners comes in, not trinkets to automate processes that already aren't really inconvenient. It might also be convenient if the home recognizes the owner when he or she arrives, and lets them in without needing a key or other 'thing you have' on one's person.

Re:Nothing.

[cayenne8]

Where I really see benefit from external communication would be mostly Boolean data such as whether the kids made it home from school,

You know, more and more I'm glad I grew up in a day before you could so easily be tracked as a kid, and no cell phones, etc.

It made it more fun to be a kid. Sure, I was mischievous, and well, frankly, some of the things we did as kids and teens would likely be categorized as borderline terrorism...but it was a part of growing up. Experimenting and well...just being a kid at the time.

When young, I would leave the house, go play with friends roam mine and the adjacent neighborhood...first on foot, then bike and skateboard. When really young, my Mom's basic rule was to call from a friend's home every couple hours to check in. When older, not really even that. My parents both worked, and I'd come home from school alone or go play with friends. During the summers as a teen...I'd be at home on my own, run with friends, make my own lunches...etc.

It was fun having that independence and I never got into what you would call trouble, no more than just being a boy growing up.

Nowdays...geez, I guess mine (and all my peers at the time) parents would be cited for child neglect.

Ok....now..GET OFF MY LAWN.

;)

Re:Nothing.

[Smerta]

When I lived in Germany I saw quite a few of them. Lawns tend to be smaller and flatter than in the U.S. Also, landscaping services are more expensive, in general, over in Europe. Last thing, and unfortunately I'm being serious, the U.S. is pretty litigious, so companies are hesitant to jump into the market.

I think there are about 10 companies or so making robotic mowers. Could be wrong, but I thought you could get a Husqvarna in the U.S. now. They require a wire to be buried along the perimeter of your yard so the 'bot knows when it needs to stop & turn around.

I';ve always wondered what happens if you lose power at home, and the buried wire no longer emits its signal. Probably a battery backup, and you have to tell the 'bot to run no longer than the battery can last.

Re:Nothing.

[Translation Error]

What I really want a home to do though, is to clean itself. Self-clean the toilets, the sinks, the shower and bathtub, the tile, the carpet, the kitchen, and to be able to lift dust off of things and dispose of it.

But a really smart home will eventually realize the most efficient way to keep the house clean is to eliminate the people and pets in it...

Yup

[Anrego]

Isn't this what we all figured out back in the x10/smarthome days. After you get over the gee-wiz star trek appeal, there's very little that we actually want to automate, and most of those things are already well handled by stand alone devices which benifit very little from integration. My automatic coffee maker and thermostat don't need an internet connection, and having lights come on automatically when you walk in the room is cool and nifty, for about 20 minutes, then it is overcome by the annoyance of the lights turning off all the time because occupancy sensors suck. Sure we can try to make up justifications, and there may be some people who legitimately have a valid use case, but I think this is gonna be home automation fad part 2.

My old x10 gear still makes an appearance around Christmas, and I still use some of it in my bedroom to control the lights and ceiling fan from my bed, but my (at one time) expensive ocelot controller and like a few dozen various bits sit in a box collecting dust.

(Also usual warning that x10 is a terrible system that I wouldn't recommend to an enemy).

Re:Yup

[Dutch Gun]

From the article:

General Electric, in particular, entered smart lighting market with the introduction of GE Link, a smart LED bulb that consumers can remotely control from anywhere in the world and sync with other connected devices.

Wow, really? A bulb you can remotely control from anywhere in the world, huh? And I'll bet the service that let's us do all that will only cost us $9.99 a month, right? What a bargain. I mean, I've always wanted to turn my kitchen light on or off from the grocery store. That's going to be so handy!

Meh. At some point, this phase 2 of the home automation fad will probably boil down to a few practical gizmos that people find useful, and history will simply laugh at our "smart bulbs" for the ridiculous overkill it represents in attempted convenience.

Two Things Only

[jamesl]

I want a home that cooks and cleans. Cooks and cleans. I can take care of the rest.

Re:FOOD

[Anrego]

Ah, the old "smart fridge" fad.

For my use case, this would be impractical, as I tend not to have many "staple" foodstuffs and tend to shop for the meal(s) I intend to make in the near future, and I've usually got a good idea of what's in the fridge.

Back when "fridges with screens that will manage your grocery list for you" was being talked about a lot, some people described situations where it could be helpful, but they all seemed to involve adopting a very rigid protocol around fridge use ("remember to punch in the percentage of ketchup remaining when you are done with it Billy!", to which my response was "screw that shit".

secret passages

[Sri Ramkrishna]

I want a home with secret passage ways.

Re:I am going to live in the dumbest home

[Sri Ramkrishna]

Make sure you also write a manifesto and grow your beard.

Status Updates

[cdu13a]

Pretty much all that I want from a smart home, is the ability to be notified if things break or go wrong when I'm not there.

I couldn't care less about anything else, I just want to know when I need to get my ass home to fix something, or deal with a disaster.

Being able to get a notification as soon as the freezer fails, or the sump pump fails, or the furnace fails would make a big difference in just how shitty your day is going to end up being.

Re:Shitty Website Alert!

[Noah Haders]

dude that's the new style for internet start up sites. stop being old.

I programmed an automation system

[msobkow]

I programmed an automation system for a 1.5 million dollar house a few years back. The owner spent gobs of money running extra wiring from every light, outlet, and socket to the central control circuit panel that ran most of the functionality. They sprang for 4 CAT6 lines to each room, with a fiber drag to supplement "future expansion", all of which ran to a router in the basement (Cisco, no less) and to a PBX system.

After the whiz-bang wore off in a month, the owner really regretted spending close to $150,000 on the automation. In the end, the only thing even his wife really liked was the automated drape controls and the cameras monitoring the property. All the fancy light dimmers and thermostats were more of a pain to use and set up than their analogue counterparts, and the remote was so complex that they didn't use it at all because it was far easier to just walk to the wall controller and use that.

Automation has always been more of a whiz-bang for a select few than a real necessity for anyone. For the most part, having tri-wired switches with switches at each of the two entries to a room is more than adequate for "automation."

The owner's kids absolutely hated the automation -- it was impossible to sneak in late at night without all the lights coming on and alerting Mom and Dad to just how late it was when they got home. :D