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People Think Smart Home Tech is Too Expensive (usatoday.com)
According to new research commissioned by smart home software and hardware brand Wink, 34 percent of Americans believe it would cost $5,000 or more to turn their home into a smart home. An article on USA Today adds: It's a stark contrast from Wink's real world user data: Of the company's 2.7 million users, the average person starts with just 4 smart devices, and spends about $200. The information comes from a report Wink has dubbed their Smart Home Index, released today, in which more than 2,000 U.S. adults were surveyed by a team at Harris Poll. Aside from the cost misconception, a few other key insights rose to the top. For example, the adoption rate disparities across gender lines and income lines have almost disappeared. 43 percent of connected device buyers are now women, and 20 percent of all households with income under $50,000 per year have purchased a connected product. Of those that did purchase a smart home device, energy savings was the most frequently cited reason for doing so, followed by security. Only 33 percent of buyers expressed a desire to monitor or control their homes while away.
or know?
How hard is it to set your thermostat or flip on a light switch?
I realize we can't spent all the extra time and $$ on "connecting" all of our otherwise mundane devices, but seriously, why is this needed?
There's something to be said for simplicity. The more I read about IoT vulnerabilities and clunky smart home devices, the less I want one.
There is elegance in simplicity. If I want to make something smarter, I put it on a timer.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Why do they assume I want this??
Really... When I retire I'd like a log cabin in the middle of nowhere with maybe a wood stove, small 12V PV system to charge some batteries and small electronics. Stream behind the house with fish, etc.
$100 for a light switch so can stay on the couch and turn my light on using my $600 phone.
In any case the exercise of getting up and taking 4 steps to the switch is good for me.
Even discounting device costs, all this shit draws power. At all times.
It's the price of dealing with shitty vendors who don't provide security updates or who go outta business.
Take your smart home and shove it up your ass
Another batch of would-be luddites decrying the inevitable embracing of technology by the masses for all purposes, simple and complex.
It costs you the last shred of privacy you have left in the world. You are paying to be monitored inside your home.
"Smart" homes don't have value to most people. If the value people received from the services were worth the money, people would purchase. People are concerned about the invasive nature of the tech (rightly so), and see any potential cost savings as trivial at best. Turning a dial on the thermostat is not that hard, and it's not like you are going to work on winter days and asking "Did I leave the thermostat 20 degrees off my normal?".
Smart homes are like VR, Apple Watches or Fitbits. A niche market which the majority of people could care less about or simply don't want. That means the cost will remain high, and the value people get won't change much either.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
How hard is it to set your thermostat or flip on a light switch?
Impossible if you aren't standing right next to them. On the other hand it's pretty nice to be able to turn up the thermostat from the airport after you've landed the plane or even do it from the other side of the house without having to get out of bed.
I realize we can't spent all the extra time and $$ on "connecting" all of our otherwise mundane devices, but seriously, why is this needed?
For the same reason we have so many other devices and bits of technology in our home. Why do you "need" a smartphone when you have a perfectly good desktop PC? Same reason. Convenience, comfort, and in some cases fun.
Why do they assume I want this??
They don't. But they know for a fact that many people do. If you aren't one of them nobody is going to lose any sleep over that. Chose what works for you and let others chose what works for them.
Really... When I retire I'd like a log cabin in the middle of nowhere with maybe a wood stove, small 12V PV system to charge some batteries and small electronics. Stream behind the house with fish, etc.
A lovely notion though I suspect you'll find it less pleasant in reality then you imagine. Living out in the middle of nowhere with minimal technology tends to be a surprising amount of work.
Welcome to economics. The devices have security vulnerabilities and are expensive for what you get in return.
Remove Americans and replace the residents with another nationality. Ha Ha!!!!!!!
I got to the chocolate box before you, that's why the hard ones have teeth marks.
A lot of that is fragmentation. I enjoy reading up on home automation and building up a few things (don't have much, but I figure I can build up over time), and the one overriding factor is just how every single company feels the need to develop their technology above all else. No standard communication technology, no standard API for interacting with the device, no compatibility with other systems. You end up with many many "smart bridges" that only do one thing and have to chain them together to get anything done.
There's just a complete disconnect between manufacturers and users when it comes to value as well. A good recent example: for the same price, I can get a Lutron smart bridge, which only supports Lutron's smart lights and blinds, or I can grab a Wink which supports Lutron's stuff plus Z-Wave, ZigBee, BLE and Thread. There's half a dozen smart hubs on the market with the same kind of problem. Even the more generalist hubs like Vera or SmartThings tend to miss at least one thing which means you'd have to have many of them to fully cover everything (namely, Lutron's stuff, because they decided they'd have their own proprietary communication method). Philips Hue poses a similar issue: it's proprietary and doesn't integrate unless you also grab their hub.
Basically, they all want to lock you into their system, even though no given system has everything you want. On top of that, they make extension and customization really limited, often preventing integration (Lutron sells a telnet enabled bridge, but only to professional installers, otherwise it's fully locked down). I really shouldn't have to run Home Assistant on my home server to make Wink not suck, but if I just stick with Wink's app (no PC app, no website), the automation basically amounts to a dumb timer and making switches do something.
Smart homes should feel smart, almost magical. Right now you just end up with 10 bloody plastic boxes which all do one thing not all that well and rarely want to work together properly, and if you lose internet... tough luck (next to no smart devices support local control). If you want to do all the stuff they show in ads, you better be ready to start hacking, because none of them really do that without integrating into a third-party system like Home Assistant or OpenHAB.
When they quote most people thinking it costs $5000 to have a smart home and that the average person with connected technology spending $200. Those are not incongruous. I would guess that a large number of those who spent $200 on connected technology do not consider themselves to have a "smart home" and would expect to spend $4800 more to get to a smart home. $200 buys you 3-4 connected color controlled lights, that is not a smart home in my opinion.
There's something to be said for simplicity.
Sure if it works well and does what you want. Complexity gets introduced when one or both of those conditions is no longer met. Early car engines were much simpler than modern ones but they also didn't work as well, were less reliable, got less power, polluted more, and had worse fuel economy. The cost of those improvements was complexity. Simplicity did not equal elegance in that case - it just equaled simple.
There is elegance in simplicity. If I want to make something smarter, I put it on a timer.
There is elegance in simplicity only if it solves a problem more efficiently than other solutions. A timer can be a very elegant solution or a very cumbersome one depending on the problem it is intended to solve. Simple can be a good thing but it's not an end to be desired for its own sake.
"OK, Self. Open the refrigerator and grab me a beer."
Works every damn time.
that's why the movement must continue, to flush evile's effects out our spiritual centers... sing along.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zLfCnGVeL4 .. hugs not thugs.. no bomb us more mom us... thanks again...
...and it'll be 10 times cheaper, 10 times better, and looked at with 10 times the inflated sense of entitlement than today.
No thermostat should be more than 20.00 smart or dumb.
So yeah its all over priced.
The one bit of kit that would actually be useful to me would be an HVAC thermostat that didn't require me to switch between heat and cooling modes for the heatpump.
Plenty of thermostats have a range feature including ones like Nest. I use that feature every spring and fall (and some parts of summer) when the temperature is normally reasonable so the furnace or AC only kick on if it gets too cold or hot for comfort. Usually I have about a 15 degree range which keeps it off most of the time.
For tech that is going to spy on you/get hacked and get you into trouble is already way too expensive.
Also, it does not say anything about the recurring costs - yearly subscription to whatever service needed for the "smart" devices to communicate over the network and whatnot.
But then, I didn't read the article...
Yes, you can still extend your arm.
34 percent of Americans believe it would cost $5,000
What they don't mention is that, that's what the average cost will be per year for ransomware when some teenager in Romania hacks your thermostat and demands payment to turn the heat off in the middle of summer, or it on in the winter. Or the hacker in China that demands payment to stop turning you lights off in the evening, and strobing them while you're trying to sleep.
34 percent of Americans believe it would cost $5,000 or more to turn their home into a smart home
Which is probably true, since "a smart home" is defined by most people as "All (or most of) my lights and devices connected to an automation system and controllable." At $30-45 per light switch, power outlet, or device-controller, it adds up quickly in even a small home. (My home is not small, and I would easily go over $5k if I wanted to swap out just switches)
the average person starts with just 4 smart devices, and spends about $200.
Yeah, starts with a hub (Usually just under $100 by itself) and a couple of lights or sensors. They generally expand beyond that.
I work in a very nerdy industry and of those who have smart devices in their home, there are a lot of Alexas and wifi light-bulbs, a few Ring door bells, and one guy who's going the DIY route and rolling his own Arduino-based (Mostly ESP8266) gear. Almost none of these people will claim they have "a smart home" though they have "some smart devices." For most non-nerds, this is beyond their capabilities and they look at it as an ROI exercise: "How long will I need this stuff for it to offset the cost of electricity and installation?"
Improvise, adapt, and overcome.
Because you are using high end stuff like Crestron and AMX. the other crap are simply toys. If it's cloud based it will not work a LOT of the time.
So yes they are correct, good robust and reliable smart homes ARE expensive.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I bought several Insteon SmartHome devices totalling well over $1000 -- light switches, i/o lincs, power outlets -- about 6 years ago to wire my house.
All of them have stopped working -- conveniently, after their warranty (some only 2-3 months after).
Insteon refused to refund/replace any of them, despite several emails/videos showing them how many stopped working.
Creating a "Smart" home is already pretty expensive, but even more-so if (WHEN) the devices break every few years.
I like my smart lights ... but not for any of the things that make them "smart." The thing I like about them is the ability to have them changes from cool light in the morning to warm light in the evening. This is something you could feasibly do without "smart" bulbs but is easier to set up with them.
But just about everything else that's supposed to be "smart" is just annoying.
Have someone over who wants to turn on the lights? Haha, they can't, not without the app! Want to turn on a light in one room? Better get out your phone and get fiddling! (They've since released physical switches you can use to control things, but I've yet to get one.)
The "smart" features that are supposed to work don't work all that well. I have them programmed to turn off automatically when I leave and turn on the light by the front door when I return. Sometimes this happens. Sometimes it'll turn on the light by the front door many minutes after I've arrived. Sometimes it'll just never turn them off, but turn on the light. Sometimes it just works.
You can use it with voice commands! These manage to be even slower than just digging out your phone and using the app.
So would I recommend "smart lights" to anyone else? No, not really. I like the ability to change the lighting color and selectively dim lights. It's nifty. It's not a killer app.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Techno-fappers can't sell products because they falsely assume that the masses are also techno-fappers. News at 11.
There are only two "smart home" features I've actually cared to put in:
* Occupancy sensor lights in bathrooms and other places that one frequently enters and exits a lot of times per day.
* A smart thermostat with remote access
Both were more about saving money than adding convenience.
Nothing else is really worth the cost because the usability is utter shit and the interoperability is almost nil. Give me Star Trek level functionality ("computer, lights; computer, play ; computer, we're about out of TP, order some more") with cost effective equipment/install (wiring your house for automation, audio, etc. is insanely expensive, wireless stuff is still shitty) and I might change my mind, but we're a long, long way from that level of UX. Alexa, etc. notwithstanding. Also, it would require non-invasive implementations that don't collect data and/or otherwise spy on me.
You can have a couple of lights that you can turn on/off OR change your temperature from your Smartphone, not both. To have a truly automated home likely would cost about $5000. People are not so dumb. Wink would like you to think you can get real automation for $200 to sell you their $100 hub.
https://charts.stocktwits.com/production/original_79092034.?1491230004
34 percent of Americans believe it would cost $5,000
Apparently 34% of Americans are actually aware of the security implications of a "Smart Home" and know if would cost over $5,000 in leaked personal data.
Don't forget that they'll stop working when the manufacturer goes bust and their 'cloud' server goes away. Or when Amazon's 'cloud' goes down again. Or when the manufacturer stops supporting them and shuts down the 'cloud' server that controls them.
Look, most "smart home" tech is always on, wasting electricity. Stuff you need:
1. home temperature or floor temperature feedback for heating/cooling that can be programmed. this is also very useful in second homes, and saves lots of energy.
2. security system ... LOL, jk. No seriously, most motion and heat detectors will rack up big charges from the local police, who can't even get there in under 45 minutes, no matter what the commercial says, so get rid of those. Better bet - lights tied into home motion detectors. Determined people will case your place and can always - and I do mean always - get in. And get out before any security or police show up. And get a real dog or cat.
3. low electric price on demand laundry wash dryer systems. These modern ones use very little energy and "buy" it when it's cheapest. Since modern laundry can run very quietly, it's ok if it turns on at 3 am. Same with dryers.
4. low energy fridge NOT CONNECTED TO Internet. Modern fridges are very quiet and save tons of money. Same goes for freezer.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Do not want! I mess with 'gadgets' all day I don't want to have to deal with that at home. If it's cold I light the pellet stove that is my automation.
love is just extroverted narcissism
I can go to my local hardware store and buy an Light Switch for £2.25 ($2.80) and it will sit, maintenance free, in my living room wall for several decades and uses zero electricity for the switch itself. Unless you are outside my house and can see the light that it controls you have no idea if it is switched on or off and thus if I am probably at home.
I can order one and buy one that connects via my wifi for $49.99 (£40.20) that I control via my mobile 'phone, so always using a not-disclosed amount of electricity. How long will Belkin support the switch through their servers ? If they did support it for 10 years I would be surprised, so in a few years I will need to replace it with something new. Some of these also demand some sort of subscription. Whoever operates the servers know the state of the switch and how it has changed recently and so if it is likely that I am not at home .... if not send round their mate Burglar Bill.
It seems like all the proprietary stuff is expensive. I bought little wifi power adapter switches (The Orvibo S20) for $20 each and an infrared blaster to control my TVs and HVAC for $30. I couldn't be happier. I did it for cheap and my stuff never goes out to the internet. I have full control and I can program them however I want! The Orvibo has a nice simple Python library that somebody wrote.
The value of IoT is explicitly not derived by normal exchanges of value for cash it's derived by leveraging the customer on the back end to sell their data and push advertising.
Smart devices usually don't work without an internet connection and without registering on manufacturer's website. Then they will collect all your usage data.
Also this makes you dependent on the manufacturer for the rest of the life time of the device.
I see two totally separate marketing modes currently in use for this technology: the hobbyist market, home of the X-10 coffeemaker that you can sort of get working if you do enough fiddling with your wiring assisted by the advice of obscure online hacker forums, and the high end market for "smart homes" that you order as a turnkey package from a builder or a security company. Nobody cares about the X-10 hobbyists because they are invisible, so to the general public home tech is associated with the Smart Home they saw demonstrated on HGTV and bought by a young couple who work for a law firm.
But if you just want to do something specific, like monitor your baby, there are all kinds of relatively inexpensive and easy to assemble systems like the Insteon sensors that I use. But know when to invoke professional help in putting a system together. Don't be that person who is on vacation when their breaking glass sensor pings their iPhone app so that they can helplessly watch their house being cleaned out on live spycam because they don't have a way of calling their local police from Costa Rica.
Honestly, the remote access on the thermostat is now obsoleted by thermostats that will let you set the vacation mode for a number of days. I just got home from a week of skiing and the house was warm, but it had been down into the 50's for the week. Nothing online to hack, extort me, invite burglars (they aren't that sophisticated anyway) or increase odds of failure.
Because when you live in a place where you need a security system, the only fun thing to do is make your security system "smart." I want your life. Mine's feels dull now.
Hey, I saw that movie about you -- The Omega Man. I could swear the vampires killed you off in the end...
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
It's about bang for the buck. If I can automate something in my home to gain me time, I'm in. Time is my scarcest resource. But... cost me money, for little productivity gain, add maintenance (which costs me time), and decrease security. I'm sorry... why should I be interested?
Don't forget that they'll stop working when the manufacturer goes bust and their 'cloud' server goes away. Or when Amazon's 'cloud' goes down again. Or when the manufacturer stops supporting them and shuts down the 'cloud' server that controls them.
Most residential Insteon deployments use controllers which are not cloud based, and all Insteon devices support local linking (e.g. you can associate a light switch to a motion detector simply by pressing a button on one, then the other -- no app required, no cloud service involved.
It is possible to deploy Z-Wave without relying on cloud services, you just need to choose your controller carefully. You can also purchase a local programmable controller which speaks multiple protocols, so you can use local REST calls to control Insteon/Z-Wave/Zigbee/etc.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
Back in the day, when things were free, you were the product.
Nowadays, you'd pay big dollars for products and you are still the product. To have those devices around, whose blatant purpose is to sell you out on your privacy, you're screwed even worse.
Get Smart + Get back Home = Smart Home
It's super cheap and you won't have to worry about a wifi kettle being hacked.
The value of IoT is explicitly not derived by normal exchanges of value for cash it's derived by leveraging the customer on the back end to sell their data and push advertising.
If that were true, the devices would cost a lot less. A dumb light switch costs 46 cents. A "smart" light switch costs $46.
They're gouging you on the initial purchase and selling your data.
I am all for using clever technology if it gives me something of actual value, but I have yet to hear about any IoT gadget that does anything that I would benefit from in my home. I have used remotely comtrollable gadgets (like networked powerstrips) in server rooms, and that clearly is useful, but I wouldn't spend money on any of the silly gadgets that are on offer, and certainly not if they can only communicate directly to the wider internet - for me to let any gadget in to my home, it must have the option to turn off all wifi and use local, cabled network only, and it would have to use an open protocol, so I can control it from, say, a RaspberryPi, which would be the only entry point from outside. Otherwise you might as well leave all the windows open.
I bought several Insteon SmartHome devices totalling well over $1000 -- light switches, i/o lincs, power outlets -- about 6 years ago to wire my house.
All of them have stopped working -- conveniently, after their warranty (some only 2-3 months after).
Insteon refused to refund/replace any of them, despite several emails/videos showing them how many stopped working.
Creating a "Smart" home is already pretty expensive, but even more-so if (WHEN) the devices break every few years.
Sounds like YOU are the common factor here. I have like 30 or so devices with most for many years. I've never had a single device stop working. Seriously @ ~$40/device your $1000 would have bought ~25 devices. You are telling me all 25 stopped working in your house and you think this is an issue with all 25 of these devices? If this was simply a manufacturer issue, at that rate, don't you think they'd be out of business? Sounds like you either don't know how to wire something as easy as a switch, or you've drastically inflated your story...
It does not compute.
We use every labor saving device possible so we can either balloon up or spend all the time hungry or at gym.
I'll continue spitting, stacking and feeding my wood stove, shoveling my driveway and getting up to to adjust the lights.
Really don't mind feeding and walking my 90lb security system, or sweeping the floors.
I'm no Luddite but it's nuts to save so much labor only to pay for the gym. Maybe a manual push mower is a better idea
Here's what I did - works pretty well for making "dumb" appliances smart. $50 Echo Dot (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B015TJD0Y4?tag=googhydr-20&hvadid=178760267662&hvpos=1t1&hvexid=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=16462602238754345856&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=e&hvdev=c&ref=pd_sl_1bxrunqc4w_e) for voice control. $30 set of 5 RF power plugs (https://www.amazon.com/Etekcity-Wireless-Electrical-Household-Appliances/dp/B00DQELHBS/ref=sr_1_2?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1491405099&sr=8-2&keywords=remote+power+control+city) $50 Hook smart home universal RF bridge - allows the dot to control any RF devices on 315 or 433 mhz freqs: (http://www.hooksmarthome.com/) IFTTT.com - easy online rules you can write that work with the Hook One example of something I've done with this is program a sign to turn on in the morning if it will be clear that day, basically signalling to me to grab my fun car keys for the drive to work or wherever that day. IFTTT pulls a weather report to my gmail account, my gmail rules apply the appropriate tag based on the weather report, and another IFTTT rule turns the light on if the email has been tagged a certain way. Easy, and a fun way to avoid having to check the weather before leaving to work. Frivolous? Sure. Fun? Yeah!
You can try this: http://www.ranker.com/crowdranked-list/technology-blogs Really helpful!
The question was how much to turn house into smart home.
The $200 is for 'starting' with 4 devices, which isn't the same a turning a house into a smart home, so there is no reasonable conclusion from that.
Now that we're seeing extremely inexpensive Home Automation (HA) endpoint devices like ITEAD's esp8266-based Sonoff line, the writing is on the wall and the "race to the bottom" is on, at least for endpoint devices. This will hurt folks asking high prices for endpoint devices, such as Lutron, Belkin, and so on.
Integration hubs (Wink, SmartThings, WigWag, etc.) , which provide the ability to communicate with endpoints no matter how they talk (Zigbee, Z-Wave, WiFi, Bluetooth, 2.4GHz, 433MHz, etc.), are the next layer up in the hierarchy. Early HA hubs either omitted popular protocols or included obscure protocols.
The elephant in the room is HA/IoT security. None of the current HA protocols are inherently resistant to attack by snooping, spoofing, replay or any of several other attack vectors. The big hope had been on Google's Thread protocol, which unfortunately is taking forever to get to market, presumably due to terrible management by its governing body, the Thread Group.
Thread runs over 6LoWPAN, which in turn uses the IEEE 802.15.4 wireless mesh protocol, a low-power protocol which nearly eliminates the need for repeaters and provides several security enhancements. But best of all it is orders of magnitude lower power than WiFi, permitting battery-powered devices that work for well over a year on a single disposable battery.
But Thread is mid-level protocol that doesn't "know" about HA devices. To address this, Thread has "bolted on" the Zigbee Device Model and protocol, which, while far from ideal, does have a ton of industry and HA support.
Another HA security "gaping wound" is tying HA systems to the Cloud. While occasional connections for updates and configuration may be tolerable, many HA hubs and HA phone apps route ALL their actions through the Cloud. This presents a truly massive number of security risks, not to mention long delays between initiating an action and seeing the effect happen. Specific risks include the HA hub itself being taken over to become part of a botnet, or endpoint devices being controlled by attackers, or your personal home data being ripped from a hacked Cloud server. There is a growing market for LAN hubs/firewalls (such as the Turris Omnia) that actively block HA Cloud connections.
The HA industry is still in its infant state and has much growing and maturing yet to come. With lots of bumps and falls along the way.