Everyone starts out thinking it’s wonderful. It’s when it comes to maintenance or troubleshooting that things become tedious. Spending 60 dollars on a bulb that may or may not last 2 years.
After 10+ or so years of messing with these stupid bulbs no one in my family besides me even uses I’ve basically switched back to all “dumb” stuff now. This isn’t even taking in to account the amount of “smart” devices that start with even basic interoperability but then end up locked in a walled garden when money got expensive. Sure you can fashion up an esp garage door opener but do I really need another 20 cobbled together devices to maintain?
As I mentioned in another comment, I've been running this system for around 10 years now, across 3 homes, growing in size each time.
I use a mix of Z-Wave and Zigbee devices (as well as lots of WiFi such as ESPHome and other devices), I started initially with Hue bulbs, moved to HA, ditched the Hue hub, increased to near 100 bulbs a mix of Hue and IKEA, door/window sensors and motion sensors, water leak sensors, wireless dimmers, and plenty more.
My kids don't know any different, the oldest now 5 has grown up with automatic lights, and has a smart switch I built for her to change the colour of the lights in her room as she wishes; we occasionally sit together and she choses a new set of colours for each button, my son (3) likes to pick a colour for his bedroom lights before bed using the colour picker on mine or my wife's phone.
The kids are aware that if they don't come to dinner when we ask I can just shout "Ok Nabu, turn off the TV" from another room and just the suggestion will convince them to do it themselves.
There's some maintenance for replacing batteries, but I really like that IKEAs stuff uses mostly AAA and I have automations to notify where the low batteries are, and as a household with young children, we've always got batteries charged and ready to go.
We use Frigate to notify us with a voice prompt across the house when people walk through the gate before they even reach our front door, we have audible alerts if the garage door was opened, and plenty more.
My wife will occasionally have griped with how something works, so I ask her to tell me how she _wants_ it to work, and I fix it.
Overall, other than adding new features, it's very hands-off.
> There's some maintenance for replacing batteries, but I really like that IKEAs stuff uses mostly AAA and I have automations to notify where the low batteries are, and as a household with young children, we've always got batteries charged and ready to go.
Not GP, but I've been at this for over a decade now and here's the maintenance that I've had to do:
1. one z-wave switch died after 10 years, replaced it with a zigbee one.
2. Two GE zigbee bulbs failed after 8 years.
That's it.
I've made a point of trying to avoid anything which requires the internet/cloud to function.
The hue bulbs that I added in 2015 are still going strong. I see so many people complaining about the short lifespan of bulbs and all I can figure is that their power dirty or they are buying very cheap equipment.
To play devil's advocate (because I'm very much in agreement with you), I've found that Hue bulbs I've bought in the latter half-decade have lasted less time than the ones I bought a decade ago.
The original metal and glass ones are still going strong at nearing 10 years old, but some of my newer ones made from plastic and plastic since Siginify started cheaping out the build quality have been failing.
Out of somewhere in the region of 60-70 Hue bulbs, mostly Colour + White Ambience, a mix of Edison, Screw and GU10, I've now had 3 of the new cheap/light/plastic ones fail, and zero of the older metal/glass ones, though I've shattered the glass on 3 of the glass ones being careless when moving.
Two failed the same way, one E27 and one GU10; they light the wrong colour and have lost most of their brightness, now about 20% or less of their original brightness, really noticeable when they're grouped with another bulb which should be the same colour and brightness, the third just stopped lighting up entirely, even though it does still register on the Zigbee network.
I share the sentiment, and I also get downvoted every time I post something on those lines here. Only thing that can make you even less popular is saying that using cloud services can make sense depending on your priorities. =D
I wouldn't downvote anyone who says it hasn't worked out for them, but I run what I imagine is a fairly large scale "smart home", ("device" counts in the hundreds), perhaps not compared to the popular YouTubers you see, but still fairly large.
It's worth noting that I _enjoy_ finding ways to automate my home, or create solutions to problems that didn't exist, and using Home Assistant, but my experience has been anything but troublesome.
Granted HA started off pretty rough, and there are ways it does things I still don't think are as good as they could be, but it has come along an incredible amount and they're doing great things at HA/Nabu/Open Home Foundation.
Everyone starts out thinking it’s wonderful. It’s when it comes to maintenance or troubleshooting that things become tedious. Spending 60 dollars on a bulb that may or may not last 2 years.
After 10+ or so years of messing with these stupid bulbs no one in my family besides me even uses I’ve basically switched back to all “dumb” stuff now. This isn’t even taking in to account the amount of “smart” devices that start with even basic interoperability but then end up locked in a walled garden when money got expensive. Sure you can fashion up an esp garage door opener but do I really need another 20 cobbled together devices to maintain?