Why I Don't Have A Smart Home

Based on the title of this post, you probably assume that this post will be a long rant about the privacy nightmare that is smart devices. It's not. I've covered that ad nauseam and they don't apply if you make use of self-hosted open source projects like Home Assistant. I self-host all of my own services already so I have the technical knowhow to setup a smart home using Home Assistant. I still don't though.

My reason can be summed up in a single word: maintenance. The older I get, the more I find myself considering the future maintenance of any project I undertake. I won't undertake a project unless the gains outweigh the maintenance that will be required down the road. A dumb home is relatively low maintenance (as far as homes go). Light switches, thermostats, and garage door buttons seldom break. If one of those dumb controls isn't working, troubleshooting is pretty straight forward. The first culprit is usually power. Is the breaker off? Is the control on a circuit with a ground fault circuit interrupter? If so, is that tripped? If all else fails, a quick prodding with a multimeter will tell you whether there's power at the control. If the control is receiving power and is still not working, there's a pretty good chance the control is broken. Swapping out things like light switches, thermostats, and garage door buttons is straight forward.

The devices that those controls control are often more complicated. Troubleshooting your furnace in the dead of winter or your air conditioner in the height of summer can require some knowhow, but that doesn't change if you have a smart home. My biggest gripe with smart homes is they add complexity to the troubleshooting and repair process. Troubleshooting a basic electrical circuit is fairly straight forward. If I turn on a light switch and the associated light doesn't come on, the first thing I check is the light bulb. Swapping a light bulb takes seconds. If the light still doesn't come on, I check the breaker box, which also takes seconds. I've never had a light switch break, but if I get to the point where I discover the switch itself is bad, I go to the hardware store, buy a replacement, and spend a few minutes replacing the bad one of the good one.

When you introduce smart devices, you necessarily introduce networking and software. Both are complicated. Many smart controls and devices are wireless, which adds complexity on top of networking. Anybody who has had to troubleshoot an intermittent Wi-Fi issue knows how much of a pain in the ass it can be. With a dumb home, if my Wi-Fi goes down, my lights, heating, air conditioning, and garage doors still work.

The complexity introduces another problem too. I maintain the entire technology infrastructure in my home because my wife doesn't have the technical background I do. I periodically have to travel for work. With a dumb home, if something goes wrong when I'm away, she can call one of several people we know who can come over and likely figure out the problem. If something is seriously broken, she can call an electrician or plumber. This isn't the case with a smart home. An electrician or plumber isn't going to troubleshoot a complex networking issue. Even a system administrator won't be able to fix it because they don't know how the network is setup and even if they did, they don't have access to any of the systems.

Smart homes have a lot of interesting capabilities, but none of them are worth the maintenance for me. Were I single and didn't have work, shooting competitions, martial arts, and a bunch of other things fighting for my limited time, I'd be more inclined to explore the idea. But I'm not single and I'd much rather spend my time at the gun range and dojo than debugging a networking issue so I can get my lights to turn on again.