Paint The Nights - Micro Blog

Introduction

This is my second take on the smart home. You can read the first one about what's holding back the smart home here The Lightswitch is Holding Back the Smart Home. I'll use lights / light switches as my main talking point again as they're the simplest category.

The Reliability Problem

In a traditional house when you use a light it's instant and works every time. Unless you're dealing with a completely dead bulb you typically don't have to think about it.

If a smart home makes this process less relabel I'd argue the value of smart lighting does not justify the unreliability you've introduced. I think most people would probably accept around a 1/1000 rate of error (let's say one technical problem every couple of years).

There is a lot of layers of technical stuff going on in a modern technology. This introduces ever increasing points of failure. While having these points of failure on phones and computers are not without their own issues, they seem to be manageable for the personal computer category.

Having these common technical issues translate over to household appliances can quickly become a much more frustrating experience to the end user. Imagine how much worse these common Phone/PC issues are when view from a smart home lens:

• My lights are slow, it takes 2 seconds to turn on
• I'll be eating dinner and my lights will just randomly flash
• My lights don't turn on when I press the buttons anymore

As a smart home enthusiast I have a higher tolerance for this and I can fault find on a technical level. I'd guess though that for most people this happening more then a few times over a certain period would be enough to want to remove the smart lights - at least from any critical location. This highlights the importance of having an almost perfectly reliable smart home environment.

Unfortunately a lot of people with smart homes (myself included) rarely have 99.9% reliability. Even the most well thought out homes will hit issues now and then due to various reasons.

Does Thread Hold Up Yet

I've seen a lot of people on the internet, and spoken to a lot in person who are aware of this issue. A lot try and solve it by convincing themselves that choosing a product with their perceived best wireless technology will fix things.

The current trend (which admittedly starting to break down) is that Thread was going to be our saviour and solve all our problems. While Thread does aim to solve a lot of the issues it isn't perfect. As it's a fairly new protocol I'm hoping it matures and get's better as time goes on.

In my experience so far these have been the most reliable products in my home in order of most to least reliable.

• LIFX Smart Switch (WiFi - Mains)
• LIFX Downlights (WiFi- Mains)
• Phillips Hue Lights (Zigbee - Mains)
• NanoLeaf Essentials Bulb (Thread - Mains)
• Phillips Hue Buttons (Zigbee - Battery)
• Ikea Shortcut Buttons (ZigBee - Battery)
• Eve Motion Blinds (Thread - Battery)

That's 2 WiFi devices I rate the most reliable. And while I'd consider my Hue Lights extremely close in comparison to my LIFX ones it questions the myth that Thread is just a better protocol to use. WiFi has been around since the 90s, it used in billions of devices and has time to mature as a reliable wireless protocol.

I'm disappointed to have to put my Eve Motion Blinds on the bottom of the list as they're actually a very high quality product. For those devices in particular I think it's actually to do with Apple when a Non-Thread enabled device becomes the Home Hub.

It's also worth noting that in my experience things that are battery operated are a lot less reliable - this is understandable.

It Comes Down to Implementation

You don't choose what smartphone you're going to buy on technical hardware specs alone. A lot of the decision comes down to software and implementation. Smart Home products should be no different.

Let's say you have a competing smart light from 2 different companies. They both support Matter and both have a Thread Radio in then. These can still vary drastically in quality. The firmware and hardware are separate from the protocols they choose to support.

Not all smart home products are created equal. You need to make sure you're picking a product from a vendor with a proven track record for quality and ongoing improvement as the smart home field matures.

Maybe one day every product you buy will work 99.9% of the time but right now careful research, planning and patience is needed.