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Comment by talentedcoin | Hacker News Reader

I’d love to see an estimate of how much time per year saved. My suspicion is, not much. And my bet would be that one or two outages (likely to happen at some point with these devices) would tip the scale the other way.

Nothing wrong with liking cool stuff, but this type of argument doesn’t resonate with me.

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Phillips hue works like a normal light if there is no internet or if you cycle the power from the switch.

Mine works completely if there is no internet. I like the Hue system as it only relies on the internet connection for software updates of you want them. The Zigbee network it uses has been super reliable for me, and always responds to the app which only needs to work on my LAN. It only gets spotty sometimes for me when used via Amazon Echo devices, which have to phone home to interpret the voice command before triggering the Hue devices.

Yes good point. I always have internet so I never noticed but of course it's all on the local network.

Your approach sounds similar to mine. While it is true the switches work without internet, out even without the local controller - I just learned the hard way that they don't work at all when the capacitor inside dies. Keep a dumb switch on hand so you can swap it in when you have a light you can no longer turn on!

I had 2 die recently. The is a thread out there on repairing them, but I don't think my soldering skills are that good. I'm also thinking "repair my light switch?" What has the world come to?

I was considering buying a bunch of hue bulbs but this feature is making me hesitant: The hue bulbs can “remember” their last setting, but if you power cycle them twice in a row (without waiting ~15 seconds in between) then they reset to the default brightness & color.

I don’t care about any of this automatic timing or app control. What I want is for every lightbulb in my house set to the same color temperature, and for that temperature to change over the course of the day - circadian lighting like f.lux for my entire house. It seemed to me that this should be possible with hue bulbs, but it turns out they can’t work that way unless I want to also replace all of the switches in my house with “smart” switches.

I didn’t replace the switches. They’re additional. The smart switch and the dumb switch both work. One great advantage is you can use a greater variety of bulbs and due to this fixture positioning is much more flexible. You can turn on 20 bulbs at once if you like. Make zones in your house. Turn on the whole house at once. Timers, programmed changes etc etc

It's not about time savings. To me at least. It's the feeling of convenience and comfort.

Yeah, idk why all of these comments are focused on time savings. That’s not the point.

The point is that when you wake up and it’s cold in your house, and you don’t want to get out of bed, you can flip on your heat and warm up the house while you’re still waking up.

Or if you left the house and forgot if you turned off the lights. Or left the AC on for the pets. Your 25 year old switches aren’t going to help you there.

Or another one I always use - if it’s raining out and I have full hands, I will unlock my front door before I get out of my car, so I can just walk right in.

>I can spend the time saved on things that actually matter.

Because that literally was the sole point of benefits in the GP post!

It literally wasn't. You left out:

> The little things add up. Life in a connected home is easier

I think the fact that you interpreted that, followed by a point about saving time, as only implying saved time is part of the huge disconnect in these discussions.

Some of the functionality saves me time. When I don't have to go downstairs to turn off a light I forgot downstairs when I've already gotten into bed, saves time, sure. But the saved time, to me at least, is entirely incidental.

I have no idea whether it adds up to enough to offset the time I've taken to set things up (I also, however, think that people massively overestimate the effort involved; I set up a couple of hubs, replaced the lightbulbs in my house in a couple of hours total several years ago; replaced radiator valves in a couple of hours), but it's entirely irrelevant to me.

I would do this all over again even if I knew it'd take me ten times as long to set up as all the time I'll "save" over my lifetime

Because I value the comfort of e.g. adjusting the heating before I get up (yes, I can get timers; my thermostat already uses a timer, but sometimes I deviate from my normal schedule), or turn off the light without having to get back out of bed far more than the time saved.

We all have things we invest time in preparing for so that the event itself doesn't get interrupted by small annoyances, even if it doesn't "pay off" in saved time. A "smart home" is that first and foremost.

The other guy is right - if you have a network outage your appliances revert to “normal” behavior.

But even after that, it’s not just about the time saved. It’s an increased amount of convenience in day to day life. I mentioned this in another comment, but you definitely feel a sort of reduction in cognitive load when your desired home state can be triggered with a spoken word.

> if you have a network outage your appliances revert to “normal” behavior.

Would that that were true. Internet of Shit is rife with examples of products that fail completely without connectivity.

https://twitter.com/internetofshit

Light switches cause cognitive load? If anything, people have too little cognitive load keeping their brains off most of the time.

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