Hacker News Reader

Comment by deepspace | Hacker News Reader

Lights are the most obvious use case. Done right, you may almost never have to touch a light switch again.

In my house, the central lights turn themselves on when it becomes too dark (except after bedtime), and off when it becomes too bright. Lights turn on automatically when someone enters a room (when it is dark) and turn off when they leave.

When the last person leaves the house, all lights go out, except when I am on vacation, in which case the lights turn themselves on and off in a pattern that looks like I am at home.

After lights come extractor fans (keeping the humidity constant) and heat/air conditioning.

It is all about maintaining a comfortable home environment without having to manually turn things on and off all the time.

View on HN

I wish I could figure out how to de-automate my bathroom light. It tends to wrongly notice that I've left the room leaving my in total darkness. My workaround is to leave the light on in the adjacent closet, which, for some reason has no such amenity. I doubt a lifetime of saved button pushes would ever make up for the inconvenience of troubleshooting this not-quite-smart-enough light system. But other people have different utility functions.

This is the thing that’s kept me from pursuing home automation: the advantage of automating lighting (or anything else) is completely negated the moment something goes wrong, because you’ll spend more time debugging than you ever did flicking the light switches in the first place.

It's not completely negated, depending on the case.

The kitchen in the place I rent has this island (its more like a peninsula) that just barely makes the light switch for the kitchen out of reach, so instead we have to walk around the way around.

Obviously a manageable situation, but automating things has been a covid hobby. So I automated the lights, obviously, via replacing the light switch and added a motion sensor to the kitchen wall. There's also an echo dot for voice control.

Walk into the kitchen, lights turn on, eventually they go off. If they don't go on, just say "alexa turn on kitchen" and they go on, motion detector eventually picks up and turns them back off.

Use the light switch, and it disables the motion sensor for an hour and just leaves the lights on, or off, whichever direction was pressed.

Time saved for everyone not walking back and forth, also at night, has definitely been greater than time spent for me debugging.

YMMV

I've been very conservative in uses of automations like that. A couple ancedotes:

The outside lights on the front of my house have a motion sensor. Alone, they turn on to about 50% at dusk, and off at 11:30. If there's any motion between dusk and dawn, they go to 100%, then eventually fade back to 50% or off depending on the time. They also come on (and stay on) at 100% if the garage is open. End result: they are at 100% when useful, and otherwise at 50% don't (annoyingly) shine as much into the front windows.

I also experimented with turning down the kitchen lights when there's no motion. The effective of this was described to me as "What did you do to the kitchen lights?! They just randomly turn off and it's driving me crazy!" -- even not in the room, the lights in an adjoining room turning off unexpectedly was bad. End result: Motion controls removed.

There's also some simple time-based controls. If no lights have been manually adjusted recently, at dawn a couple lights come on (to make it look like someone's home) and likewise turn off sometime later at night. There's also an absolute off at 3am, and again at very early dawn. These have the effect of never coming home to a dark house and never leaving lights on all night.

The best automations blend in so you don't even notice them. But absolutely make sure humans can still control things, and don't do things that interfere with that control or expectations.

The only thing that's tempted me when it comes to automation is whole-house light dimming past a certain hour. But AFAIK that would require buying a whole bunch of really expensive bulbs (or, otherwise, re-wiring a bunch of stuff), so I've passed on it for now.

If you get used to candle or other low-power nighttime lighting, typical house lighting seems obnoxiously bright. I'm convinced it's a major contributor to the sleep troubles that, it seems, nearly everyone in the modern "West" has. It's way more light than you need to get around, play board games, play or listen to music, read, et c. It's like we're trying to make our houses as bright as they are in daytime, which seems like it'd have to be really bad for sleep.

I'd just put dimmer bulbs in all around and forget about automation, but I kinda do want the daytime-like brightness for at least 2-3 hours after sundown, in Winter, or the option to turn it back to full brightness if I've got people visiting and they don't like it (it's not that way so you like it, it's that way so you get sleepy when you're supposed to—but whatever)

There was a similar use case I read about here on HN that interested me: using color-changing bulbs to shift the color tone of all lights in the house from cool during the day to warm at night. But, as you mentioned, it would be pretty expensive to replace every bulb in my house, so I haven't considered it. Maybe when I start running out of spare bulbs I'll think about implementing this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com