Comment by cadamsdotcom | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cadamsdotcom | Hacker News Reader

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My house has smart light switches. They use ancient technologies of injection molding and metal wires. Their firmware has not needed an update and I haven't had to reboot them; they also recover instantly from power failures. I haven't measure their boot time but it's impressive. Probably 1/50 seconds is my guess, based on the AC switching frequency. Their data collection is primitive, and the retention is only a few hundred nanoseconds. They're quite good about not selling data about when I'm home to insurance companies or advertisers. And they use ancient principles of physics to destroy data securely. Their registration and account creation process didn't store my home address in some vendor's questionably secured database, so it can't be sold when these vendors fold in 5-10 years. It doesn't stop working while I'm traveling and never leaves my family without working lights, in fact I've yet to get one tech support call for light switches.

Home Assistant won't read the state of them so they're lacking in integration, but the plus was that caused me to not set up Home Assistant. Not making a fragile computer a single point of failure and not tying my whole house to one shared-fate system with all the failure modes of a small scale full stack SaaS gave me a couple more nines of reliability.

One downside is the commute to the wall if you want to use them. Commuting to a light switch is actually good though, I'm pleased to report it's a nice stroll. It takes around the same time it takes to unlock my phone and discover my phone can't switch on the lights in my house. It goes past a window so it has views.

When I read some vendors' stuff was gonna stop working I went home and turned off and on all my light switches to simulate a reboot in solidarity for those whose hobby is to make their home less usable. Hopefully you folks are able to spend a few hundred bucks more to refresh your stuff for this decade. If you need me, I'll be over at the wall panel.

> Home Assistant won't read the state of them so they're lacking in integration, but the plus was that caused me to not set up Home Assistant. Not making a fragile computer a single point of failure and not tying my whole house to one shared-fate system with all the failure modes of a small scale full stack SaaS gave me a couple more nines of reliability.

My light switches integrate with Home Assistant, but I can just press the button or turn the knob to dim. Home Assistant Zigbee is there as a bonus, not the sole way of doing things and certainly not a single point of failure.

Not to mention the sheer reliability (uptime) of the LCPT (legacy copper plastic technology) switches. We're talking like 99.999% uptime here.

Isn't downtime the whole point of having a switch though?

That's the difference between OFF and NULL.

> Not making a fragile computer a single point of failure

You can set it up in a way that it does work without it but can be enhanced with it. Some zigbee switch work like that (Like the Aqara one).

Also, Home Assistant is the most rock-solid piece of software I ran in a long time, it just never breaks for me

Dumb devices work as expected for at least 20 years and then you replace them.

Smart devices work as expected for a year, fail in new and exciting ways, and then you replace them with dumb devices.

The light switches in my grandparents' house are two years short of being a hundred years old. I'm fairly confident they'll still be there after I'm gone.

There's also a pelton-wheel turbine generator in the basement from before there was mains electricity which most likely would still work with a bit of a cleanup and oil.

There's not a single "smart" anything in the whole house. Things just work.

If one took extra care to wire everything properly one could close the door and leave knowing it would just work until the contacts are black. Even then, wobbling the switch up and down is likely to buy at least a decade of use. The plastic might turn crispy in 100 years.

We put everything in pipes in the Netherlands. If you don't bend them in absurd corners and properly fasten them one can also replace the wires and switches without opening up the wall.

Then came the flimsy IoT wanting to be part of the installation but it should really be a disposable plug and play component that is easy to replace like a lightbulb.

It should use switching wires where possible, Ethernet as a second choice, then Bluetooth and finally wifi if non of the above satisfy the req.

For renovation you often have no choice but new houses entirely depending on wifi and flimsy IoT seems only worth it if it really saves a lot of money.

You can get that exact same experience with Zigbee/z-wave smart switches. I have 74 of them in my house (replaced them all when I moved in) and haven’t had to think about them past that. They work by flipping the switch, they work by voice (Alexa), and via HA and anything that can talk to HA.

If HA goes down I can just walk over and use the switch. A downgrade over yelling into the air for sure but my downgrade is your daily experience.

If someone comes over that doesn’t know how or doesn’t want to use the smart speakers, they can just walk over and flip a switch.

After moving HA off a Pi I found it to be rock solid and I don’t think about it at all unless I want to make or tweak some automation or I get a new device. Adding Claude into the mix for creating/modifying automations is awesome.

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