January is almost over. Do you have a New Year’s resolution for your home automation projects?
I’m pretty happy with what I’ve got now, especially now that my young service dog has learned how to open and close doors.
I am replacing a smart lock which is just been too glitchy for me with one which should have better reliability.
Other than that, my big goal is to go through my systems and remove any devices I am no longer using. And go through the HA cabinet in the basement and actually install the devices that I do want to use and get rid of the ones I’m not going to use. LOL!
Reliability. For me it’s replacing my Zwave devices with their Zigbee counterpart if one exists, otherwise replace it with Zwave Plus. Every since I’ve moved to Zigbee devices, I’ve had ZERO issues with devices, performance, and stability. I’m down to just 12 zwave devices out of my total 265 devices.
Supportability. Keep as much as possible out of the box as I can, and avoid groovy SmartApps, webcore, ActionTiles, and other ones as best I can. I mean no disregard to the developers, I’m just wanting to ensure I’m not spending too much of my discretionary time on supporting my environment, as well as the others I’m building (my parents).
Simplification. Eliminate devices they we don’t need or have a use for. There was a point where I added anything I could find for the “fun” factor, but I’m past that stage… Oh yeah, and I only have 2 virtual devices now.
Ease of use for everyone. We’ve renamed devices to something more “normal” and how our family would normally call something. Instead of some weird name to help sort devices, or whatever, we just call it what comes to mind right away. Usually I take the lead from my wife on that process This goes a long way to making the adoption and use of Alexa go well and quick. We are almost exclusively controlling our devices through Alexa, and through Minimotes, vs using the ST app.
My 75 yr old mother-in-law is coming here to live in 2 months. My resolution is to make my setup as invisible as possible. I’m going to make sure that no one has to fiddle with the app or bark at Alexa unless they want to. If they do, I will make sure that those controls just work.
My resolution was prompted in part by opening the HA cabinet to get something and seeing a brand new in the box cloud-based device which has now been discontinued and so is completely unusable.
Which I guess is better than having it as an integral part of some important use case when it was discontinued, but still… I need to either use that stuff or get rid of it.
My plan for 2020 is to simplify my automations between SamrtRules, SmartLighting, WebCore, Homekit, routines, scenes and IFTTT. I also want to document my setup better so I can deal with issues faster and more efficiently.
…and not to buy too many new devices that I really dont need.
Start a new thread in the following section of the forum, call it “Zigbee instead of zwave?” Or something like that and tag the individual people you’d like to get responses from.
