Smart Home Mistakes You Need to AVOID

Making a smart home is tough. And there's so many things that I wish I'd thought of to make sure that my smart home was always running flawlessly, but I've been neglecting my smart home and haven't really had the chance to take care of it as well as I should have. So I'm going to be fixing some of that and trying to help you with what not to do to save you some future headaches. Let's start. If you're interested in smart homes, I made a video a year ago that summarizes everything super well. Instead, what this video focuses on is more of what happens when you already have an established smart home, one that you painstakingly put together and set up yourself. Let's answer that question. What now? What I learned fast was that this wasn't a set it and forget it kind of thing. Just like how regular light bulbs, air conditioning units, ceiling fans, and blinds may need repair or maintenance. So do your smart home lights, thermostats, switches, and plugs. There will be times where you need to replace batteries, do software updates, or reconnect stuff back on wifi because one non-functioning smart device could impact everything else that you have going on in your smart home and make a terrible experience for everyone in your house, not just yourself. And these people will then tell you you should have just done things the old fashioned way and make things non-smart instead of spending money on this smart crap. So please make some time once a month, maybe even 30 minutes, just fixing or maintaining all of the smart home stuff that needs it. Because if you don't, you'll hear it from someone else or be frustrated at yourself for not handling it sooner. Now, if you're looking to up your smart home game and keep your physical space clean at the same time, you might want to look at today's sponsor Shark and their new PowerDetect 2-in-1 robot vacuum and mop. It does a great job cleaning dirt and even my dog's hair off of carpets, and it easily handles stuck on messes when it mops my hard floors. There's some raised entryways in my home and the vacuum lifts itself up using its never stuck technology to make sure that I don't have to baby it and make sure it's doing its job. This lifting feature also means it will lift the mop when it detects carpet so that your carpets don't get wet. This 2-in-1 robot also has up to a month of hands-free maintenance, thanks to the ProBase. The robot vacuum does its job and goes back to the ProBase to charge, empty debris, refill its water tank and cleans and dries the mopping pad. Obviously with so much gunk going into this base, you'd expect it to get kind of stinky. Thankfully, the base has odor neutralizer technology to protect against bad odors and keep your base and home smelling fresher. There's even an app that you can wirelessly connect to, view its current status and control the vacuum, like setting up zones based on the LIDAR scans of your home, schedule cleaning times, and even manually start the robot. This thing is feature packed and really all I need to do on my end is set a reminder every month, just like I do with my smart home, that I need to maintain this robot vacuum. It cleans well and I find myself reaching out to grab my stick vacuum and mop way less often because the power detect has been so reliable. Suction strength is good with its dirt detect feature that adjusts the power depending on the amount of dirt that it sees and the vacuum and base are much quieter than I expected, which is pretty important if you're doing stuff around the house. So if you're interested in the Shark Power Detect Never Touch Pro Robot Vacuum and Mop, check out the link in the video description below. And thanks again to Shark for sponsoring this portion of the video. The larger your smart home becomes, the more devices you have pinging back to your wifi access point. This means you're slowly adding to all the different wifi signals in your home. Just imagine your home as an auditorium and each smart home device as a person who's talking. The more people you have talking, the harder it is to hear each individual person. That's a crowded wifi network. So whenever you can just plug your stuff into ethernet. It's usually more stable, is better performing and helps out all your other wifi devices by making the airwaves less congested. Things like video game consoles, TVs, PCs, streaming boxes, and smart home hubs aren't great devices to switch off wifi and onto ethernet because these things don't move around and are usually near a place with ethernet in the first place. Using smart home products that all connect to a central hub can also cut down on wifi signals, since it's usually the central hub that sends the signal instead of each individual device to your access point, obviously not every device that you own will be off wifi, but the more that you can do within reason could help all the internet connected devices perform at their best. So automations can be very simple or they can get super complex. You can set your lights to dim at 20% on a Saturday when the temperature is 65 degrees or less in the month of October, when the car is parked in the garage and the TV is on because you want a great movie night watching the greatest Halloween movie, Halloween town. But like, look at these potential points of failure. There's many different variables that have to be just right. And when you have a ton of automations like this, it might just make life more difficult instead of easier. Obviously the rule I mentioned is very niche and very specific in nature, but you know what I mean though, someone could come up with many rules that are very similar in nature that do very specific tasks only when a bunch of parameters are in place. If you decide to go that route, that's a ton more rules you have to maintain. And will the other people in your home, remember all these different complex rules and how to trigger these automations or just you, because if it was just you, was it worth the struggle of getting it working only to get so little use out of it? Instead, I focused on more simple things that could dramatically improve the quality of your life, like turning on lights when it's close to sunset, when you get home or activating indoor cameras, when you leave the home or turning on the ceiling fan, when the room is a little warm and it detects movement, all these are all useful things that we do frequently and can save us a little bit of time each day. All right. But once these rules are set though, they shouldn't stay stagnant. People change over time. You've changed majors, jobs, roommates, relationships, homes, children, whatever. We change a lot. And so do the people around us. So it just makes sense that our habits do too. So along with your habits changing, so will your automations to adapt to those habits. So along with monthly maintenance, I would say maybe once every six months or a year to the most difficult thing everyone dreads. Think about your life, what's changed and how that change could change how you use your smart home. This could lead you to adjusting these rules to better fit your life or create new ones to better suit them. I'm not saying spend a few hours overthinking things, just maybe 30 minutes to reflect and really think if something is working out properly and adjust it accordingly. I'm just not trying to get everyone into their midlife existential dread over here. And the last thing that I think about is making sure that I consolidate my smart home. Every smart home item you buy from a new brand is another device that requires its own app, login information and set up and potentially a new hub. And it sucks. It really sucks. On my phone, I have pages and pages of smart home apps that are supposed to make my life easier. But is it really easier with a million different apps I have to keep track of and update to make sure my devices are working to the best of their ability? Sure. All these different apps integrate into my preferred smart home platform, but there's unique features that can only be accessed through their apps instead. So I need to keep each individual app just in case I need to use those features. So be very intentional with what you end up purchasing so that you can cut down on the number of different brands that you're using so that you don't end up with a large list of apps, but instead have a short list of manageable apps. To be honest, you will most likely end up with devices that might require their own app and that's fine. I own quite a few devices like that, but cutting down where you can will make managing everything so much more efficient and easy on you when it's time to tinker. I mean, there's a million and one different smart lights and different smart plug brands, right? Do you really need to collect them all? You really only need to stick to one that suits you the best. And of course I would pay attention to the compatibility of the smart home products that you buy. Sure. You may be using Alexa right now, but what if you want to switch to Google home or Apple home because they got some crazy new features that just made Alexa irrelevant. You'd then have to buy new devices to replace your old ones or would have to rely on third-party integrations like Home Assistant to fix this. But while I love mentioning Home Assistant for tinkerers, that in itself requires maintenance. Wouldn't have a hundred percent uptime and having 100% compatibility isn't guaranteed there either. Try to make sure that what you're purchasing at least supports the three major smart home platforms and even better matter, which works with all of them for the widest range of compatibility. Okay. We're pretty deep into this video now. And just now, am I realizing that all of these tips revolve around simplifying a smart home. And really I think they ended up perfectly. The thing is the more items you add into your smart home, the more complex that things get and your smart home just gets harder to manage and maintain due to that complexity and inflexibility at the end of the day. What really matters is making sure all this stuff works for you and your family or your roommates or whoever lives with you, because if you overcomplicate it, you're going to have a bad time and it's going to be tough to maintain. Just keep it simple. Or if you just love tinkering too much, then don't make it as complex as you want. It's pretty fun tinkering with things, but usually not at the expense of others, but either way, those are some of my tips for making sure that you get the best use out of your own smart home based on the experiences that I've had in this long. Three year journey. There was a lot of failures along the way too, but I hope I saved you a future headache. Anyway, what do you personally think? Were these tips helpful? Were any of them unhelpful? Why? What tips do you think I should have mentioned alongside these different tips? I thought these were a great high level overview of some things that people should pay attention to. Leave all that down in the comment section below. And if you enjoyed this video, give it a thumbs up and I'll see you all next time. Bye.