In my last post about smart homes, I promised to outline what I have automated. A lot of home automation talk is about the gizmos and I don’t think enough is about the actual automation. These are actual automations; things a computer does to my house for me.
Our front porch light turns on at sunset. It turns off when we go to bed – I don’t want to contribute too much to light pollution by leaving it on all night. We manually hit a “Good Night” widget in iOS’s Notification Center to trigger this.
We also have interior lights come on at sunset if no one is home, as determined by the location of our phones, so that the dogs don’t get stuck alone in the dark. They don’t seem to mind the darkness but I feel bad enough to have created a rule to automate this.
We do not turn on the lights automatically when we are home. Sometimes it’s dark before sunset, sometimes it’s light after. It’s less weird to manually turn on the lights. I might try to use some luminescence sensors to do this in the future.
The thermostat goes into energy saving mode when we are away from the house. High temperature in the summer, low in the winter. It uses less energy to return the house to normal temperature than it does to maintain normal temperature when no one is home. If you are going to do this, be sure to create a “Guest” mode for when you have a babysitter / houseguest.
The thermostat also changes to cooler temperatures when we go to sleep. It’s like having a programmable thermostat that is based around us instead of a clock.
I have an app that turns the furnace fan on for 10 minutes every hour, to even out the temperatures in the house. Our bedroom is closed off during the day so it’s extra warm in the summer and extra cool in the winter. It’s nice to come to bed and have the bedroom a normal temperature.
Our door from our house to our garage (as opposed to garage door) unlocks when we arrive home. This is awesome because we have an RFID key on our Honda, which means you can get in the house without ever having to take your keys out of your purse or pocket.
If the garage door is open when we go to bed, we get a push notification. It’s a handy reminder for when we accidentally leave it open.
If the smoke alarm goes off, all the smart lights in the house come on.
I’ve been purposefully vague about how I set all this up. Partly its because its in SmartThings and my goal is to move to Home Assistant. Partly its because you can do this stuff with most smart home systems.
I’m happy to answer questions in the comments if anyone wants to know how I did something. I’d also love to hear other automation rules that you love.