So, I’m in the market for a new dishwasher, and half the models I’m perusing are extolling the virtues of their wifi-enabled versions. Really? WHY would I need a wifi enabled dishwasher. It gets full, I switch it on. I’m right there. When would I ever need to use wifi?
What products do you have that really don’t need this, and which products do you have that you didn’t realise you needed wifi til you had it?
My Anova Sous Vide unit has WiFi and Bluetooth. It is kind of handy/reassuring to be able to check on how it’s doing when I’m not at home. Our washing machine also has WiFi capabilities, but I only wash my clothes when I’m home, so I’ve never bothered using it.
I scoffed at the idea of wifi connected garage door openers when the guy suggested them. Now, I love them.
We have wifi refrigerators and freezers now, and I’m not loving it. I did get a notice once that the door was left open. That was cool. The main problem is huge connectivity issues what ultimately led to me giving up on the idea altogether.
I definitely want to add wifi to my garage door because I always forget if I closed it and I have to go outside to check. It makes me crazy. I’ve been meaning to look into it and I’ve been inspired now to do that today.
My new oven has wifi. The only useful thing for me is that it makes sure that the clock is set correctly. I get a message on my phone when the timer finishes or the preheat is complete which isn’t particularly useful. Another thing it does, which I will never use, is allow you to start the oven remotely. You could put a roast or casserole in it in the morning and then tell it to start when you’re out and have it ready when you get home. My previous early 80s oven did the same thing but it was mechanical and you had to set the thing up before you left.
It’s also nice when we’re not home. We can open the door for our adult son if he needs to get in the house. We can make sure the doors are closed when we’re away. I basically use my phone as the way I get into the house when we’re on a walk (we never bothered to install a keypad).
The other feature that is handy is that we can set the doors to automatically close at 10:00 p.m. (for example) to deal with the situations where we have forgotten to do it. I’d say around 2 times per year we hear the door close at 10:00 p.m. and are grateful for the device.
My Samsung cook top has wifi. It does nothing useful. You can check to see if a burner is on and how high. That’s it.
I think we’ve previously determined that I have the same Samsung cooktop as squeegee. I agree it is a useless feature, except for someone with OCD who needs to check that they haven’t left a burner on when they’re away from home. Making it worse, there’s a “Wifi Module” (which I assume contains the antenna), an ugly plastic blob that sticks out from the back. In my case, the cooktop wouldn’t even fit into my countertop with the Wifi Module installed. I was happy that the installer said it was fine to remove the module.
On the plus side, I have a weather station that measures temperature, wind speed, rainfall, etc. and displays it on a small panel in the house. It has wifi so it can upload its data to Weather Underground. At first I was dubious as to the usefulness of this feature, but it’s actually been quite handy, not only to see the conditions at my house when I’m away, but also to view the weather history. For example, I can go on WU and see a graph of the rainfall at my house over the past week, or month, or whatever.
It’s handy having it on the garage door, but I can’t imagine a need for it on kitchen or laundry appliances.
So far, I can think of no really good reason to have a wi-fi enabled major appliance. Yes, it might be nifty on rare occasions, but so very seldom, that it simply is not worth the security and privacy issues. I’m excluding TVs, since wi-fi can be a core function of how you use them for streaming.
Smart Appliances Bring Convenience, But Risk Your Privacy - Consumer Reports
We don’t have an Alexa or similar device, either (though if they ever let us change the code word to, say, Jeeves, I might rethink that!). I genuinely can’t see a need or use for one - unless such a thing would be required if we ever got a smart doorbell / lock. Or if we cared all that much about programmable lights or something.
Garage door opener: Yeah, I actually could see the utility of that. The security would still be a concern, however. We currently have a keypad on the doorframe that any of us can use to get into the garage from outside, and I have a key hidden inside the house, in case the door from garage to house is locked.
Video doorbell: I actually like the idea of one of those, but privacy concerns still outweigh the utility for us. If we were older and not as able to get to the door, or if we were out of the house a bit more, I might push to get one. Recently, I went to drop off something at a neighbor, and was amused to get a message from them - from a thousand miles away - checking in on what I was there for.
So far, the only IoT thing we have is an air filter I bought for my home office. It was a silly thing to get - really not needed. I just wanted to try it out. The only advantage is that because it’s connected, I can set up a schedule for it - lower speed during the work day, higher at night / weekend when I don’t care as much about the noise. Yes, I could change its settings from a thousand miles away, but I guess I could have lived without that feature 
A smart thermostat would be useful. “Brrrr, I’m cold. I don’t want to go upstairs / downstairs to check it. Lemme check the phone. OK, time to fix that!”.
I could be onboard with a smart thermostat that works via cell phone, NOT WiFi.
Do those exist? Some quick googling says… maybe, sorta, but most need WiFi. And actually, I don’t even need it to be all that smart. I just want to be able to manually control my thermostat through my phone because WiFi can go down or experience various connectivity issues.
Many nice things about a smart thermostat. I can turn it up when I’m in bed, I can turn it off when I am out and forgot to turn it off before I left, I can turn it on when I am leaving somewhere and will come home in a few minutes to a warm house.
I view a lot of these products as unnecessary security vulnerabilities. I was looking at new refrigerators last year and came across several models with WiFi capabilities. Admittedly, I am not an early adopter of technology as I prefer them to work whatever kinks out of the system before making a purchase. But why would I need or want WiFi on my refrigerator or a washing machine? I don’t need to control either one by remote nor do I need to monitor either from afar. The only advantage I can see if the app might tell me when I need to perform maintanence.
It does tell you about maintenance but all of those things are also on the screen on the machine itself. My dishwasher told me that I need more salt that way. I didn’t need an app for that. I can here my oven timer beep from anywhere in my house so no app needed there either.
Often things like this are there so that they are extensively tested for some future use that will be rolled out later but I can’t imagine what that would be.
This is my greatest concern. I doubt that the WiFi adapters in most IoT devices can be updated readily to fend off malware attacks (and rumor has it that some of them come with malware preinstalled).
I don’t have many IoT devices, and with one exception — the alarm console — they’re connected to a guest account on the router that blocks them from internet access.
I got a couple of quotes and made my choice and will be getting the new smart garage door motor installed on Friday. It has two hard remotes and a smart phone ap. As a bonus, there is a battery backup so it works when the power goes out.
I’m not an expert, so the only reason this is on my radar is because I read something about wireless cameras in their home being used by someone in another country to break into their system. This might have been 15+ years ago. There are probably a lot of people who don’t think about security when they make these purchases and hook things up to their WiFi.
At least with security cameras, I can certainly see why you’d want to hook those up to the internet. But for refrigerators, coffee makers, washing machines, etc., etc. the utility doesn’t seem worth the price. Do I really, really need WiFi tell my oven to turn on at 4:00 while I’m on my way home? Is that worth the extra price?
WiFi cat litter boxes exist.
I wish I was joking.
I built the first Twitter-enabled litterbox nearly 10 years ago. Technically just Bluetooth instead of Wi-Fi, but it had internet access. There have been many copies since then, including one from Purina.
My cat’s running wheel and treat dispenser are both on Wi-Fi. But I built both (well, the speedometer, not the wheel), so it’s ok. The wheel is connected to the treat dispenser, so my cat gets a treat after a decent run, even when it’s 4 AM.
I ordered a room humidifier, not realizing it was, ‘smart’.
So if I want to turn it down or off, in the night I can do so remotely.
But…I’d have to find my glasses, in the dark, then the unlock the phone, just to turn it down or off?
It said it was smart in the advert, but I def didn’t understand it had no other controls, and HAD to be operated that way!
It went right back in the box and back to Amazon. No thanks!
I have one now, and have had 2 others. Moderately useful, on occasion, but I don’t really use the Wi-Fi portion. The boxes are great tho!