And if you’re not home, what do you do?
I have a WiFi clothes washer, ovens, and garage door openers.
The garage door openers are great because I can open the door from my bike before I round the corner to my street. I can close them from anywhere if I forget to do it at home. They have cameras so I can see if someone came into or out of my garage. I lived without it for 25 years so not essential, but I do use it.
But I have never used the connected features of my washer or ovens. I can’t even figure out why you would want to. I think you can download custom laundry wash programs but I usually just hit Normal and go.
I have an Anova sous vide. The main advantage for WiFi there is that you can use the app to select a program based on a recipe (e.g., medium rare short ribs) and it sets the time and temperature for you.
My new car has Internet connectivity and can act as a WiFi hotspot, but that requires a paid subscription and it’s not worth it to me. I just use my phones (both Apple Car Play and Android whatever-they-call-it).
I can’t help but believe there’s an online community of people discussing and swapping the best custom laundry programs.
What’s even better is:
I can open my garage door by telling Siri “Open the Pod Bay Doors, Hal.”
As for WiFi enabled clothes washers and dryers - it’s pretty nice that they will send an alert when they are done, but still not as good as the remote alert I made for our old washer, which would ding every five minutes until it was reset. Our new LGs only send one alert, and it’s really easy to miss it.
Agree with the other garage door opener comments. That is very convenient, and we didn’t bother replacing the outdoor keypad, because it’s easy to use the app instead. I can even let other people with a MyQ account open the door.
I like the Wi-Fi connected car (well, mobile data when it’s not home). I can turn the heat or AC on remotely, including heating the seats; lock and unlock the doors; live view the cameras; roll up or down the windows; open the trunks (mine can’t close them, though); and see where it is. I use the climate ones all the time.
I don’t think I have any completely useless WiFi things. The WiFi on the robot vacuum was not too useful, but it was fun to look at the maps it drew. It died, though.
I would really like a WiFi connected clock that ran NTP to set itself. That’s all it should do on the network, nothing else.
All my home-built clocks are WiFi/NTP. They even adjust for DST. Got a Nixie tube one, a flipdot display, and an LED “filament” display. If only my oven and microwave did that…
Our two new Daikin air conditioners have wifi capability. The options are:
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to connect with it on a dedicated wifi network - so just the aircon and my phone, say - which prevents my phone being on the domestic wifi.Not going to happen.
-
to link it onto my domestic wifi - but that needs the wifi modem to have one of those buttons that you press when you want a dumb device to join it, and mine doesn’t.
So I gave up. The only possible use I can see is turning it on say 30 minutes before we get home on a hot day, but as we both work from home that is rare to non-existent. So no loss.
Yeah, can’t even turn it OFF or see what the timer is set to. W[hat w]ere they thinking?! I understand “can’t turn it ON remotely”, that could arguably be a safety issue. But OFF?
About the only reason I can imagine to have WiFi on those things (setting the clock).
I want something I can buy for $25, not a kit I have to build. What I’d like is one with red real 7-segment LEDs that are dim enough to not light a room at night.
Though a Nixie tube or flip clock with NTP would be really cool.
We do not allow Internet of Things, Alexa-like products, or voice-activated remotes in the house. The HVAC guys always act like we’re crazy not to want it, even though the last several thermostats have been easy to program. Nope. Too vulnerable, though they’re unconvinced by my itemization of all the ways even I know to screw with someone’s system if it’s wifi-enabled. I just read an article (on Malwarebytes, maybe) that detailed exactly the same list of exploitation and chaos that a hacker or stalker can cause. I was a counselor; yeah, people’s exes and kids and roommates do indeed remotely turn the heat all the way down while someone is on vacation, open the garage door, turn on the oven all week, etc.
I’m with you 100%. I have a mix of old and new appliances; none of them are network-capable, and I’m just fine with that. “The Internet of Things” strikes me as almost entirely a solution in search of a non-existent problem. What I require of my refrigerator is to keep things cold and my dishwasher to wash dishes, not to have conversations with about how they’re feeling or about propositions from Wittgenstein.
I only have that problem when I’m leaving the house, since when I’m inside I can open the door into the garage and make sure I’ve closed the outside garage door. I have sometimes actually returned home after a short distance to make sure that I pressed the button on the remote to close the garage door. I always have. The solution to this particular problem is not new-fangled comms technology, but just the discipline to be more attentive and less absent-minded.
No device of mine “phones home” to provide updates.
I forbid it.
If it fails to “function” without an update, it is discarded, with extreme prejudice. And replaced with an acceptable product. Excluded are mobile phones and other devices which have well understood operating systems whose updates are required for proper functioning.
Indeed. I take the tiniest amount of pride in being able to control simple devices, soldering irons notwithstanding, and use my tiny observational abilities to notice abnormalities.
However, I understand if one were demented or deranged, one may not have such confidence in one’s abilties.
Therefore, little gadgets are likely useful for patients/wards in assisted-living facilities.
We don’t find such gadgets helpful nor necessary. In fact, we find them intrusive and insulting.
If I leave the front door unlocked or the heat gun plugged in, I’d much prefer to know who is to blame, even though the truth may sting.
Maybe. I doubt you’ve considered which of LW’s “propositions” should have been considered.
If they did that, I’d be more interested.
You can change Alexa’s name if you want to, including to Jeeves.
As for me - can’t really see a purpose to appliances being internet-connected. I don’t see any utility for me
Yeah. That is the exact opposite of useful or “convenient” to me. I hate hate hate hate anything that pushes me to control it with my phone, an app, or anything like that. What if something happens to my phone? What if they WiFi is down? WTF would I want something with no controls on the device? Ugh.
If I say that to Alexa, she says, “I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that. Also, I’m not HAL, and we’re not in space.”
When I do this my choices are
- Alexa
- Amazon
- Computer
- Echo
- Ziggy
My garage door opener has this, which has definitely been useful for letting people into the house when they’ve forgotten their keys, or checking & closing the door because the teens never remember to close it themselves.
We just got a wifi-enabled washer, which has an app which will notify you when the laundry is done, which is slightly helpful if you’re in another room of the house. You can also download “specialty” cycles to the washer, but they appear to be mostly useless.
Agree 100% on that.
ABLE to control it with the app? Fine (except that, as noted, it’s hardly essential). REQUIRED to do so? Oh hell no.
My air filter has buttons on top to let me set the fan speed and turn it on and off. The app is amusing, and does add a little functionality (programmable schedule, and apparently I can set the speed to intermediate levels e.g. 2.4 versus 2 or 3).
As far as Alexa’s wake word: last I heard, you could only chose from a short list of values (funnily enough, as I’ve just been rewatching some old Quantum Leap episodes, Ziggy is one of them).
Oh yeah: if the appliance you want DOES have wi-fi, you can simply refuse to connect it to your home network. I don’t think there’s a vulnerablity, then.
But all in all, if I’ve got choices of devices, one with wi-fi and one without, I’m taking the non-connected one.
A few years back, someone at my husband’s company decided it would be lurvely to send all the employees Alexa smart speakers. I have NO IDEA why they made that decision. Everyone had to log on somewhere to say where to ship it. My husband didn’t want it. One of his colleagues was delighted with the gift - so my husband simply had “his” sent to the colleague’s house.
The two times it happened, we were home, but in a different part of the house. It alerts pretty quickly, so I don’t think you’d typically have time to leave home.