Maybe some people’s minds work differently than yours. Mine, as an example, is intelligent enough to realize that despite the apparently glaring flaw that I forget about the garage door on occasion. Like WTF?
Also, my house is configured in a way such that I can’t tell at a glance if it’s open or closed.
Ones I like:
Google Nest thermostat. Works great and saves money.
Wifi connected car for reasons @echoreply mentioned.
Smart plugs. We used to use those crappy electrical plug timers with the pins to control grow lights. We’ve now switched to smart plugs. Can set a schedule or use your phone to turn on and off. Use them for grow lights, use a schedule for the outdoor patio lights (they come on at dusk and turn off at 9:00PM), and also use them to control the added shop lights rather than putting in a dedicated switch leg.
Ones I’m meh about:
Anova sous vide. I just turn it on to the temp I need and use my phone timer.
Google Home - got one free and it lives in the garage. I rarely use it to play music since my bluetooth speaker sounds better. Should get rid of it.
I got a free Echo Dot for signing up for something or other. I didn’t even take it out of the box. My mom wanted one so I gave it to her. I can’t stand voice activated anything but that’s just a personal choice.
The only thing I have (besides a Nest not connected to anything else) is a dryer, which is useful since it pings me that drying is done. My office is in the other side of the house from the dryer, so I’d never remember otherwise.
A few years back I reviewed a bunch of books on IoT, and the pitiful security is scary. I’d never have my front door or garage door hooked up to it.
It’s easier to pick a lock than it is to hack a front door and you can easily use the standard range of frequencies for a regular remote garage door opener to open it that way. Am I really at a greater risk?
My garage doesn’t have an entry into my house. Am I really at any reasonable risk by adding the smart app?
I share your general attitude here, and so far have managed to avoid smart refrigerators, stoves, w/d, etc., let alone Roombas, icemakers, and what-have-you where (totally agreed) the device getting updates from Mother on its own initiative has a vaguely annoying and/or threatening quality.
However, my HVAC system recently outsmarted me for about 20 minutes: guests were about to arrive and the thermostat/controller system decided to take itself offline for an update during which time I couldn’t adjust the temp. This was anger-making, of course, especially since it had never done that before in 10 years to my knowledge, but what choice did I have when the system was installed? “Naw, just gimme one of them ol’ mercury-in-a-tube things” would probably not have cut it. Others here might be able to build their own thermostat to control a heat pump/furnace combo system, but I sure the heck couldn’t. This sort of thing is rapidly becoming entirely inescapable.
It doesn’t say specifically that these are WiFi, but they probably are:
How timely and how horrifying. It’s like that Black Mirror episode with the mechanical bees that were all benevolent and saving the earth and all, till they were sicced on a bunch of people. At least my toothbrush is safely confined to its little glass. For now.
Coffee pot with wi-fi. Alexa? Yeah They’re a thing.
I don’t want one. I wouldn’t set it up if my next pot comes with wi-fi.
I don’t see the need to start a coffee pot over the internet. I’m quite capable of pressing a button and waiting 5 mins for a pot to brew.
Nannybots, those toothbrushes.
Hell, I make my coffee without an electrical anything.
…
I notice I am not alone in not having claimed “your FREE Echo Smart Speaker!” when it got thrown in with some offer.
And yes, a product that you can only run from an app is to me slightly worse than one you can only run from the dedicated remote. At least dedicated remotes usually have a noticeable on/off button that does only exactly that and does it every time.
Me, I am still a believer in real switches that turn things on and off by actually physically breaking the circuit.
…
Takes inventory…
At home: WiFi enabled equipment is the computers, the printer/scanner, the tablets and smartphones and (at the family homestead) the security system. TVs at the “base home” are WiFi capable but hard-connected to the cable box because Mom categorically told the installer guy “at 80, I am NOT going to learn home networks. Wire that sucker so it works like a NORMAL TV.”
Nothing else is “conected” . Nothing else needs to be. I can look at my fridge in the morning myself to get a good idea of what I need to replenish.
I used a manual coffee grinder for years for my french press, but I still needed electricity to heat the water (we have a gas range, but the plug in electrical water heater is so much faster). I finally bought a Baratza grinder and have relegated the manual grinder to the camp box.
Which reminds me of a story the Register ran quite a while ago about a company who disassembled the firmware of a wifi-enabled vibrator. Among other scary things, the admin password was in the firmware in plain text.
I suspect stuff from reputable vendors is better, but I wouldn’t buy a wifi lock from certain websites that throw ads at you all the time.
I’ve got a smart thermostat which my wife enjoys using, but I haven’t bothered connecting my phone to.
My most useless wifi device is a meat thermometer which you stick in to a joint of meat when it’s in the oven, and it monitors the temp and predicts when the meat will be ready. Sounds great, except if you move your phone 3 feet away from the cooker, it loses connection and starts beeping warning signals to your phone. So basically pointless.
I do have smart lighting which helps me switch on all my lamps in one go and adjust the tone/brightness, which is fun. But boy it’s buggy - lamps often seem to lose connection and come up as ‘off line’.
It’s things like this that makes it a great idea to set up a VLAN on your home network for the “Internet of Things” devices, with firewall rules set up so they can only connect to the Internet–they cannot see each other and they cannot see anything else on the more genteel part of your home LAN.
Unfortunately, the list of people who can buy and set up Wi-Fi enabled devices is much larger than the list of people who understand the previous sentence.
Router manufacturers and device manufacturers ought to make it easier to be secure without needing to teach Grandma about VLANs.
I’m amazed by this. Within the last two years I have bought a washer, dryer, fridge, none internet connected. Nor do I recall that as an option, although maybe I ignored it. The only things that are our phones, our computers and the printer and thee utility is obvious. Although I noticed only a few months ago that the TV has buttons on the side of the screen that can turn it on and off and change channels. I have to admit that the remote controls for the TV, cable box, and tuner are very handy. I’m not sure the cable box can be used without the remote, but the other two can although not as conveniently.
I wish there was some comprehensible way to control the thermostat.
We don’t watch tv very often. In fact, it hadn’t been turned on in over a year. Our dog Simi destroyed the remote control and we haven’t bothered finding a replacement.
I remember the first time I saw a wi-fi enabled stove. It was in Costco while I was waiting for my number to come up for eyeglasses. I think my jaw actually fell open in disbelief, both at the notion and at the $7,000 price tag. While it’s remarkable that all of this technology has been achieved, it seems like any sort of catastrophic failure would leave you with nothing working. Of course, I’m a fuddy as well as a duddy at this point. I’m not shouting at clouds yet, but none of these products are of use to me other than the cell phone’s GPS feature.
When we bought our current house, it came with a “fancy” programmable thermostat. Our old house had one, but it was very simple to use. This new one was garbage. At random times during the week, the heat would come on and the former occupants were apparently 100 years old and liked it very warm, and this is after I thought I had turned off all the auto settings. I finally figured out how to pull the thing off and yank the battery.
Our utility company was giving away Nest thermostats and we got one. It was easy to install and no real programming. It paid attention to the temps we set, and when, and has come up with it’s own schedule which is pretty much on. When we leave the house, it goes into eco mode and when we come home, it turns back on. If it is really cold, we can remotely turn it back on to preheat our house. No more waking up in the middle of the night dripping sweat because the heater is blasting. We love it.
I love my Nest. I’ve had one for years. I also have a Nest smoke/CO2 detector. If it senses CO2, it communicates with the Nest and turns off the furnace.