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Home automation - why? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by Loucypher@lemmy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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I am failing to see the interest in having tons of IOT devices to manage, connect, segment, etc… Why would someone want to do it? To be clear, I have friends deep in it but… I still don’t understand. Can anyone try to explain the magic I am failing to see?

Edit: Thank you all for sharing your experiences! The ones I found more interesting are those that can easily translate in reducing or tracking consumption. The rest I hear but makes more sense when I look at it from an hobbyist perspective.

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[–] Hexarei@programming.dev 13 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Honestly for me the draw is in minimizing the mental/emotional overhead of forgetfulness. My wife and I both have ADHD, and I have autism. That leads to a potent combination of spacing out and forgetting even very important things.

So both in service of that and as a fun hobby (My special interest is computing), I have automation using presence detection, various timers, Z-wave outlets/light switches (I refuse to use IoT, I prefer local access/control every time), GPS position and various stuff like that, in order to avoid things like leaving our home theater projector powered on unwatched (reducing bulb lifetime), leaving the oven on, leaving the espresso machine on (boiler heating water over and over again unnecessarily, wasting thousands of watt-hours of electricity), turning reptile enclosure lights on/off on a schedule with sunrise/sunset, that sort of thing.

I have this ultimate vision in my head of my bedtime routine going from "Walk through the whole house for a few minutes and lock doors/turn things off" to "Triple-click my bedroom light switch 'off' and it turns off the rest of the house lights/TVs/projectors, reduces AC temperature a couple degrees, locks the doors, arms the security system for 'home', locks the car...". You get the idea.