Is a smart home all this for someone?

Recently, in a blog of a colleague in the workshop, a controversy flared up on what “smart home” is. I wanted to make my five kopecks, but it turned out more and took shape in a separate article.

Indeed, that only a smart home is not called, smart bulbs, a kettle sending SMS to reach 100 degrees, a vacuum cleaner rolling around cats in the absence of owners, a slow cooker running from the couch with a phone a, and other nonsense ... , but the word "smart" in all these ideas is clearly superfluous.

Recently, a sect of Internet witnesses has also been observed, zealously waving the IoT flag and including in this incomprehensible three-letter abbreviation and smart home too.
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Also often argue the need and even payback smart home. So how do you sell a smart home to a client, and why is it put up at all?

I will try to answer these questions by describing my personal point of view.

Why do we need a smart home?

There are many reasons why people think of a smart home. Here are the main ones:

• Security
  Sensors installed around the perimeter and in the house, as well as video cameras provide monitoring of the state of the house and residents. This is not a replacement for a security agency, but rather a calm for yourself: it means that everything is in order at home.
• Comfort
  A convenient management interface located in a convenient location is what a person so often lacks in a classic home. UI / UX in our homes suffers. The tenant-oriented infrastructure allows you to save a person from unnecessary trouble, to make life a little easier. For example, old thermal heads on batteries or heated floors with risks of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 are now replaced by a human-loving interface that allows us to indicate the degrees Celsius that we understand. And the systems of the future will already operate with even simpler terms “I'm cold” / “I'm hot”. The ability to customize lighting (light dimming system, setting up zone lighting) also improves comfort. But the management from the phone - perhaps the most unnecessary from this section, but for some reason is the hallmark of smart home systems.
• Saving
  Smart homes can also provide real savings by optimizing the use of energy resources. It is in this aspect that the payback of the smart home system is often talked about. However, let us not harbor illusions - saving on lighting practically does not work. The best thing to do here is to install LED lamps. Another thing with heating - here you can really save up to 30% by optimizing the temperature profiles and turning off unnecessary circuits in the absence of tenants. Also, charging electric cars and all sorts of washing, too, help to save a little at the expense of night rates.
• Greenness
  This is a special category. I deliberately brought it apart from savings, because understanding that you are “planet friendly” is often more important than real savings. For example, to understand that you are spending more renewable energy (“windmills” or solar), and not the energy of nuclear power plants. At the same time, NPP energy is actually cheaper in most countries. Or that you reduced this year's CO exhaust by 0.01% compared to a year earlier (despite the fact that the contribution of your household to the exhaust so was insignificant).
• Family care / health monitoring
  Opportunity to “secretly monitor” elderly relatives for the purpose of preventive response to non-standard behavior. In case of deviations from the usual behavior of old people, the system can notify you - it is enough just to call and ask “how are you”, without indicating that your smart home has notified you of something. Old men do not feel themselves a burden and at the same time they are always “under the hood”. Also, awareness of the occupation of children while you are at work will add to your peace of mind.
• Automation
  In general, many people confuse the terms "smart home" and "home automation." Indeed, without automation, it is impossible to make a smart home. Automation allows you to remove various duties from a person. For example, turning on and off lights in a corridor is easily automated by a motion sensor and a relay. Heating control is conveniently automated by a schedule or even sensors that detect the presence of a tenant in the house. Instead of running around and twisting the thermostats around the house, it’s enough to set up the system once. But the automatics will become really interesting, when it will be able to understand without any prior adjustments what you need from it. Well, why should I configure that this switch should turn on the world? Smart home let him guess or at least ask me.
• Configurability
  This is perhaps a very undervalued property of smart homes. The ability to change settings and connections will allow residents to adapt the smart home to changing life situations. The appearance of children or rearrangements often require not only changing the settings, but even changing the location of switches and sensors. Here the star topology comes to the rescue with the setup at just one point (controller), as well as radio protocols, such as Z-Wave, which do not allow the switches and sensors to be tied to wires, but locate them anywhere. A smart home should grow with you.
• Remote access
  The ability to manage the infrastructure at home, while traveling or at work is very convenient. For example, start heating in a country house or air conditioning in hot summer. I also include notifications from smart home subsystems to this group (as these alerts are worthless without remote access!) Monitoring the current state of the house will allow you to avoid unpleasant weather situations, such as freezing water pipes in extreme cold.
• Show off
  In the end, this is an important reason to order the installation of a smart home in your palace. After finishing the floors with marble, and the walls with Venetian plaster, you seem to be a caveman if you can’t steer the voice control installed with multi-million hardware;)

We rank these categories in order of priority for different countries. We are talking about some kind of average user request a smart home. Of course, specific needs may differ - I note that this is my personal assessment, which does not coincide with the opinion of the company and the policies of the party.

Russia	Northern Europe	USA
Security Show off Comfort Remote access Automation	Saving Greenness Automation Care for loved ones Configurability Remote access	Comfort Security Automation Remote access

Such is our country - we are afraid, we understand, we don’t save much, but we want to control everything and live in comfort.

People in Denmark, Holland, Germany, Sweden (the main places for the sale of smart homes in Europe, especially in the DIY format), it is important to think about what they think about nature. They definitely save and want to automate many household trifles (there is a greater percentage of households compared to apartments). And yes, there is a very aging population where old children are caring for their parents, i.e. care for loved ones there pay attention.

In the US, people for the comfort, security of personal space and laziness. The rest doesn’t bother them much due to more frequent crossings and cheaper oil.

Approaching thinking about the need for a smart home at home, it’s worthwhile to go over this list and understand what tasks of the smart you are interested in. The choice of technology, equipment and the concept of building a system significantly depends on this.

Wait a minute, but where is the mind?

Let's return to the phrase "smart home". So far there hasn't smelled smart here - all some kind of pre-configured connections and predetermined logic.

Indeed, the term "smart home" for several decades has overtaken the technological capabilities of systems bearing this loud name.

Let's take a look at the past and see how the management in the house has changed over the past 100 years:

• Stage 1 - direct control
  Before coming to visit, we knocked on the door. And the "bell" sounded in the same place where we punched. Similarly, to turn on the lamp it was necessary to approach it and light it.
• Stage 2 - Remote Control
  People quickly became lazy and came up with a bell with a string - a bell inside, and a cord outside. Then came electric lights with the ability to turn on the light without climbing a stepladder, electric door bells, and then IR control panels.
  The control is still available only in the light / dark mode or it is cold / hot to me, i.e. a person needs to twist the wheels with some obscure numbers.
• Stage 3 - Ubiquitous On-Site Automation
  Management becomes “make me comfortable”, i.e. Automation in the end devices itself monitors the on / off, maintaining the set temperature. We began to manage parameters that were convenient for us — temperature, and not modes with device-dependent power scales.
  Sensors allow you to no longer press the buttons, they can maintain the level of illumination in the room themselves. Schedule solves periodic tasks, sensors report problems.
• Stage 4 - all of the microcontroller - “configurable home”
  Cheaper devices led to the ability to install very cool brains, even in the most simple switch. Now the devices do not just make decisions, but can be customized. It becomes possible to reuse equipment in the changed conditions, reconfiguring connections and logic. Personally, I call this “configurable home”, because it’s not at all clever. It is at this stage that smart homes are now . Those. not yet smart.
• Stage 5 - from the watchman to the adviser
  Already, there are experimental systems that prompt the user how to optimize housing costs. They are only analyzing your consumption and habits and giving recommendations. Such systems can also make more distant conclusions. For example, if in some apartment the temperature is lower than that of the others in the house, perhaps there is a problem with the insulation of the windows (or the neighbors like fresh air;)?
• Stage 6 - Self-Learning Systems and Behavior Analysis
  The beginnings of such systems also exist, for example, the Nest thermostat. These systems will not ask too many questions, but simply learn. Compared to step 5, the system will not even report a problem if it was able to fix it.
• Stage 7 - part of the smart city
  This is such a "communism" in the world of utilities. But objectively significant changes in energy consumption can be achieved only by allowing the city operator to intervene in certain household processes (the time for turning on the washer and drying, charging the electric car). Here the private / common face will be fine. But definitely in the future, the smart home will have to take into account the urban environment and weather conditions.

The above-mentioned article about the new LM Wall dealt with stages 2-4. And LM, alas, does not offer anything new here, except for the next overprotocol combine capable of managing everything and everyone. There are many, and some Fibaro Home Center or Z-Wave.Me RaZberry , or even a monster OpenHAB - its complete counterparts, differing only in interface, API and the convenience of pulling up external protocols. LM Wall is a cool solution at a great price (the preliminary price is really good), in a good design and a very rich automation tool ... But again, not about the smart home.

Alas, we are not doing everything here (and we, Z-Wave.Me too;). So far all existing decisions about the configured house.

As you can see, only stages 5-7 are like a smart home in the sense that we have been inspired by myths and stories about the smart home of Bill Gates, built 20 years ago. For now it is necessary to live in the configured house and to name it clever.

I have a personal assumption when the smart home will still become smart, but more on that another time, because this futuristic opus will not fit in this article ...