Hey guys
So, I'm pretty burnt out on my car project, so I haven't felt much like talking car problems lately. Even this year, I didn't touch the thing until Memorial Day. That's unprecedentedly late in the season for a start. I see so many cars for sale where the ads says "pretty much done just needs the final tweaks". Those are people that are right where I'm at. Burnt out. The car is all put together, but try as you might, it just never seems to come together and be what you want.
So, since I can't be expected to, y'know deal with life straight on , I found myself another distraction. I started buying smart home stuff. I started by watching youtube videos about it. The stuff didn't make sense to me at first. There is a bit of a learning curve, even for the most basic devices. But there's a lot of really cool stuff you can do. I don't know how we got along without it for so long.
I chose Alexa as our "platform" to base everything on. It seemed like a good place for beginners and there are a lot of fun things the kids can do with her. From there, I bought a few smart switches. It seems like most people do smart bulbs, but it seemed to me smart switches are a better value, and I don't mind tinkering with home electrical. We used it at first to make our house look occupied when we were away on trips. You can tell it when to turn the lights on and off, and there are lights we have on pretty much all the time when we're home and it's dark out. So it works great for that. From there, I decided it would be good for our mental well-being to maybe have the house a bit brighter. Our living room has no overhead light, just 4 lamps, and it's annoying to have to go around and turn them all on one at a time. So we pretty much never did. I added smart plugs to them and now we can turn them on with one click or voice command.
It started to really explode from there. We have to get up for school crazy early in the morning, so now we have "sunrise" alarms that bring the lights up gradually to wake us up instead of a blaring alarm clock. I upgraded our wifi to a mesh system. The kids were constantly asking when and where mommy works, and what was for dinner, so now we have a display in the family room that shows those calendar items all the time. The Amazon Echoes can act as an intercom, so we don't have to yell across the house anymore.
There have been problems, of course. Devices that won't work together like you think they will, setup taking far longer than it needs to, signals not reaching far enough... Last year we had a major leak develop on our sprinkler system while we were away on a trip. I want a way to monitor water usage, but the component I want to use for that, that includes a shut-off valve, can't be had right now because of shortages. I had my TVs on smart outlets in an effort to defeat "Standby mode" and save some energy. But apparently modern TVs don't like that and it fried one of ours. Ugh. And when you use Alexa, you are kind of at her mercy. It they have an outage, it's pretty inconvenient. Luckily with smart switches, you always have manual control unlike with smart bulbs.
Anyone else in on this? What's been your experience?
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