My Automated Home – October 2018

My Automated Home

Each year I have posted a rundown of all of the smart home tech I have installed in my house.  Here is last year’s post, and here is the post from 2016.  What follows is a list of everything I have in place, and some of my wish list items and projects for the year to come.

Garage

What’s Installed: 

Smart Features In Use:

  • Auto on lights.  The wall mounted control boxes have motion sensors with nearly a 180 degree field of view.  The instant someone walks into the garage through the main doors, or the door to the house, the lights come on.  This is an awesome feature, as the garage is one place where you are very likely to be carrying things and not have a free hand to turn on the lights.  This can be toggled on or off, if for some reason you love the dark.
  • Auto closing doors.  Another optional feature, you can easily program the doors to close after 1, 5 or 10 minutes of inactivity (as detected by the motion sensors).  This can be overridden with a hold button on the control units.
  • Remote opening/closing doors.  This requires the MyQ internet gateway and the Chamberlain MyQ app.  This alerts me when a door has been open for a prescribed amount of time, in my case four hours.  It also gives me the ability to open the garage for guests or deliveries, or close it if I left home and forgot.
  • Blue Link Apps and Alexa Skill.  With the apps on our phones and the Alexa skill installed, we have a number of options to remote start, lock, unlock or find our Sonata.  Check out my review of Blue Link here.  As you’ll read in the review, after the Blue Link free trial ended, we stopped using the features.  Blue Link is an expensive subscription service and responds far too slowly for me to justify the cost.

Integrations:

  • It’s been four years since I bought my openers and over a year since I last updated this column, and still, MyQ doesn’t work with anything.  Chamberlain/Liftmaster claims this is a security measure, but I think it’s also partially because they don’t care.  MyQ works with Wink, Nest and HomeKit, but as far as I’m aware none of these will let you open your garage doors.  You can now pay to use MyQ with IFTTT, making MyQ one of the only smart home devices demanding a subscription to work with IFTTT.
  • Hyundai Blue Link has an Alexa skill that is useful when it recognizes your commands.  You have to pay a yearly fee to use Blue Link, and there are three tiers to the fee structure, so depending on what you want it could be $99-$299/year.  As mentioned above, the functionality doesn’t justify the price.  If there is one integration that MyQ should allow, it’s integration with cars!  Unfortunately that’s not the case.

Kitchen

What’s Installed:

Smart Features In Use:

  • Insteon Scenes. We currently have scenes for Nighttime, which turns on all of the downstairs lights at dusk and turns them off after we go to bed, Movie Time, which dims the den and living room lights, turns off the kitchen lights and stops the Sonos, and Dinner, which turns off the den lights, dims the living room and kitchen lights and plays a preset station on Sonos.
  • Turn lights on at dusk.  Through the Insteon app, I configured the kitchen lights to automatically turn on at dusk and turn off at 11:30 PM in case we forget to turn them off at night.
  • Echo.  Virtually every feature that can be used, we are using.
  • Bond. One Bond controller can turn up to six RF controlled ceiling fans into smart fans.  Although this is installed in the kitchen, it controls fans throughout the house.  It easily connected with Alexa, giving me the ability to control each of the fans, their lights, or all of the fans with simple voice commands.
  • With Ring Alarm I now have sensors on all of the doors and windows in the house, as well as motion sensors in the common areas.  This will come in handy as my toddlers start opening doors.

Integrations:

  • All of the Insteon devices are controlled by our Amazon Echo.  I have groups configured for “den lights,” “living room lights,” “kitchen lights,” “downstairs lights,” and “the whole house.”  This allows us to use natural commands to control each room, the entire downstairs or the whole house, which is the downstairs plus backyard lights.
  • The Insteon hub can control the Sonos to a degree, and we are using it in scenes, but the Echo cannot trigger the scenes or control the Sonos.  The same goes for the Nest, which is integrated with the Insteon hub, but not controlled by the Echo in that manner.
  • Bond is controlled by Alexa via voice commands and routines.  I also have a few IFTTT routines to turn the fans on if the temperature on either Nest thermostat hits certain thresholds.
  • Alexa is present in one way or other throughout the entire house.  It can control every device but the garage door openers.

Dining Room

What’s Installed:

Smart Features In Use:

  • Nest Daily schedules.  It took a lot of tweaking at first, but this has been in place for almost two years running the same schedule.

Integrations:

  • MyQ.  Yeah, so my thermostat can apparently talk to my garage doors and they can try to figure out if I’m home or not based on an open/close cycle…or something.  I still have not seen any value from this.
  • Insteon/Nest.  If/when I create a “Vacation” scene I will incorporate the Nest.  Otherwise I have no reason to be adjusting my heat all that often.
  • Alexa: Voice control of the lights and the thermostat are table stakes for smart homes these days.

Den

What’s Installed:

Smart Features In Use:

  • Insteon Scenes. We currently have scenes for Nighttime, which turns on all of the downstairs lights at dusk and turns them off after we go to bed, Movie Time, which dims the den and living room lights, turns off the kitchen lights and stops the Sonos, and Dinner, which turns off the den lights, dims the living room and kitchen lights and plays a preset station on Sonos.
  • Harmony Activities.  I upgraded from the Harmony One to the Harmony Ultimate including the Harmony Hub.  This gave us even more opportunities to make useful activities.  While I could previously tap activities to watch TV or Play Wii, now I can easily specify the content I want.  Instead of just turning on the Roku activity, I can turn on Netflix.

Integrations:

  • The Harmony Hub lets me integrate with just about everything.  The Alexa integration makes it easy to ask to turn on specific content.  Saying “Alexa, turn on NBC” knows I mean to activate the Turn on the TV action and then change the channel to NBC.  I also created routines in the Alexa app, such as Movie Time, which turns on my entertainment center with the Plex app open on Roku, while dimming the lights in the Den, Living Room and Kitchen.
  • The Echo Dot in this room is linked to the Fire TV, so I can control everything on screen with voice commands.  Couple that with the Harmony features above, and my entertainment center is fully voice activated.

Living Room

What’s Installed:

Smart Features In Use:

  • Insteon Scenes. We currently have scenes for Nighttime, which turns on all of the downstairs lights at dusk and turns them off after we go to bed, Movie Time, which dims the den and living room lights, turns off the kitchen lights and stops the Sonos, and Dinner, which turns off the den lights, dims the living room and kitchen lights and plays a preset station on Sonos.
  • Protect.  The protect works as a motion sensor for the Nest thermostat.  Since I had a baby last January, I re-enabled the motion sensing on all of my Nest products to keep the house cool or hot when we are home.
  • SmartCam. We’ve long since stopped using motion recording as it kept filling the SD card with videos of the dog.  This camera only gets used if we’re out of the house for long stretches and want to check on the dog.
  • Hue. Since Insteon doesn’t see a need to develop a widget for phones and tablets, I’ve slowly started changing all of our lamps over to Hue.  All Hue bulbs on the first floor turn on at dusk and off at 11 PM.  I’ve installed a few Hue Smart Dimmer Switches throughout the house for the people that cant grasp the concepts of automated or voice activated lighting.

Outside

What’s Installed:

Smart Features In Use:

  • The Wemo switches are all configured to automatically turn on at dusk and shut off at 11:30 PM.
  • The Wemo at my back door has a long press action that turns on both Wemo switches.
  • The LED entry lights were basically set it and forget it.  The switches controlling them are always in the on position, and the lights come on at dusk and shut off at dawn like clockwork.
  • I upgraded the floodlights above my garage from motion activated LEDs to the Ring Floodlight Cam.  This gives me a full view of the driveway and the side of my house
  • The RainMachine is installed in my basement, but obviously controls the exterior sprinklers.  After the initial setup, I haven’t interacted with it often.  It determines when to water and how much.

Integrations:

  • The Wemo’s are all flawlessly controlled by the Echo.  I can turn on “the backyard lights” to access them all at once, or I can toggle them individually with separate groups I set up.  They are also included in a group with my Insteon devices called “the whole house” to allow me to toggle my entire first level and backyard at once.
  • The pool light now has an Insteon dimmer that can be controlled via the Insteon app or Alexa.  I can set the light anywhere from 10% to 100%.  This is part of its own Alexa group as I don’t always want it to turn on with the outside lights (ie mid winter when the cover is on and there is a foot of snow on the pool).
  • I created IFTTT recipes to operate the RainMachine with the Echo (see below).  For now, the most important rule was being able to tell Alexa to turn off the sprinklers, in the event we were using part of the yard when they came on.

Upstairs

What’s Installed:

Smart Features In Use:

  • The Fire TV stick comes with Alexa, and when it is paired with an Echo through the Alexa app, you can control your devices with voice commands through the remote.  This has been awesome for all those times when I am just falling asleep and the dog decides she needs to go out.  Turning on the lights before I go downstairs has eliminated a lot of cursing when tripping over dog toys.
  • Every room that isn’t a bathroom on the second floor has an Echo Dot installed.
  • The Hue Wireless Dimming Kit comes with a wall mountable remote that has been installed in our nursery.
  • The Samsung BrightView baby monitor includes two HD, night vision cameras with full pan, tilt and zoom control.  They are installed in the nursery and my daughter’s room. They are wirelessly controlled by a 5.1″ touch screen monitor.  Truth be told, this system is terrible.  The video monitor leaves a lot to be desired in both the software and control areas, the cameras mount terribly on walls, and the battery life is abysmal.  If I had to do it over again I’d spend my $300 elsewhere.

Integrations:

  • As mentioned above, the Echo/Fire TV integration comes in handy.
  • The Google Home Mini is my test unit for this site.  It is configured to control everything in the house the same as Alexa.

Other

Wishlist

  • After five years of owning my garage door openers, Chamberlain/Liftmaster allowed third parties to integrate with their garage door openers…for a fee. I hate you Chamberlain/Liftmaster. I hate you.  I still hope to someday actually integrate these doors with the rest of the house.
  • Smart blinds for all of my first floor windows would be awesome.  We get a lot of sun and this would really help regulate the house temperature during the day.
  • I’m expecting to see a huge increase in integrations between Amazon and Ring products in the next few months.  This also goes for Ring Alarm working with other Ring devices, as they’re currently two separate systems controlled by the same app.
  • I’m going to be finishing my basement this winter, and I’m looking forward to creating a smart space from scratch.  This will include lighting, heat, a camera for the playroom, and a home theater.
  • By next summer I hope to have a backyard music solution in place.  Carrying the Sonos out to the pool bar every day has gotten tired.
  • I’ve been purposely avoiding smart locks, but now that we have the Ring Alarm, I may start looking for something that integrates well with the rest of the house.