No Z-Wave, just cheap lights

Since I'm automating stuff anyway - I think I've found a couple of things that aren't worth automating.

In my washroom, there's a light which is usually on (it's the 'nightlight' for the kids and the rest when they come downstairs at night, plus it lures the gulf mosquitoes that sneak in into a spot far away from the humans).  It's dark when I leave, usually dark when I come back, so it's on 24x7.  I was thinking of putting a Z-Wave switch there, but a switch is $32, and the old fluorescent light was only taking $30 a year in power anyway even using a hippie wind power provider, so best case it would take two years to pay off the switch anyway.

Fortunately (?), the starter went out on the old fixture and made this easier.  A replacement starter and fresh bulbs would be $30 anyway, so I trashed the old fixture and got a low end LED fixture to replace it.  The new fixture takes less than 10 watts and is, well, blinding.  It's cold to the touch and looks like a small sun in the ceiling.  It actually look pretty good.  It's as good looking as the old school 'eye ball' lights that are trendy in a lot of houses, but without letting the attic gush into your home all winter.  And I got it delivered for $30.

This new fixture takes a whopping $7 a year to run 24x7 - so cost wise I would need almost 10 years of automation to pay for the switch.  Needless to say, I'm not replacing the switch.  I'll probably stick more of these cheap lights in as the old fluorescent bulbs die off until something better comes along.

Unless it's for fun only - unless something is over 50 watts it seems like a waste to blow money on a Z-Wave switch to automate it.  So for my house, the only things left are kitchen and the bathrooms - all of which are left running constantly with so many people running back and forth in the house now.   Bang for buck, under cabinet lighting and  upstairs bathroom seem the best bets.

I'm also waiting on my Echo to show up, which is supposedly easily to integrate with SmartThings over REST - so stay tuned.  :-P

Hue and cry, villain, go! Philips Hue in my home automation system

Okay, I didn't actually buy the Hue, but the Lux.  I don't need rave lights in my house.  Shakespeare quotes make the blog more classy is all.  :-)

The Lux is a wireless bulb that's more than a little pricey.  Really for the cost of this thing you can get a good quality LED build and a Z-Wave switch to control it.  The only real advantage of this is that the bulb is dimmable (most of the cheaper Z-Wave switches don't support dimming) and it's a decent option where you can't get the fatter smart switches installed.  There's no way that I could get a Z-Wave switch installed into a few of the outlets in the house just because of the tangle of connections in there, so I got some of these for those areas.

Installing it is easy - you need the smartphone app installed and you just mash the big button on the top of the hub to make it findable.   The kits all come with the hub, or you can snag one off eBay (the kits are a bit cheaper than buying the parts, so there are a lot of extra hubs out there) .  You hit the same button to chain it to the SmartThings hub.

The troublesome switches now have Lux bulbs and are happily turning off and on through the SmartThings switch automatically.

What sucks about this is that if somebody forgets and turns off the wall switch, the automation is broken since the bulb is 'dead' by that point.  Also it's expensive.  Z-Wave is cheaper for a big house by a huge margin.

I think the only time this would make sense is if you have a few unreplacable switches (like me) or if you are renting.  For an apartment this is awesome - you could replace the 4-5 bulbs in your place and completely automate the lights using your smartphone.  The Hue does support basic rules so you could get by just with the bulbs and the 'free' hub.  For a onesy-twosy case I found a cheaper option that I'll talk about later.  I sort of regret buying these bulbs now, but they're not a bad option.  There's just a better one if you own and already have something like SmartThings.

Home Automation #2 - SmartThings

Like I mentioned before, my old GE XT alarm system is getting pretty old - a lot of things don't work right with it and it's sort of flaky anyway.  As an alarm it's awesome but the Z Wave seems a bit challenged.

I did some research and found what seems to be the best deal for somebody who doesn't want to futz around with Raspberry Pi and doing everything themselves: SmartThings hub.

It's cheap, works okay, and does a pretty good job.  Like everything else though, there's a downside.

It's all cloud-based, so everything ends up being processed on their AWS instance.  Normally this is awesome - everything works the same everywhere and it's all good.  I have found so far though that the back end will sometimes (and judging by the support log, pretty often), suffer rolling capacity problems as all of the millions of devices being controlled turn on or off.  After I got my hub, I thought it was broken for hours just because the service was busy enough nothing seemed to be happening.

Once it settled down though, it's working pretty well.  Everything needs to be done from the Android/iOS app for basic operations.  It's pretty simple - you turn on the Z Wave and hit 'add' on the app and it finds it.  My Hue hub worked just as easily.  Being a group of nerds though - this is too boring.  Which is why SmartThings has...

An IDE.  There's a built-in support for Groovy, which is an unlovable version of the Pascal of the new millennium, Java.  It's easy to write and pretty much anyone who managed to slog through a high school computer science course in the past 10 years can write it easily.  So you can make a 'driver' for any random device that you happen to have, and as long as the SmartThings AWS or the local box can talk to your device or gadget somehow, you are good.  Which is really nice - and if you have some hardware ability you could make all sorts of crazy crap.  Anything that can talk REST can be plugged in, so you could make an automated dog house or whatever you want and it will just plug in, and you can share the code with everyone,

Judging by the forums, there's a big group of people making all sorts of gadgets that plug into this API.  Seems like a good buy so far - but as always I'll complain bitterly if things start to look otherwise.  :-)