Smart hjem/Smart Home

Much has been written about “smart homes” for years, but from my perspective, it seemed expensive, offering only minor benefits, and seemingly only relevant if building a new house from scratch. So despite an innate interest in technology and gadgets, I steered clear.

However, when a thermostat broke in the fall of 2017, I figured this could be an opportunity to take a closer look at this world and whether a smarter thermostat was an option. Checking with several electric installation companies quickly confirmed my suspicion that these only offered traditional, “offline” thermostats. This triggered a round of investigation into the market of smart thermostats, i.e., that are connected, remote controllable and possible to integrated with other components.

After a couple of attempts, I found a suitable solution for our needs, in the form of a Heatmiser neoStat-e. As many others have experienced, smart components have a strong tendency to procreate, and for me, this became the starting point for a continuous project of investigating opportunities for upgrading all kinds of “systems” in the house, followed by stepwise investments i more and more units as well as programming of increasingly more complex interactions among the components and systems.

This has been both time consuming and eventually not an inexpensive process, but it has also been a fun process that has really turned into a new hobby. And while I know that many out there have much more experience and knowledge about home automation that what little I have accumulated, I have also realized that there often are lacking resources out there to help people starting on a similar journey to mine (what I have found is that sites, forums, etc. do provide a lot of information, but scattered across a lot of places and often either at a trivial level or too complex). The purpose of this site is therefore simply to share, in one place, my experiences about which parts of a home that can be “made smart”, benefits that can be achieved, solutions to various needs, assessments of specific products, etc.

The site will be under continuous development where I gradually add information about new solutions and products. As the menu on the right indicates, the site is structured along three dimensions to make it easier to find information pertaining to any projects you are considering; by type of system, by room, by component type, and by manufacturer of products. However, a disclaimer up front; I will never aim to provide complete and comprehensive overviews of manufacturers or their products. This is a very dynamic market with products being launched, withdrawn, or updated all the time.

And I am sure that many will see and be irritated by the fact that I favor products compatible with Apple Home. This is not something I try to hide; I am fully entrenched in the Apple ecosystem, but most of what I write about will work perfectly well on other platforms as well, and we do also have an Amazon Echo in the house.

Throughout the site, I provide extensive links to other sites, and as I have mentioned, there are many sites and forums out there useful for the budding home automator. It would be impossible to provide any attempt at a comprehensive collection of links so I will not even try, but I will mention two places that have been invaluable to me in terms of keeping track of new Apple Home-compatible products:

• HomeKitNews.com, a site that keeps a big ear to the ground about new products being launched; many of the products I have installed have started from news published here

• Apple’s own overview of HomeKit-compatible products in different categories; the US version is the most comprehensive since there are more products developed for the US market, but look for the version in your own country to see what is sold there

• An even more extensive overview is presented at Apple’s page listing iOS accessories, where many products are included that are not found on the HomeKit page

And should you decide to investigate less or more complex solutions for your own home and get stuck or wonder about some details of my solutions not presented on the site, please feel free to get in touch. I will try to answer your queries to the best of my time and ability. You should be be aware that no matter which platform you choose, which types of components you prioritize, and which manufacturers you buy products from, this is still a technology that requires continuous and active troubleshooting. Sometimes this is a matter of restarting a device, in other cases it requires more advanced investigations, and it is still far from “plug-and-forget” - thus you are warned…