My first foray into home automation was playing with a Google Home unit I found amongst a whole bunch of disused junk I was tidying up for a relative. It had never been used so I plugged it in, downloaded the app and had lots of fun asking about the weather, getting it to tell me a joke and anything else I could think of.
I soon found myself at a local big-box store asking for a shiny new Google Home of my very own. The helpful salesperson confidently told me that for the full experience he recommended I paired it with a Logitech Harmony remote control hub for my TV. I left the store a little poorer but very excited to play with my new toys.
WAF (Wife Approval Factor)
Upon arriving home, I plugged in the Google Home and Harmony Hub. While the Google Home was fun and even useful with its intuitive voice control, the Harmony Hub was complex. It required us to control the TV in an awkward and unfamiliar manner. Also, at least in our opinion, really didn’t integrate that well with the Google Home.
Neither my wife nor I found the Harmony Hub very useful. I’ve got it out of the box to have a play a couple of time since then to give it another go but still can’t find a way to make it fit the way we live. The Harmony Hub is one of the various expensive paperweights smart home products that didn’t work out in our house.
This was my introduction to a concept that is often referred to as WAF or “Wife Approval Factor”. It’s a handy concept, acknowledging that it’s generally men who like to play with home automation and impose it upon their long-suffering wives. If the new functionality is genuinely useful and convenience, it earns a high “wife-approval-factor”.
An example of something that might earn a high “wife-approval-factor” could be a robotic vacuum cleaner. One that actually cleans the carpet gets the whole house and doesn’t make a nuisance of itself. Conversely, a coloured bulb that has to be controlled from a phone app and requires that the light switch never be switched off is likely to earn a low “wife-approval-factor”.
If you can’t set a good example…
I guess you won’t be surprised to hear that I’m a bit of a magpie. I like shiny new toys and am prone to purchasing stuff because it looks interesting.
I’m prone to impatience and learning through painful by experience rather than because I sit down and think things through. I’m choosing to describe my approach as being in keeping with the maxim: “If you can’t be a good example, at least be a horrible warning”.
If you like the horrible warning approach, you might want to take a look at Troy Hunt’s excellent series of IOT Unravelled articles over at his website. His experiences and conclusions mirror many of my own and draw some of the same conclusions.
Getting started questions
Here are a set of questions you should ask yourself:
1. What are you trying to achieve?
This one is a favourite of my frustratingly intelligent and experienced IT architect friend Mike. On my more adventurous days, I feel answering this question destroys the opportunity for discovering interesting new things. In retrospect, I have to acknowledge that Mike’s helped me out of a fair amount of self-inflicted pain and frustration that was non-productive and easily avoidable.
There are undoubtedly an almost endless set of things you might want to achieve with home automation, but in practice, all the ones I can think of seem to fall into these categories:
- I like to play with toys!
- I have some problem/niggle that I’d like to address
- I’m building/renovating and figure it’s worth building in some options for the future.
- I’d like to make some aspect of my home more efficient, or be able to monitor and track so I can get a better idea of what’s costing me money.
Taking each of these in turn:
1. Okay, you got me, it sounds fun
This one is my primary motivator. While each of the other categories also fit me to some extent, they’re mostly just the way I justify my hobby.
Experience teaches that beyond getting yourself a voice assistant from Google or Amazon (or where ever), this isn’t enough motivation to give your tinkering a useful direction. With just this, there’s a strong chance you’ll end up frustrated, possibly with a set of disjointed smart home products with a low Wife Approval Factor.
2. I’ve got this annoying problem I’d like to address
Our local council has required that rainwater be collected in tanks for the last several years. We have two of them at different places on the property. They look huge and unsightly but seem to hold a lot less water than I anticipated. In theory, they should be perfect for watering the garden and keeping costs down. They should also let me water the garden after it’s rained during periods of water restriction. The problem is that I can’t easily tell how much water is in the tank and it either empties too quickly or sits unused while I use the metered water supply. By attaching a simple battery-powered distance monitor connected to the lid of each tank that talks back to the house through WiFi, I can immediately see the current water level either on my computer, on a tablet mounted on the wall or any other way that I feel like notifying myself.
A friend had an issue with a water leak he couldn’t track down. Adding water flow meters in strategic places allowed him to track down and fix the problem and then keep an eye on his water usage generally.
Other examples might include, tracking salt in a water conditioner, tracking use of solar power (or mains), keeping track of mail deliveries at the end of a long driveway, keeping an eye on that same mailbox to see who’s stealing your packages, watering the garden, keeping track of how often and how loud the dog’s barking or anything else that can be measured in some way and routinely causes you some pain when you forget or otherwise can’t get to it.