It’s easy to get carried away when creating a smart home.You can feel compelled to take on elaborate projects and automate things that don’t need automating, just because it’s possible.This isn’t inherently a bad thing, but you might be deceiving yourself if you’re using utility as an excuse to tinker.
Dashboards with no clear purpose I’m not saying that wall-mounted dashboards and touchscreen control panels can’t be useful, but they’re far from the optimal way to interact with your smart home.For many of us, invisible automation is the goal where possible.Lights that turn on when you're present, cooling and heating systems that maintain a comfortable temperature, sensors that trigger devices like dehumidifiers, and garage doors that open and close automatically.
For everything else, most of us are content with using smartphones and wearables or speaking aloud to a smart speaker.The same is true for checking sensor states or video camera feeds.You can even get your TV involved and have notifications and other items show up there while you’re sitting in front of it.
The challenge of creating a wall-mounted tablet might be more alluring than the utility it provides, and I can’t fault that.You probably already have everything you need to create one, and they do have a few good uses.They allow guests to easily control various smart home elements, and you can leave camera feeds on screen at all times if you want, for at-a-glance security.
But before you set about taking the time to build one, perhaps consider some more useful projects like building your own presence sensors or Bluetooth presence trackers with an ESP32 instead.Scoring your showers The Home Assistant community loves a good project.There’s a good chance that if you can imagine it, someone has tried to build it.
Considering the existence of smart home-compatible water flow sensors, is it any wonder that the overkill real-time shower stats dashboard exists? In fairness, this isn’t so much a project with its own GitHub page and army of followers, but rather one person’s folly.Two flow sensors measure how much water is used, while a probe connected to an ESP32 measures the temperature.Home Assistant then displays this information in real-time, with a summary at the end that tracks how long you took and how much water you used.
It’s one way to visualize water usage and calculate costs, but it’s unabashedly overkill.If your primary aim is to cut down on water usage, your money and time would be better spent installing a shower head that restricts flow and using a simple timer to nudge you that it’s time to get out.Dishwasher cycle finish notifications I confess that I previously floated the idea that notifications following a completed dishwasher cycle could be useful in a guide to getting washing machine cycle notifications working in Home Assistant.
While knowing when your laundry needs your attention is undeniably useful, I can’t really make the same argument for the dishwasher.Unless you’re happy to hand-dry the load, everything you’ve just washed will still be wet.Opening the door is the opposite of helpful in this situation since many modern dishwashers have drying cycles that kick in when the main wash is finished.
Even those that don’t will benefit from retaining heat inside the dishwasher, which can help things dry faster.The best I can come up with is using the same laundry cycle blueprint but adding a delay that only sends you a notification when the dishes are likely to be dry enough to put away.Even if that feels like a stretch, you’ll probably just do it when you get a moment.
Setting up notifications for every sensor, camera, and function Setting up notifications isn’t necessarily a project, but managing too many of them can feel like it.While Home Assistant requires that you go out of your way to enable them, platforms like Apple Home are all too happy to enable them for devices like contact sensors and garage doors.How-To Geek Report: Subscribe and never miss what matters Unlock your tech-savvy potential and master the digital world with How-To Geek.
Subscribe By subscribing, you agree to receive newsletter and marketing emails, and accept our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.You can unsubscribe anytime.Though it may seem useful to know that someone is home because the garage door just opened, you’ll get the same notification when you open the garage door yourself.
This gets tiresome fast, especially when you can just check on the status of a sensor or set up an alert to tell you that your garage door is open only after a specified time or delay.The same is true of notifications from security cameras and smart doorbells.It’s useful knowing that there’s a package sitting outside on your porch, but it's less so being told that someone is about to ring the doorbell (moments before they ring the doorbell).
Security cameras can alert you to all sorts of events, from straying cats to cars blocking your driveway.But do you need real-time alerts for these things? Have your camera system log them as events and choose to interact with them later if you want.Looking for more tips on what not to do with your smart home? Here are five time-wasting habits you need to break.
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