25-May-2020 By Jeffrey Cooper

Smart Homes: Mission Critical

Years ago I installed my first Smart Home system. It was 2014, and I was preparing to speak at the Samsung Developer Conference about Smart Home of the Future. Samsung had just acquired SmartThings, so I bought a system and installed it.

Overall, I definitely had a lot of fun with it. It was fun to set up scenarios and see them play out. Simple things like automating the pantry light and creating an All On for the outdoor lighting, were both fun and quite useful. Along the way, though, some problems became evident.

At first, my main issues were the app itself. SmartThings first app was cumbersome and it was not obvious to set up some routines. The terminology was confusing, so it took some trial and error to get things working the way you wanted. But, I figured them out and pushed on adding devices.

Over the holidays that year, I bought a Z-Wave controlled relay and wired it into my garage door. I though it would be great to be able to open it on approach (I hoped) and open it remotely if needed. That idea quickly came screeching to a halt.

About that time, and probably mainly to do with Samsung’s acquisition of SmartThings, sales increased quite a bit and, as it turns out, not in lock step with SmartThings’ servers processing capabilities. It quickly appeared to slow down to a near standstill.

Latency

Triggers, it turned out, were getting backed up in the system. One of the great things about SmartThings is a vast user community in which you can get answers from other users and SmartThings employees themselves. It’s a great resource, and there’s a lot of creativity shared on there that helps you get the most out of your system, and indeed, do more than you ever thought you would.

One post, in particular, stood out, though. One person wrote in that triggers for turning on lights in their kid’s bedrooms were coming through 8 hours later, in the middle of the night. Certainly that was disrupting to the kids and annoying to the parents. But it made me realize something immediately: The relay I installed on the garage door to allow SmartThings to control it was a terrible idea.

I removed it immediately, within a day of setting it up. If I had come home, and the garage door didn’t open, I would have overridden it with the normal controller that it came with and forgotten about it. Then, at 2am when we were all asleep, the door could open once that trigger was processed, leaving the house open and vulnerable all night. That is a massive fail.

Fast forward to 2020, and I still will not connected any doors to SmartThings. The reason? Look at the screen capture on the right. This was taken 4 days ago. I found that some of my actions that I has set up were not performing quickly, or were delayed. SmartThings sent out some emails that they were dealing with some issues and would fix issues with their Event Pipeline.

During the maintenance window, my phone began to receive these garage door open notifications- 12 in total. These are just from a sensor that tells me when the door opens and closes- it does not control it. But it was Tuesday morning, and nobody had left the house yet. These were left over from previous days, stuck in a queue somewhere.

If any of the stuck triggers were to open the garage, they, too, would have been processed days later. And had that been middle of the night- the house would have been wide open while we slept.

Not Ready for Prime Time

I’m not not recommending SmartThings- I think they are one of the better all-inclusive smart home systems out there. They have Zigbee and Z-Wave radios, and integrate with a huge number of devices. Just don’t connect them to anything mission critical. That includes front doors and garage doors.

I do believe there are reliable electronic lock solutions. August’s locks, for instance, work really well. But, they just focus on door locks, and a doorbell product. They do that well. I would argue the same for a bespoke garage door opener, by a company like Chamberlain. Don’t connect them into another system in a way they can accept triggers from them.

If you get a system like SmartThings- have a lot of fun with it. Just keep the security-related controls separate. They are nowhere near the “five nines” level of reliability that I would want for such a feature.

Still a Long Way To Go

I think SmartThings is a great value for the money, and is one of the most comprehensive systems out there for the price. With its undying support for the mesh networks Zigbee and Z-Wave, it offers the best approach, to date, for a home automation system. Just hold off on connecting locks and garage door openers to it.

Amazon’s Echo Plus and Echo Show, with Zigbee support, comes somewhat close. It can certainly control things, but are voice centric and automation is secondary. If you want a real system, Zigbee and Z-Wave are the better choices due to the range that mesh radios provide.

Better home automation is still a ways off. It will require sensing and learning of routines and a reduction in app complexity so that non-technical people can install them. They will also require devices that are less clunky (after market plugs) and easier to install (Jasco switches are not for the faint of heart if you are installing for a multi-gang light switch).