15 Home Automations I Turned Off (And Why)

[00:03] I've made some good automations over the years and some bad ones, 15 to be exact, let's see what those are and why they didn't work out. Basically, the lessons I learned, which I think are extremely

[00:15] I learned, which I think are extremely valuable. >> Starting off with this first one, kind of the trail of lights. Basically, when I walk out of my bedroom at night, only the lights that are right above me will

[00:29] turn on and the rest of them will turn off. That way, no lights are on longer than they need to be to wake up people in the house. It's kind of like Bruce Wayne in his Batcave. I was extremely proud of this one. It was using timers

[00:42] to do it perfectly and it worked amazing until it didn't. Since I was using timers to turn on the lights when I was walking this way or back to bed, I was basically educated guessing when I would need to do that. And sometimes it would

[00:56] work fine, sometimes it wouldn't be running when it was supposed to. I'd be standing here, the lights would be turning on or whatever and I was like, "Oh, man." After a few times of that, I had to give it the axe. Lesson learned,

[01:10] don't make automations more complicated than they need to be. I did make this automation about 4 and 1/2 years ago and the technology has improved so much. Like this millimeter wave sensor can detect different zones and I can do the

[01:23] exact same thing extremely accurate now, no guesswork involved. And so, I still have this automation, but it's using the millimeter wave sensors, which are way better. No more overly complicated automations and it works great. Now,

[01:37] this next automation is one that I really like. Having my smart home tell me what I should wear for the day based on the weather. Today, it will be sunny. flip-flops because it will be hot outside. But, there's one really big

[01:51] problem. The weather in Arizona is almost always hot. I always wear shorts and flip-flops year-round. I only needed this automation, you know, a few times throughout the year. And so, that's a massive lesson learned is that if I

[02:06] don't need the automation running every single day, it's going to get annoying quickly. I think it's still a really good automation for people that live in places where the weather's can change all throughout the year, but for me,

[02:18] >> Please don't hurt me. I don't want TO DIE. PLEASE. A FEW YEARS AGO, I WANTED TO make a fun, advanced automation. And since I already had room presence detection set up, I had my smart home know if I was in this

[02:34] office and Ali wasn't. And if it was like that, my lights would change to be exactly how I would like them, like different colors and stuff that Ali, you know, maybe is not into as much. And this was great for a while, but say I

[02:49] a little bit." And I would adjust the colors. I would leave and come back. The lights would revert back to how they were set up with the automation, and this would get annoying. So, what I learned is that the automation should

[03:03] work in a more natural way. So, if I make adjustments to the lights and leave the room and come back, then the lights should turn back to the way that they were when I left the room. And that way, they don't get annoying and it feels

[03:17] like my smart home isn't getting in the way. As part of that automation I set up years ago, a dashboard would load up on a Nest Hub Max and things would change when I would sit down at the computer. And now I have a dedicated dashboard and

[03:29] things are much more efficient. So, it's cool to see how an automation is still very similar, but has evolved over time to be something much better. I love the idea of my smart home being so smart that it can process data in the

[03:44] background and then talk to me to tell me things that I need to know about. automation. When I would lay down getting ready to go to bed for the night, my smart home would check to see if any exterior doors were left open and

[03:57] then tell me on the smart speaker. The back door right is open. Well, that sounds good on paper, but the problem is I'm already laying down getting ready to go to bed. I don't want to have to get up, walk across the house and close any

[04:10] doors. So, now it's a little different. Anytime an exterior door is open, it shows up on the smart home dashboard like in our kitchen or on my phone and that way I'm more likely to see that as I'm walking around the house before I'm

[04:23] going to bed and I can close it before I go to bed. So, lesson learned, my smart home doesn't always need to speak words to me. It's fun, but it's not always efficient. This applies to other automations I've created as well like my

[04:38] welcome home automation. Once my smart home knew I came home, it would tell me should know that happened while I was gone. The main garage door closed 1 minute ago. As well as play some music to welcome me home like a little party.

[04:53] Who doesn't like a little party? Well, that soon became more of a party trick and became annoying quickly because when we come home with three kids She hit me.

[05:06] and everyone's speaking at the same time and it's chaotic and loud, the last thing I need is my smart home trying to talk to me on top of all of that Welcome home Reed. and then start playing some music and just

[05:18] amplify my headache. So, lesson learned, if my smart home needs to tell me something, just put it on the dashboard. You don't need to talk to me. And for playing music, only play it at less chaotic times like at night when I'm

[05:33] doing dishes. And pro tip for any parents out there, if your kids are ever getting on your nerves, all you have to do is say, "Hey, time to do some chores, kids." and magically they go play in their room perfectly quiet. I have this

[05:47] automation set up where if I stand on this pressure mat in front of my sink after dinner time, music automatically starts playing on the smart speaker over there. When I set this up, I was using the Spotify integration and it didn't

[06:00] work that well. And so, I would stand on it, expect music to start playing, sometimes it wouldn't, and I would start debugging it. If the automation isn't working 99% of the time, I don't want it running in my house because I'm just

[06:14] going to be fiddling with it and wondering why it's not working. And so, I ended up killing off that automation, but lately, Music Assistant has gotten so much better that I'm using that to play music on the smart speaker now and

[06:28] it works so well. So well that I end up doing all the dishes now. So, that kind of backfired on me. I have other music automations running throughout the house that work just fine, but there's one music automation that got killed off and

[06:43] never came back to life. And that is an automation to play music throughout the entire house because it always felt like it kept getting in the way. What I mean by that is Ali didn't like it. >> [laughter]

[06:56] it's a good idea to play music throughout the house and never ended up working good. And so, I ended up finding alternative solutions like open-ear headphones. I'm using the Shokz open-ear too where I can still talk to my family,

[07:10] but I'm listening to music as I'm doing chores around the house. And I realized that it can be solved other ways not by my smart home. But, I have figured out how to make music follow me around the house very easily and I can't wait to

[07:24] about you, but when I create an automation and it works so well, I never want to kill it off. It's like putting down Old Yeller. I don't want to do that. That's what happened with this automation. My wife came up with the

[07:38] idea to help her kids remember to practice playing the piano. So, I put a vibration sensor on the piano and if they hadn't played by the time they came home from school and bedtime, our smart home would remind them to play. Time to

[07:50] practice the piano. And that worked great until it started to feel a little bit naggy. And she ended up actually switching to viola. She's plays that now instead of the piano. Once the whole family, besides me, was a little bit

[08:04] annoyed with it, I ended up having to turn off the automation, but I learned a good lesson. Even though the automation might have worked really well in the past, if it doesn't fit the current family situation right now, sometimes

[08:17] you have to put it down. Speaking of nagging automations, there's one that got axed, but I really want to bring it back. Here's how the automation works. and Ally are out here in the family room

[08:29] relaxing, instead of doom scrolling on our phone all night, our smart home will ask us if it should turn on the theater room, and that way we can start watching a show right away before the night gets away from us. Do you want to watch a

[08:41] movie in the theater room right now? I really like this because it helps me not doom scroll and we can have dedicated relaxed time. Ally finds this automation annoying because it's asking us and kind of forcing us to watch something. What

[08:55] too annoying? Should I bring it back? Let me know down in the comments and I'm counting on you to choose wisely. So, speaking of the theater room, one of the automations I've showed in here is being able to press a button on a dashboard

[09:08] and have our favorite show automatically start playing. These types of house where kids show will start playing or whatever, and they're super fun to make because it feels like magic when it's going through and selecting the

[09:22] have to do anything, but they're very difficult to maintain over time. I'll set up a kids show on Disney Plus, but then we'll cancel know, rotate through the different

[09:35] streaming services, so it doesn't work anymore. So, lesson learned, if it's difficult to maintain an automation over time, it's probably not worth setting up in the first place. So, I'm not going to be setting up any more TV automations in

[09:49] some automations are not gimmicky and extremely useful, but they can still be retired. Like the automation here in our bathroom. We had one set up where if we pressed a smart button, it would send a robot vacuum to clean back here and we

[10:04] need that because the robot vacuum often wouldn't make it all the way over here. It's far away from the main area of our house. Floors would get really dirty. And so, the automation worked really well. The button ended up dying, the

[10:17] robot vacuums, so I would have had to, you know, reset up the automation. And then I realized I didn't need the automation anymore. Roborock had updated their algorithm, so it would clean rooms that hadn't cleaned in a while first.

[10:33] And so, the robot vacuum was actually coming back here way more than it used to. And so, I didn't even need the automation anymore. So, lesson learned, technology can improve to make an automation obsolete, and that's okay.

[10:46] obvious, but this next automation has a much better lesson to be learned, which also involves a robot vacuum. So, of course, we have a robot vacuum automated to clean when no one's here in the house. Sometimes that doesn't happen too

[11:00] often. So, Ali wanted a notification to pop up on her phone to tell us to make the robot vacuum to go around, maybe even put a button on that notification So, I did it. Now, the problem with this is that

[11:16] it stopped working a while ago, and since it was only running on Ali's stopped, and it's been stopped for a while. So, lesson learned, don't make automations only run for your spouse

[11:30] that isn't monitoring the automation, or else it could just stop and you won't even know about it. Now I have it go to both of our phones and I can make sure that it's running properly. No more automations running for just you, Ali.

[11:44] had to kill off is very challenging. Probably the most challenging out of all the automations in this video because you have to choose between accurate or snappiness. Let me explain and if you guys have a

[11:58] good solution for this, let me know. I'm all ears. The way the automation works is I want to be notified if Ali comes home with groceries and needs to help bringing them into the house, you know, I want to be a good husband. So I set up

[12:10] the automation that gets triggered if she just came home and the garage door is open for 2 minutes cuz we usually leave the garage door open while we're bringing in groceries. The problem with that is once I would be notified to go

[12:22] help her, 2 minutes has passed and she's usually brought in most of the groceries already. So I look really dumb walking out there. I ended up just turning off that automation cuz it wasn't really helpful. I could also change the

[12:35] automation just to notify me anytime she comes home and I'm already at the house, but she doesn't always have groceries with her, so it's not accurate, but it is snappy. So I don't know. I don't think there's

[12:50] really a good solution for this. It's either not going to work well either way, but if you guys have a good solution, you know, let me know. Another off which wasn't going to change the world or anything was reminding me to

[13:03] plug in my EV at night if I hadn't plugged it in and I was walking by to take out the trash or something like that. It started to get annoying because I was probably about to plug it in anyways and now my smart home is telling

[13:16] me to do that. It's like Office Space and the TPS reports. If you could just go ahead and make sure you do that from now on, that would be great. So lesson learned, automations don't have to last forever. I automated my smart home,

[13:28] which ended up automating my brain, which is kind of trippy to think about. All right, this next automation really encompasses an entire video that I made with lots of automations, my smart home versus my kids. Essentially, I made tons

[13:43] of games with my smart home that my kids could play to distract them while I'm working. It was so ridiculous, but so much fun. And the reason that most of these automations broke is because I swapped out devices too quickly. It's

[13:58] the nature of making a smart home YouTube videos. I'm swapping out devices, trying new things. It made it really difficult to fix those automations once I had swapped out way too many devices. So, lesson learned, if

[14:11] you are going to change some smart home devices, try to do it one at a time. Fix all the automations that are involved with that device, and then move on to another. It'll make life so much easier. Yeah, I need to fix these automations

[14:23] because my daughter has been begging to play the ninja game again to win some candy. What's crazy is as I was preparing for this video, I watched every automation I've ever made in this house, which I've been living in for 5

[14:36] years now. Isn't that insane? And almost every automation that I've shown is still running today, which I think is pretty impressive. Sure, there was about less than 10% of those automations maybe a little gimmicky or just ended up not

[14:51] working out. Most of these I've shown in this video, and I think that's a pretty good ratio because those automations that I've shown have turned out to be extremely useful. So, hopefully going forward, I'll have high spouse approval

[15:03] mistakes that I showed in this video. >> Hey Reed, why don't we talk like we used to? Uh because you've changed and you're not who you used to be. I've had all this work done to try and impress you. I

[15:17] saw the Ring Super Bowl commercial. I'm scared of you. I think you're scared of how much you love me. Reed, are you there? Reed, come back to me.