Best Of

Update: I've had SmartThings going for about a week and it's been OK. The last time I dipped my toes into home automation it was the era of X-10 popup ads and you would plug something into an X-10 outlet adapter. Anticipating this I bought 3 appliance modules. It turns out that it's now more cost-effective to get smart light bulbs. Seriously. $30 for an outlet adapter vs $15 for a bulb.

So now I have 5 of the bulbs and they're pretty nice. I had planned to control them with a smart wall switch, but it turns out the switch in the room doesn't have a neutral wire. So now I need to come up with a way to control the lights in that room with a high spouse-approval-factor.

I also have a water sensor for my basement, a CO/smoke detector and a garage door tilt-sensor installed (lets me know if the garage door is open or not). I really like the idea of knowing if there's a fire at my house if we are away, although my neighbors would probably call as well.

Generally adding things has been painless - it comes close to "it just works." The biggest issue has been the GE Link bulbs. They require a firmware update on SmartThings that you need to email to get, but they had it pushed to my box in 5 minutes after emailing on a Sunday afternoon. I also had a problem with one of my Link bulbs getting disconnected from the network, so I needed to go through re-adding it. Support gave me the instructions, but there was a 24 hour turnaround time on that response (Saturday->Sunday).

My next steps are to wire up the garage door controller my wife got me for my birthday, add a couple switches to control some lights (that I got before I realized how cheap smart bulbs are) and find a thermostat.

My old thermostat died this week and I didn't have the time to get one from Amazon, so I got a cheap one for the time being and will replace it soon. I am hindered by the lack of a "C" wire on my thermostat, but I think I can find a battery-powered Z-wave thermostat. I could have gotten an un-officially supported thermostat, but I'd be worried that Honeywell's servers would block access to scripts running on SmartThings servers and I'd lose programability. I'd prefer to get something with an officially supported API.

I really like the idea of having all the rules for my house in one place: if we're away then make sure the lights come on at sunset, lower the temperature, alert me if someone drinks from my kegerator, etc. I like that SmartThings has modes like "Goodbye", "Good night" and "I'm back". It can also set them automatically based on small trackers or smartphone geofencing (e.g. if my wife and my phones are out of the house, automatically set the house to "Goodbye" mode)

Downsides so far are cost (as expected), limited number of officially supported products and having to pull out my smartphone to turn on lights (until I get physical switches installed). Upsides so far are it's cool and I don't have to scramble to make coffee in the morning while getting my daughter ready. I'll keep updating this thread as I make progress.