Smartening Up the Homestead

Apparently it's hard to know the exact number of Amazon Alexa voice assistants that have actually been sold, but I can tell you that there are two of them in the Roediger House. I got a pair of Echo Shows a couple of years ago, in part because it's a great way to communicate between the kitchen and the 3rd floor. I also thought it might open the door for video communication with friends and family as they also got their own devices.

Initially, my use of Alexa was pretty simplistic, in the scheme of what's possible. It has been a kitchen timer and a house intercom; I tell it to add items to my shopping list and occasionally set reminders; Alexa can tell me the weather and temp and forecast and she also displays upcoming events pulled from my Google calendar. It's easy to get simple reference and trivia information (i.e., "How old is Olivia de Havilland?"). Sometimes it's a quick source for a song or video. Rarely I'll ask her to play a music station or genre. Perhaps once I asked her to order something for me from Amazon and for a brief period I linked my orders and deliveries for her to report on (until that became annoying but also spoiled some surprises). Every once in a while I'm enticed to ask Alexa to tell me more about an item in her ongoing scrolling news feed. That's been the pattern for the first couple of years.

Now I've decided it's time to take the smart home possibilities up to the next level, which I guess began to kick in when I upgraded two of the thermostats to Nests. As we moved from Christmas into the new year, I finally decided to upgrade the wifi router to a 3-unit mesh system for better whole-house coverage. LinkSys Velop routers are now strategically placed throughout the house (see photo above).

One easy upgrade was to get several smart plugs. For years, I've had various lamps on timers. Alas, because they are mechanical, some of them had gotten rickety and noisy and you could distinctly hear the grinding of their slow-moving gears. Also, if I was visiting with guests in one of the front parlours past the cut-off time on the lamps, I wasn't able to easily turn them back on because the timer plug was behind the sofas. Now that all of those lamps are controlled by smart plugs, I can adjust their schedules easily and also turn them on or off with voice commands or via my Alexa app.

The next simple smart home upgrade was to get a set of Philips Hue wifi bulbs. They've proven to be a great choice in a couple of hallway lamps and at the base of the stairs going up to the attic, but the bulb is not bright enough for my fireside reading lamp so I'll have to come up with another plan for that fixture. I also swapped out two of the LED kits in the east and north nooks/gables of the attic so that I could put BR30 LED smart bulbs in. That's also been a good option, although both of these bulbs have been turning themselves on randomly and I'd like them to not do that.

The big-deal investment was in smart light switches, and I might have gotten a bit carried away on that part of the project. But with the help of Fred Schlosser of eWire Electric Company, who really made it happen even in some of the tight old switch boxes in the front of the house, the Roediger House has emerged into 21st Century functionality.

Outdoor Bay Lights (old timer) plus two GE smart dimmer switches

The kitchen, the main hallway, and the attic have now been largely upgraded to a whole set of Z-wave dimmer smart switches and, frankly, it's pretty dandy.

In the meantime, I have linked a few more skills to Alexa.  I've got the security cameras linked in so that we can get Alexa to show us, for instance, the porch or who's at the back door without pulling up the video monitoring app on the phone. Another skill is for the Sonos devices, but let's also acknowledge that Sonos has not yet achieved good integration with Alexa, so the commands are limited, and frequently Alexa tells me the device "doesn't support that" when I ask her, for instance, to turn the music up or down.

The last acquisition was a Schlage Z-wave smart lock for the back door. That means I can lock or unlock the door using the app, whether I'm home or away, and I can also tell Alexa to unlock it (with an additional security code) as well as to lock it back. While I prefer for folks coming to visit to use the front door and the doorbell, some of the younger set report to the back door and text their arrival. Now, it will be easy to let them in without coming down two flights of stairs. Also, it's not unusual for a guest to forget to lock the door behind her. It's nice to have that extra option for controlling and securing that entry.

Thanks to the routines I can program into the Alexa app, my repetitive beginning-and-end-of-day tasks are all automated. I tell her to "Start My Day," and the front hallway lights and lamps will come on. The kitchen undercabinet lights turn on in the kitchen, as well as my fireside lamp. There are different routines to run the lighting in the attic, whether it's for TV watching, pool playing, or bringing up all the lights for cleaning. As I leave the kitchen after the final before-bedtime trip out with the pooch, I tell Alexa to "Shut It Down," and all lights and lamps are turned off. I do have a number of lamps on schedules, too, so that they continue to operate even when I'm on the road. In the upstairs hallway, thanks to this automation, the lamp dims to more of a nightlight setting after 9 pm, before going out completely an hour or so after that.

Several of the devices do depend on hubs, so I now have two: one specifically for the Philips Hue bulbs, and then the more universal SmartThings hub from Samsung. I went considerably further with these smart upgrades than I'd initially intended, but once you get started and consider the options and possibilities, it's easy to overdo it. I'd say that, although it's still a cool novelty at the moment, I can also appreciate the ongoing utility of it for the long haul.