Exactly, some talk about apples, others about pears. Today, there is such a mess in the smart home products market that you really need to be careful about what you are actually buying. In this article, I would like to look at the difference between how "Smart Home" products work and how home automation works. The differences are not negligible at all.

A certain bad habit has spread here!!!
- Companies very often use bad words. Especially one word... It's the word... Smart Home!
- Where did that come from?
- They didn't get it from us.
- And everyone says it?
- Everyone...

What actually happened?

We didn't always have it this way. Smart Home wasn't always a swear word. Once upon a time, Smart Home essentially meant an "automated home." Even the literal translation suggests so.

However, with the increasing number of companies in the Smart Home field, a bad habit has really spread. Today, anything that is on a mobile phone is called Smart. It doesn't matter that it has completely limited functions and you have to send it an SMS to make it do something, it's just on your phone, so it's Smart...

In this article, I would like to explain the important and clear difference between what a Smart Home is in the eyes of some manufacturers and how it differs from a true Smart Home, i.e., an automated house.

What can a Smart Home do as many present it today?

So let's start with what the term Smart Home means today.

It is truly surprising, but from my point of view, development is in many cases moving in the wrong direction, or it is simply misnamed. The market is constantly flooded with new Smart devices, which could generally be categorized as IoT. This English abbreviation stands for "internet of things." IoT is a great thing; having devices connected to the internet and being able to access them from anywhere in the world is something that was truly unimaginable just 10 years ago.

But what does IoT have to do with a Smart Home?

And that is precisely the problem. Many manufacturers have started confusing the fact that their devices can connect to the internet with being smart. Simply put, it became a trend that as soon as a device is on the internet, it is Smart. From a perspective of 10 years ago, it might have looked that way, but today we are a step further. To explain why IoT does not equal Smart, I would use a great example that always comes to my mind:

NAS - a data storage that you can access from anywhere in the world and it doesn't have to be called Smart (NAS stands for "Network Attached Storage").

Of course, we could mention, for example, printers available on the network, robotic vacuum cleaners, cars... There are really many examples.

Why is it a problem to call these devices SMART?

Now imagine this, you have a "Smart light switch". I intentionally used this phrase to describe the Hevolta WiFi switch because it is a good example. You install it, add it to the app, and that's it. From this moment on, you have the ability to control the light via your mobile phone, for example from the other side of the world... Perfect, but what is Smart about that?

When you have to open a mobile app, search for the given light, and press it with your finger (and the finger is important there :) ), isn't it accidentally the same as if you came to the switch and pressed it with the same finger? It's just that you are doing this manual action via your mobile phone. Is there really a difference? Or is it actually just more complicated?

A very similar case is the system from the manufacturer Legrand. Honestly, I was very excited when Legrand introduced a new series of Smart switches. After all, every addition to a Smart home is great. I was all the more surprised when I found out during testing that the "Smart" part of this system consists of having customizable switches which, when you press them, exactly, with your finger, trigger a certain action, such as turning off light 1 and turning on light 2. Great and smart, what do you say?

Well, but these systems are supported by Voice assistants Alexa and Google Home, and that surely makes them smart...

And here comes the great news. The ability to control IoT using your voice. It's great, really, we can keep our finger free for other tasks, we don't have to press anything. Just speak and you're done.... And then you find yourself in a situation where you yell at your handicapped Google assistant every day to turn on that light in the kitchen when you walk in the dark with your hands full of groceries, and instead of turning on the light, Google gives you some tips on great voice commands you can use in the future... Of course, we also have routines available. However, these also very often have to be triggered by voice.

So where is the line when an IoT device is actually Un-Smart?

In the concept I am trying to outline here, IoT devices, or devices connected to the internet, really don't have to be Smart. A very simple definition of why these devices are not Smart could be described like this:

I have to give a manual/voice command to start the device
≠
Smart device

Exactly. Basically, if we have to perform a manual action to make the device change its state, then it is still manual control. At best, I can say it is remote control or voice control. Therefore, I would really say that calling these devices Smart is a bad habit :)

Home automation is a different story

And now let's talk about why home automation is a different story. Essentially, we should correctly call home automation a "Smart Home," but due to the aforementioned situation, we’d better keep it separate.

I would tell you one thing in all seriousness, which might be a surprise for you if you don't have an automated house yet - even though my whole house is smart, I don't use a mobile app at all! And believe me, my Smart Home is truly Smart.

And that is the fundamental difference. If there is a system running in the house that provides automation, no manual actions are required. Why should I press a wall switch, why should I open a mobile app or give a voice command when I can set my system to do those actions for me, automatically.

An example of home automation

Imagine you were at work, the house was empty, and you are the first to arrive home. This is an interesting moment because, with a mobile-controlled system, you would have to take out your phone, turn on the heating, pull up the blinds, turn on the lights, play some music... In an automated house, it can look like this:

1. You approach the door - the lock recognizes the proximity of your mobile phone, unlocking the door.
2. By connecting your phone to WiFi, your house simultaneously switches from "away" to "home" mode. This means that:

• The voice assistant greets you and tells you, for example, how long nobody has been home
• If it is daytime outside, the blinds will open
• If it is already dark, the house will light up as needed
• If you have your favorite radio set up, it will start playing (or the TV will turn on). But only if it's not too late
• The heating switches from eco to normal mode. If it is daytime, it heats up in the living area; if it is evening, in the night area
• ...

And that's it, you're home, the house is lit, the heating is set, the blinds are adjusted to the time,... And just try counting how many times in the whole list it says "You press, you say...". Exactly, no action was needed from you! And that is what home automation is all about.

What is the core of an automated house, which is missing in a "Smart house"?

The foundation of automation is that our house must not only have actuators (sockets, dimmers, motor controllers), but it must also have senses. It must be able to "feel" what is happening. And this is exactly what sensors provide. If we humans see that something has moved using our eyes, the house sees it using motion sensors. If we feel a draft, the house knows about an open window through a door sensor. If we feel that there is spilled water on the floor, the house knows it thanks to a water leak sensor... When a house has sensors, it knows what is happening and can react to it. And it is the reaction to sensor values that gives us the opportunity to turn our house into an automated one. Therefore, we could describe the definition of an automated house as:

The house can react to sensor values with actions
=
Automated house

Of course, sensors are not yet everything we need. The system on which the house runs plays a huge role in making a house with sensors truly automated.

Alexa, Shelly, Aqara, Tuya, HomeKit ...

We clearly specified that if a house has sensors, it can already be automated. To make things not entirely simple, there are differences here too. They come with how powerful the system is in which you do the automation.

A good example of basic automation are Alexa Smart Home, Shelly, Aqara, Tuya, HomeKit... These systems will allow you to trigger an action based on a value from sensors. However, it has its flaws. Here is an example of what you can do with similar systems:

• Turn on the light when entering a room, in some cases taking into account the light intensity
• Switch the house to "Home" mode upon arriving home.
• Close the water supply to the house when a water leak is detected, provided the system has a device for this task
• ...

These actions are possible and for many users they are sufficient. However, these mentioned systems do not offer advanced functionality within automation. Of course, there are differences even among these systems, and somewhere it is better, somewhere worse, but in general, I dare say that if you want to do automation properly and tweak it to the details, these systems will simply stop you at a certain point because you will be missing some variable, value comparison, ...

If you are serious about automation, you will need this ...

Scenes that are supposed to control your house can be simple, but let's admit it, our life is not simple. Every day something different happens, we have different habits at different times of the day and in different seasons of the year. Therefore, you often get into a situation where a simple scene to close the blinds at, say, 6 PM is not good. During the year, 6 PM looks different in summer and different in winter.

Even here, for example, it is necessary for the system to be able to trigger scenes based on sunrise and sunset. But is that enough? It is not!

Because automation will do what you tell it to do, and precisely when you tell it! If you set the blinds to close at sunset, it will be done regardless of whether you are inside or, for example, on the terrace, and this scene will simply "lock you out".

The solution is conditions

And here we get to the heart of the matter. If you are trying to set up your house so that it is truly automatic, you have to take into account that there is a massive amount of different conditions. Conditions then give us a great opportunity to say under what circumstances the given automation will be triggered and under what circumstances it will simply be ignored or another one will be triggered.

Let me mention a few conditions that can be used in automation:

• The blinds will close at sunset but only if the terrace door is not open or there is no movement on the terrace. If the terrace is open, all blinds will close except the terrace ones.
• The hallway light will turn on when motion is detected, but only if it is already dark outside
• The hallway light will turn on to 5% when motion is detected, provided it is dark outside and someone has previously switched the house to sleep mode.
• The heating in the living room will increase by 2 degrees in the morning, as long as the house is not in "Away" mode
• Upon returning home, the blinds will open and music will play, but only if no one is watching TV or it is not past 10:00 PM.
• When a visitor arrives and rings the doorbell, it will chime and all lights will flash, but if it is already past 10:00 PM, only the kitchen light will flash.
• The air conditioning will turn on if the photovoltaics currently produce more power than is being consumed, and the house is over 24 degrees, and the heating is off.
• The blinds will close if you are home, the terrace is not open, it is 25 degrees inside, and it is more than 3 degrees warmer outside.
• If your dog approaches the water dispenser, water will dispense for him, but only if he hasn't been there in the last 30 minutes, so that not too much water is wasted.

So this must be extra complicated to set up...

Setting up advanced automation is not entirely simple, but manufacturers like FIBARO and Homey really try to make it as simple as possible. I dare say that you can create the mentioned automations in the Homey PRO control unit directly through the mobile app thanks to tags. If you own Homey and do not use tags, definitely check out this video where Alex beautifully explains it:

However, if you are a fan of the Yubii Home Pro system, you can of course achieve such condition setting here too, both by using the "And" item in the scene but especially thanks to variables, which I definitely recommend trying out. Therefore, I would dare to define true home automation like this:

The house evaluates a combination of conditions and sensor states
=
A perfectly automated house

A house with artificial intelligence.

Alright, alright, now I am moving a bit into the future, but it must be said that the situation will definitely change in the future and an automated house will need to be defined differently than I have done in this article. When we move to a level where we can use artificial intelligence to control processes in thehousehold and houses will learn how to behave, then home automation will mean something else.

However, I am writing this article in 2022, when a home automation system controlled by artificial intelligence does not exist, perhaps the closest to this is Bill Gates' house with the Xanadu 2.0 system, which, however, also does not meet the criteria for us to say that it is controlled by AI. Because even this system has written in its code when it should do what, how it should react to an arrival, to a visit, ... And therefore, even this system does not decide anything on its own, but only based on preset scenes.

Interestingly, here in Slovakia, several companies have already managed to brag that their Smart system can learn by itself. This is again just an attempt to misname things to gain a competitive advantage. Today's systems can copy your habits, like the NEST thermostat does, for example. It "watches" you for a month how you change the temperature, and after a month it starts changing it to the given temperatures on the given days and times by itself. Yes, it is a certain way of learning, but it is not artificial intelligence, because if you operate like this for 3 months and then go on vacation for 2 weeks, the thermostat will not evaluate it itself; it will simply continue with what you taught it. Basically, it is a certain way of creating scenes, except you don't set the whole scene yourself, but you repeat it for so long until the thermostat learns it. The problem then remains with the conditions that the thermostat simply won't learn, and those are the exceptions.

However, it is obviously more complicated when managing things like turning on a light upon movement and so on. For this to work truly automatically, you really need to tell the system what and when it should do. Monitoring your actions will not create proper automation. Why? I will explain that to you with an example:

On an older project, we were solving a problem with the hallway light at night when someone went to the toilet. The motion sensor picked up our movement, but the light fixture in that hallway was not dimmable. Turning it on at night then meant that a lot of light entered all the rooms through the glass doors. The owner couldn't crack it, yet the solution was simple - we set up the night lighting so that when motion was detected in the hallway at night, the hallway light wouldn't turn on, but the LED strip illuminating the kitchen counter would turn on, and even that to only 5%. Such light was sufficient to illuminate the hallway but was very weak to wake anyone up.

The owner himself could not do this solution, because in order to manually turn on the light at night like this, he would have to walk through the dark hallway, into the kitchen, feel for the LED strip switch there, set its intensity to 5%, then return to the hallway, go to the toilet, back to the kitchen, turn it off and move to the bedroom in the dark. And repeat this enough times for the system to copy it. If the system were to learn from the user's behavior, it would really have to look like this every time someone walked into the hallway at night. However, without automation, this process is truly impossible and highly impractical, which is why even a learning system cannot learn this, and we simply have to write such a scene for it.

Of course, when someone finally gets around to creating this and offering a system that can truly manage a house with artificial intelligence, I will very gladly test this system and write to you about it.

There is another simple explanation why such a system does not exist. Because if we were already in a state where we can let something run on artificial intelligence, companies with budgets like Google, Apple, or Amazon would have incorporated artificial intelligence into their smart assistants a long time ago. Who else has the economic power to make such a breakthrough if not them? And on the other hand, if today, in 2022, we still often find ourselves having to explain 3 times to a voice assistant what we want from it and it still doesn't understand it, then it is highly unlikely that a company in Slovakia will have breakthrough artificial intelligence in its Smart Home system :) Of course, I keep my fingers crossed for it, but for now, it's just marketing.

Which Smart Home system is right for you, then?

And here is the interesting thing - I don't know :) In practice, I often meet customers who really just want remote control of a device, which I think is unnecessary for a light... But someone might want even that. In that case, it is better if they reach forWiFi switches, because if this is really all they want, then buying an expensive system is pointless.

Then there are customers who want something simple and have no desire to automate things too much at all. Then something like the Shelly system or the Tuya system might still be enough for them, which is not expensive, has some sensors available, interesting functions, and mainly, it won't ruin the family budget. However, if a customer is looking for something truly great and their head is full of thoughts about how everything will work by itself, how they will be able to automate every process in the house... well, those systems simply won't suffice there, and this customer will have to invest in a system FIBARO or Homey. So which path you take is entirely up to you; it is just necessary to have realistic expectations and not to needlessly oversize or undersize your own requirements.