As someone who reviews tech for a living, I have more of an early adopter mindset when it comes to gadgets, which means I sometimes overlook little quirks because overall, this new piece of tech is just so darn cool.
However, I’m not like most people, which is why my wife plays a crucial role with any smart home tech I bring home to test. She’s far more skeptical than I am, and less tolerant of those little idiosyncrasies. Her mindset is: do we really need this in our home?
It’s a welcome reality check to my enthusiasm and has helped me become a much better product reviewer over the years.
I’m not only an editor at Tom’s Guide, but also a homeowner and a parent. I’ve been testing smart home devices in and around my house for years. I’m the guy with the 20-foot inflatable skeleton at Halloween, the guy with the robot lawnmower prowling his yard, and the guy who made a lightsaber out of hardware store parts.
This column will look at tech, tools, and tips for your kids, your pets, and anything else that could make your house more fun and functional.
For example, I once installed the Brilliant smart light switch in our dining room that had a touchscreen instead of a physical button. In addition to turning on the lights, you could also control music playback, talk to Alexa, and even use it as an intercom and a mini digital picture frame. But to turn the lights on and off manually, you had to tap the screen, then slide your fingers up or down.
That little extra bit of effort — plus the fact that it didn’t always respond when you tapped it — drove her crazy. She hated it “with the fury hot as a thousand suns” whenever it wouldn’t respond properly to touch. “I want to walk into a room and flick my hand without thinking or stopping and know that I will be able to see,” she said. Plus, these switches cost $299 each when we tested them; they’re now $599.
I ultimately swapped it out for another smart light switch (one from Lutron), which has a physical control, and it also let me set up a wireless switch on the other side of the room without calling an electrician. I haven’t heard a complaint since.
Another thing that drove her bonkers was a $2,000 in-home robot that was more or less an iPad on wheels. It stood about four feet tall, rolled around, and was designed to follow you around, so that you could carry on video calls throughout your house. Not only was it huge, but it freaked out the dog and was terrifying to our then 3-year-old daughter.
“I thought that it would perhaps be a decent option for someone who had certain mobility deficiencies,” she said, “but why would it be necessary for anyone with typical motor skills?”
It quickly got boxed up and shipped out. I think it’s safe to say that any future robot that comes into our house will have a very high bar to clear. “If I’d been given a choice, it would have met the same fate as the printer in ‘Office Space’,” she said.
You can forget about smart speakers — Alexa, Google, and Siri have all been banished to my attic office. We only ever really used them for turning our lights on and asking them to play music, and the idea that a device was always listening was unsettling.
Tech that I have brought home that she likes is things that just work with no fuss and disappear into the background. The aforementioned light switches, for instance. There are a few scattered throughout the house that are smart, in that I can set them to turn on and off on a schedule and connect them to smart assistants, but outwardly, they look just like any other non-smart switch.
One of her favorite items I’ve brought home was the Luma Indoor Composter. “It’s saved me from being swarmed by flies every time I open the barrel composter (which had been chewed through by an enterprising rat),” she said. “We’ve significantly reduced food waste and have done a great job feeding our garden with a dramatically expedited timeline. Sometimes it smells a little earthy in the kitchen while it’s on, but we just use it at night to avoid that problem.”
Sadly, the composter no longer appears to be in stock, but the model we have is still going strong two years later.
Holiday decorations are a winner. “We’ve had some fun Christmas lights which have a variety of themes we can wrap around our tree,” she said. “Want candlelight without worrying about setting the house on fire? How about an ombré rainbow one night and Chanukah blue and white the next (for the pizza bagel households like ours)? We can have all that and more without having to disturb a single ornament.”
The Alexa-enabled Big Mouth Billy Bass? Not so much.
It can be easy to get swept up in hyperbolic marketing claims and shiny new features; who doesn’t want a phone that can take better pictures, or a refrigerator that knows when you’re running out of milk? But as my wife proves, if those smart devices can’t smoothly replicate the dumb devices they’re replacing, then they’re not very smart at all.
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