Finally, after weeks of a struggle to find a mutually convenient date, a smart home consultant visited me. We looked around the house and had a detailed conversation.
We discussed enabling smart light switches, radiators, media and garden irrigation under the hood. Pending a visit to his place to see how they all work using a dedicated system, I had two pointed questions. which are critical for us.
1: Convenience for my family without worrying about coding, configurations, etc should anything go wrong - if I am not going to be around. The consultant agreed this is critical and always stresses this point to his clients.
2: What if the company and the brain of the stand alone system go belly up? We need spares , just in case. This isn’t a plan B. It all depends on how quickly one can swap, and bring the whole thing up. The proprietary systems will have this potential single point of failure, while the distributed platforms provide an alternative.
Either case, until an alternative is found and become fully functional, we are staring at living in primitive age because these systems, to the best of my understanding, won’t allow a manual operation as a back up. This was indicated by one consultant and the consultant today confirmed this risk.
We discussed this challenge in detail. Assuming, every switch has a neutral, we are looking at parallel connections, one overriding the other. This route will be very expensive.
I plan to visit the consultant’s office some time going forward. Ideally, I would like to take my wife to give her a first-hand experience of what is being planned. This visit may have to wait as we are aiming to sort out changing the windows and doors by this summer. We will have a lot of guests in summer, which is going to make it harder to make any progress. A recent family tragedy only makes it worse.
A dedicated system like Laxone will be neat but will have a plan B risk, which we can’t afford. We will also think of an alternative, which can provide plan B (manual ops).
