We recently installed a Nest to control the heating and air conditioning. On a subsequent muggy day I was about to pick up the phone to call home and see if someone was there to turn on the AC (we were expecting guests) when I remembered that I could now do that remotely! I fired up the Nest app and just a few seconds later I happily settled back into work. An hour later when I showed up at home I was surprised it was still quite muggy until I realized that all the windows were open and our poor AC had been attempting to cool the neighborhood!

There is an important lesson here – making one aspect of your home remote controlled may lead you to want (need) to control others (here windows). The experience itself was really quite compelling and I am now researching what the cheapest sensors are that I can get to determine if the windows are open or closed. In fact at least for some of the windows the alarm system should already know that. Ideally of course I could close the windows remotely although that raises some other interesting questions (what if someone not only opened the window but put a plant there or Dori our dog is sticking her nose out the window).

One other lesson that I came away with is that it will be perfectly fine to control different parts of the home from different applications. I already now use the Sonos app to control music and the Nest app to control temperature. I would be perfectly happy using a separate app to control a smart lock on the front door, such as the August or Kisi. Which suggests that the strategy of being the central controller for the home may be flawed at a time when there is a lot of innovation around individual aspect of home automation (all of which can have their own complete experience).

We recently installed a Nest to control the heating and air conditioning. On a subsequent muggy day I was about to pick up the phone to call home and see if someone was there to turn on the AC (we were expecting guests) when I remembered that I could now do that remotely! I fired up the Nest app and just a few seconds later I happily settled back into work. An hour later when I showed up at home I was surprised it was still quite muggy until I realized that all the windows were open and our poor AC had been attempting to cool the neighborhood!

There is an important lesson here – making one aspect of your home remote controlled may lead you to want (need) to control others (here windows). The experience itself was really quite compelling and I am now researching what the cheapest sensors are that I can get to determine if the windows are open or closed. In fact at least for some of the windows the alarm system should already know that. Ideally of course I could close the windows remotely although that raises some other interesting questions (what if someone not only opened the window but put a plant there or Dori our dog is sticking her nose out the window).

One other lesson that I came away with is that it will be perfectly fine to control different parts of the home from different applications. I already now use the Sonos app to control music and the Nest app to control temperature. I would be perfectly happy using a separate app to control a smart lock on the front door, such as the August or Kisi. Which suggests that the strategy of being the central controller for the home may be flawed at a time when there is a lot of innovation around individual aspect of home automation (all of which can have their own complete experience).