Home Automation/Smart Home Tips and Tricks for Beginners in the UK

Introduction

In this series of articles, I hope I can pass on some of the learnings that I have made over the last decade plus of trying to automate our home and make it “smarter”.  I have been in the fortunate position to have the money and some of the skills and a lot of interest to be able to do this.

In general, I have only used products from the mid or lower end of the market, the exception being for home networking and heating controls. While higher end products are available and may have been more capable, I started this journey with the intention of keeping cost down and as the market was, and remains, fragmented and there is risk from automating and being a relatively early adopter.  With a career in IT and Security, I also came equipped with a considerable degree of hype-awareness, which I would strongly recommend everyone develops, as there is lots of hype around home automation.

Technology also, surprisingly, has a history of changing and the longevity of home automation products and platforms is not always likely to be long in my view. This unfortunately, is exacerbated by marketing and product strategies from varies manufacturers and “standards and protocols” that are not fully adopted and with definitions developing still.

Despite these challenges, Home Automation can be really valuable; whether it is enhancing your physical security to saving money heating your home or doing fun stuff like automating your Christmas lights or turning your kitchen into a home disco with one command!

In this series, I will try to explain what home automation is and how to navigate what is quite a fragmented environment and perhaps in the process (and stealing some of the words of Jurgen Klopp), turn doubters into believers!

What am planning on covering?

This is all written, but with feedback, I may amend or extend, so please comment or DM me as I am happy to help if I can:

-         Smart Home basics

-         Navigating “standards” in Smart Homes

-         The elements that make up a Smart Home and a semi in depth look at these elements, especially Home Hubs, Networking and Connectivity (and security).

-         A focus on security and the risks associated with the internet and your home and your Smart Home

-         Managing your Smart Home and nomenclature for your Smart Home aka the bane of my life!

-         How and where to start with your Smart Home with a foray into making your home more energy efficient (very much focused on older properties like ours).

-         Smart Home tech for your older relatives that might help you and them.

Techies out there, please forgive me if I take some shortcuts, but happy for you to correct me.  I have tried to write this in a light manner and ideally avoid technical terms, but at the heart is my experience of how the kit works or doesn’t.

What is Home Automation or a Smart Home?

Put simply, it is the use of technology to control and manage parts of your home. I personally prefer to use the term Smart Home, and I will use this term from now on.

A Smart Home is a collection of disparate Internet Of Things (IoT) devices that perform specific tasks for instance managing your heating or performing specific tasks at specific times or when you instruct it to.  An IoT device is simply something that is not a laptop, smartphone or tablet that connects to the internet (most of the time) and can communicate with other devices via the internet or other network (like your home Wi-Fi).

Smart Home technology is already built into lots of everyday appliances, some with little value, but some, if you look at it, can provide value by saving money or by taking little chores away.  For instance, your connected dishwasher might send you pointless messages, but you can also schedule it via your phone to start when electricity is cheaper and it will remind you that you need salt, dishwasher tablets, rinse aid and when the filter needs cleaning.  Even our hob hood is connected and while largely valueless, it does remind me that the filters are due a clean, which I find valuable.

Our journey

I started this about a decade ago and it came about partly because of my interest in it but accelerated substantially because of my Mum’s rapid dementia deterioration. Living 220 miles away from her and having to juggle her resolute desire to stay in her own home, especially as she didn’t know that she had dementia, meant that a degree of diving into it was necessary and I needed the same systems in both locations so I could support her environment.

Obviously, my 80-year-old mother had neither any interest nor ability in technology, and my long-suffering wife is a bit of technophobe, so I needed tech that was largely easy to use and reliable.

The deterioration in my Mum, drove a rapid decision to accelerate our home automation. We had started small, which is one of my recommendations, by automating our home heating, which itself was driven by a desire to make our home more energy efficient and I will deal with smart heating and how it helps older houses in some detail later in the series.

Fortunately, I had been researching for some time and had already had some failures to learn from – remember UK Distance Selling Law is your friend and “not fit for purpose” an acceptable reason to return a product that simply doesn't work, and I have used this several times to return automation and multi-room sound systems successfully.

Smart Home basics

Before diving into specific devices and systems, it is crucial to understand the basics of a Smart Home.

Essentially, Smart Homes involves using technology to control and monitor and control various aspects of your home environment, such as lighting, heating, security, and entertainment.  I would argue that there are four core components to a Smart Home:

• Smart Hubs:   These are devices that have some capability to bring control of disparate smart home devices and platforms into a single device. Price and capability vary greatly and the ability for such a device to be the single controller for your smart home, I personally, believe to be limited based on current (2024) capabilities. Happy for someone to point me in a better direction and new devices are appearing all the time. I will deal with this area in more detail later and provide some pointers.
• Smart Devices:   These are really what you want the smart home for as these are the valuable elements that you are trying to use in a smart manner. Lights (and bulbs), thermostats, security cameras, curtains and virtually anything that can be plugged into a power socket can be made to varying degrees smart and these will all be classed as Internet Of Things (IoT) devices.
• Your Smartphone:  While Smart Hubs may provide capabilities outside of your smartphone, the disparate nature of the marketplace means that the apps on your phone are often king and while some devices won’t need you to go back to the phone app after setup, the painful reality is that your phone will be needed regularly.
• Connectivity:   I am sure that it comes as no surprise that your smart home devices need to be able to talk to each other and the outside world and this comes with a set of challengers to be overcome and to be considered. Unfortunately, this connectivity introduces risks that you should be aware of and consider before you make investments as even the most innocuous device could be a threat, and marketplace does not really articulate this nor provide sufficient protection to you and your home.  There is talk that the UK government may change consumer law to provide a degree of protection, however, I doubt that this will happen quickly and the effectiveness of it I fear will be questionable.

I will deal with each of these components in more detail later.

Again, please give me some feedback and share with your network and happy to hear from you.