Reliance on the internet and the cloud has never been greater. But is that the right way to run your smart home?
Most smart home devices need an internet connection to work. We have all experienced the “bong” noise when you summon a voice assistant but it can’t help you because your WiFi or internet isn’t working. Even more frustrating when the internet goes down halfway through a 90 minute timer for dinner in the oven. When you rely on the cloud your smart home relies completely on something outside of your control. After all. the cloud is just someone else’s computer.
When your smart home talks to itself it doesn’t matter if your internet is down or there is an issue with the service in the cloud, it will always work!
Speed
Want a smart light to turn on when you walk in the room? When everything is local it has the best chance to switch on before you stagger into something in the dark. If your relying on a cloud service to turn your light on then the command to switch on the light has to travel out of your home, all around the planet before getting back to get to your home. This overly complicated route slows down how long it takes for your light to turn on. Local control keeps everything much more responsive.
Reliability
What happens when the company running your cloud service goes under or they stop supporting the tech you bought a few years ago? The service stops working and you are left with a paperweight. What happens when your internet connection or WiFi drop off? It all stops working.
Keep everything under your control and you can only blame yourself when it stops working. Use a stable simplified system and your system will repay you with a reliable smart home.
Privacy
When your information goes through the cloud then someone or something will be seeing that information. Why should someone on the other side of the planet know that someone is at your front door, or even worse that your house is empty and a good target full of smart home kit?
There have been numerous news articles about home cameras being hacked or company employees looking at footage without permissions.
When you keep everything within your control then the chances of the information being misused are much lower.
Costs
If your not paying for a product then you are the product.
When you rely on something in the cloud you often have to pay a small fee. No cloud service….no fee.
Flexibility
This one might not be as obvious. If you have smart home tech that uses open standards (Zigbee, Local API’s, Matter etc) instead of using the internet you can get all these devices into one hub. Bringing everything into one hub means you can get anything to react to anything. For example. You could press a wireless handheld button to boost your heating by 2 degrees for 30 mins or when you first arrive home get an audible announcement of the status of the home and what happened while you were gone. The limit is your tech and your imagination. If you have lots of different brands of kit all working with their respective cloud, they often cant work together. This results in a connected dumb home.
