| For me it's a set of automations that make some of the minor inconveniences of life just sort of magically resolve themselves: - Automatically closing the skylight shades after sunset (when they just let ambient city night glow in) and open them just before sunrise. - Automatically opening the window shades just before sunrise. - Turning on the overhead lights and increasing brightness in several stages during sunrise (my place can be a bit dark because I'm under the eaves, this helps the effect). - Automatically turning off several light-producing devices (coffeemaker, Instant Pot, etc) via 'smart outlet' when I go to bed in a certain time window, then turning them back on when any light is turned on in the morning. (This second-order automation means they still have the same 'magical' effect even if I disable the other auto-lighting for a day because I desperately need to sleep in.) - Automatically playing NPR in several rooms the first time I leave the bedroom on a weekday during a certain time window. All the automation here happens entirely locally via HomeKit, and the only reason the system even needs an internet connection at all is so the Apple TV acting as a hub can get updated sunrise/sunset times. (For a totally self-contained system you'd probably want to grab a cheap iPad to act as the hub instead, wall-mount it, and put it in 'kiosk mode' locked to the Home app.) For all of this, my Hue lights/smart plugs/motion sensors and the Apple and Sonos speakers have been completely reliable. The Hunter-Douglas skylight shades have been mostly reliable (maybe one or two failures over the course of a year, though I did have to get an RF repeater for that to work well). The weak point is the window shades, which use generic rebranded functionality from a reseller because most of the industry of window coverings is awful and behind the times. Hunter-Douglas top-down-bottom-up shades are about the best replacement available at the moment for automation purposes (so you can adjust the exact amount of window covered for privacy purposes and do it multiple times per day in a way that would be a massive pain to handle manually), but awfully pricey. I'm also considering rigging up a proper bed occupancy sensor (basically turning the whole bed into a giant scale with load sensors and triggering events on human-approximate weight being added/removed) to replace the bedroom motion sensor, but I've got one of those Ikea slat-bottomed bedframes that probably wouldn't work very well for that. |