[brimble]

What's kept me from trying this stuff out is a few interrelated factors:

1) There's no possible way setting up and managing this stuff manually is going to be worth it if it only controls a couple things.

2) Doing enough to overcome point 1 seems to begin with "step 1: spend lots of money and time to replace tons of stuff that already works completely OK" and/or a bunch of research (I've used enough AirBnB IoT "actuate the existing deadbolt" add-ons to know that a bunch of them are time-wasting crap that barely works, plus I've never seen one that didn't look bad)

3) Taking a "just do it as you replace things" approach still results in spending more money (IoT will be more expensive than dumb, just about every time), plus lots of things will probably never need to be replaced while I own this house, plus that means potentially years before I hit any kind of reasonable pay-off period.

4) I have a feeling I could solve several of the problems faster and cheaper with a dumb approach of low-voltage LEDs hooked to the right things and run to the right places, or outlet timers, or whatever, if I were so inclined—which I'm clearly not, because I haven't.

Every time I get the urge, I think back to that automation effort/payoff chart from XKCD and then... don't, because I can't see how I'll ever get on the good side of the line. Doubly so if any part of it can't go years without any kind of attention or maintenance related to the IoT aspect of it.

[EDIT] The calculation would change if I enjoyed that kind of thing as a hobby, of course.

[xconverge]

Your math checks out. For me I came to different sums for each bullet point primarily starting at the place of "I do/did enjoy setting it up as a hobby". I also really liked maturing my solutions from a this is fun to hack together, to things my partner actually has said "wow this is actually pretty nice I like it".

I have also been very impressed with some of the infrastructure/solutions that the open source community has available, it is a pretty rich infrastructure that is not unbearably-brittle if you know what you are doing, but definitely is not user friendly enough to be easy to recommend to everyone.

[boringg]

Thanks for the ideas - I think that's how I would have to approach it as well in that I would really want to further explore the possibilities of IoT. I've done some in the past for home energy systems but past energy I haven't seen a lot of high value opportunities. Certainly some things that could be smoother (like your projects).

[brimble]

Yeah, I totally get that it works out differently for different people. Maybe I'm just getting old enough that I can smell when I'm looking at something that's gonna become an excuse to spend money, more than anything else ("well now that I have an X, if I just had an Y...") But if I truly enjoyed it as a hobby, different story.