Spent way too long comparing smart plugs. Sharing in case it helps someone save time:

• TP-Link Kasa EP25 ($12.50): Energy monitoring (watts + kWh with 7/30-day history), Away Mode that randomly toggles lights, works with Alexa/Google/HomeKit. Wirecutter's top pick.
• Amazon Smart Plug ($19.99): 571K reviews, 4.7 stars. Plug in, Alexa detects it, done. No features, but my mom set hers up without help so it wins on simplicity.
• Kasa EP10 ($6.37): EP25 minus energy monitoring and HomeKit. Ultra-compact, fits behind furniture. I have 8 of these running for 2 years.
• Govee 4-Pack ($25.49 total): $6.37 per plug with Bluetooth. App could be better but hardware is solid.

If you just need basic on/off scheduling, the EP10 or Govee is enough. EP25 is the best overall but most people don't use energy monitoring. Amazon plug is perfect for non-tech family members.

Anyone else have experience with these? Curious how the TP-Link vs Govee reliability compares for others.

I feel like robot vacuum companies and actual dog owners are using two different definitions of hands free. Because if I still have to rinse the mop, scrape hair out of the brush, wipe the tray, empty gross water, clean the dock corners, rescue it from a bath mat, and then sniff the mop like a Victorian doctor checking for plague, that is not hands free. That is just chores with an app. I have two dogs. One sheds soft little clouds, the other brings in dirt like he is doing field research. The problem is not just hair. It is wet paws, dried drool, kibble powder, dust under the couch, and that weird ring around the dog bowl that appears even when nobody admits responsibility. So when people say “just vacuum daily,” yeah, but what about the mop staying clean during the actual run? If the mop only washes after dragging through three rooms, I do not fully trust it. I’m starting to care about things I never thought about before: self-washing roller mops, dirty water separation, sealed dust paths, filters that do not cough fine dust back into the room. 

Dog people, what is your honest standard for hands free? Like actually hands free, not “you only need to do disgusting maintenance twice a week” hands free

My yard isn't very big, and lawn care was usually something I kept putting off until the weekend. A friend recommended the o600 rtk a while back, so I tried it mostly out of curiosity. After using it for a bit, the biggest thing I noticed is how much cleaner and more even the lawn looks all the time. Once the schedule was set, I stopped thinking about mowing. It just goes out and deals with it, even in the narrow side areas and around the garden edges.

Now I'll walk outside with coffee in the morning and the yard already looks done. No catching up or thinking about when I need to mow next. Funny how a neat lawn just makes the whole place feel better. Anyone else get that from home automation stuff too?

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Hey everyone,
we’re a small team working on a simple tool called AdBuster 2.0 PRO.
It solves one very specific problem: loud TV commercials.

The app detects commercial breaks and sends IR volume commands through Broadlink RM devices (RM3 Mini, RM4 Mini, RM4 Pro).
When ads start, the volume goes down automatically.
When the program returns, the volume goes back to normal.

The tool is already fully functional — now we’re trying to understand how useful it is for real users.
If you deal with loud ads or use Broadlink for home automation, your feedback would really help us decide what direction to take next.

Not promoting anything big here, just looking for honest opinions from people who know this space.

— AdBuster Team

I’m planning to replace most of my home lighting and I’d really appreciate advice from people with long-term experience using Matter smart bulbs.

Current setup:

• Home Assistant
• MikroTik network (currently Wi-Fi 6, planning to move to a MikroTik hAP be3 with Thread Border Router support)
• Mostly Tapo devices right now (smart power strips/plugs)
• Apartment setup, starting with living room, dining room and hallways first
• Gamer/tech enthusiast, but I care more about reliability and good lighting quality than RGB gimmicks

I’m intentionally excluding Philips Hue because the cost becomes very hard to justify where I live.

Right now I’m mainly comparing:

• Tapo L535E
• Linkind Matter RGBTW bulbs (especially the 1600lm A21)
• Nanoleaf Matter bulbs
• Govee Matter bulbs

Things I care about:

• Good white light quality (important!)
• Consistent color temperature between bulbs
• Efficiency/power consumption
• Low flicker/fatigue
• Matter reliability
• Home Assistant integration
• Long-term ecosystem stability
• Good brightness for common areas
• Preferably local-first behavior

I discovered my current bulbs are generic ones 1055lm 6500K 12W, so the Tapo L535E would basically match my current brightness while using less power.

However, the Linkind 1600lm RGBTW bulbs look VERY tempting because of:

• CRI90
• 1600 lumens
• 1800-6500K
• RGBTW architecture

At the same time, I keep seeing mixed opinions about long-term software/ecosystem maturity compared to TP-Link/Tapo.

One thing I’m struggling with:
Should I keep using Matter over Wi-Fi for bulbs since my network is already good, or should I start investing into Thread/Zigbee for lighting before I scale further?

Some people say Wi-Fi Matter is perfectly fine unless you have huge deployments, while others regret putting dozens/hundreds of Wi-Fi devices on their routers.

Also:
Is mixing bulb brands in connected spaces (living room + dining room + hallways) visually annoying in real life? I’m worried different whites/tints/dimming curves will look inconsistent.

Would love to hear real-world experiences from people running these bulbs long term, especially with Home Assistant.

One thing I’m also trying to understand better:

Linkind explicitly advertises true RGBTW architecture, while Tapo mostly markets the L535E as RGBW + tunable white.

Does anyone know if the Tapo bulbs actually use dedicated warm + cool white channels internally, or are they partially mixing white through RGB?

In real-world usage, does this actually affect:

• white light quality
• color consistency
• CRI perception
• dimming smoothness
• overall comfort

…or is it mostly marketing/spec-sheet differences?

we have been putting off replacing the fridge and the memorial day french door refrigerator deals finally got me serious about it. our current one is way overdue. we already have a decent smart home setup so i wanted something that actually fits into it, not just a fridge with an app that does nothing useful also spent a good chunk of last night going through specs and i still cant figure out whats a real feature or is it just marketing?

for anyone who has a smart french door fridge at home, did it actually change anything about how you use it day to day??

I love automation, but nothing makes me feel more ridiculous than tidying the house so the machine can tidy the house. That little pre-run ritual is where robot vacuums lose people, imo. Chairs half moved, cables rescued, dog toys thrown on the couch, bathroom rug lifted, then the robot starts and gets stuck on one shoelace anyway. So I stopped asking “how smart is the map” and started asking how much setup it needs before each run. My current rule is boring but works: only schedule rooms that are normally clear, use zones instead of whole-house runs, make one basket for floor junk, and don’t run bedrooms unless laundry is already handled.

The robot vacuum became way less annoying once I stopped pretending my home was a showroom. What’s your cutoff? If you have to spend 10 minutes preparing, is that still automation or just cleaning with extra notifications?

I originally got into smart home stuff for the fun side of it, but some devices genuinely ended up changing my day to day habits more than I expected.

Robot vacuums might be the biggest example for me, because I stopped having to constantly think about the floors being dirty.

Curious what devices ended up becoming background infrastructure in your home instead of just a cool gadget.

I’m curious where people draw the line between “annoying automation bug” and “nope, this device is leaving my house.”

I’m working on a smart-home thriller and trying to keep the scary parts grounded in things that could actually happen in a normal setup.

The useful-but-creepy failures are much more interesting to me than haunted-house stuff.

Not the obvious stuff like cameras being hacked or a lock failing open. I mean the small, believable things.

A light turning on at 3am for no clear reason.

A speaker responding to a conversation that did not include its wake word.

A thermostat changing behavior because it thinks it knows your routine better than you do.

A camera or motion sensor noticing something technically useful, but in a way that feels a little too aware.

A device making a correct reminder you never asked for.

The thing I keep thinking about is that most smart home creepiness probably would not look dramatic. It would look useful enough to excuse once, then twice, then permanently.

For people who actually run home automation setups: what kind of small failure would make you stop trusting a device?

EDIT: Apparently I need to point out that I want this to be a fully-automated solution, not one that relies on me inputting the data myself. I didn't think that would be needed given this is a Home AUTOMATION sub, but here we are...

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Hey folks,

We've got subscriptions to most of the major streaming providers in our house including NowTV, BB iPlayer, Netflix, Apple TV+, and Disney+

As a result, we've also got various TV series that we're watching across all those platforms, and remembering what we're watching at any given time and which service it's on is a real headache.

Does anyone have a system (ideally using Home Assistant!) that tracks what's being watched where? It would make it significantly faster each night to make the decision and switch to the appropriate channel!

I have a dream of creating an LED light show but don’t have any experience with this type of thing. My first step is just to attempt to buy the correct materials to make it work. Is this a list that would work to make this possible??

Mean well LRS-100-5 (5v 20a 100w)

3 hex boards

Appliance power chord

GLEDOPTO ESP32 WLED LED Controller

18awg wire

I've come around to a fairly specific one, and I'm curious where everyone else lands.

Mine is that a smart home should be invisible. The lights come on at sunset, the shades move with the sun, the door announces a visitor before the bell rings. None of that requires me to pick up my phone or open an app or ask a voice assistant for permission. The phone is for when something is wrong, not for running the house.

The test I keep coming back to is whether someone who has never been in my home can use it without instructions. My mother-in-law walks in, hits the switch on the wall, the light comes on. A guest stays for a weekend and never knows there's a system running. The dumb functionality of every switch and every control is preserved, because the moment the smart layer disables the dumb layer, you've built something fragile that breaks for anyone who isn't you.

The other piece is that everything runs locally. Home Assistant on hardware in a closet. No cloud round-trips for the things that matter. If the internet drops, the house still works. If a manufacturer shuts down their servers next year, nothing in my home becomes a brick.

I think a lot of what gets sold as smart home is really just remote-control-by-phone, and the planning question never gets asked. People buy the gadget first and then try to make it fit. I went the other way, planned the system before I bought anything, and the result is a home that mostly disappears.

So what's yours? Where do you draw the line on cloud versus local, on app versus invisible, on the dumb switch staying or going?

I’ve been trying to find a good solution for monitoring a freezer (garage freezer specifically) and most options seem to fall into one of two buckets:

1. Wired probe running through the door seal
2. Fully wireless sensors with mixed battery life / reliability

What I’m ideally looking for:

• works reliably inside a freezer
• no wired probe through the door
• decent battery life
• remote alerts if temp rises (app/text/etc.)

Curious what people here are actually using and trust long-term.

Colin Angle, who helped turn Roomba into a household name, is now working on something very different.

His new company, Familiar Machines & Magic, is building a home robot that isn’t focused on cleaning at all. Instead of another vacuum or mop, the goal is a mobile companion that can move around the house, follow people, and interact more like a pet than an appliance.

The idea seems to come from a limitation Angle ran into at iRobot. Expanding beyond vacuuming into things like mopping never really took off, partly because those tasks don’t justify the same kind of spending. So rather than stacking more chores onto a robot, this new approach leans into presence and interaction.

Planning to add Home Assistant + an AI conversation layer on top of an existing professional KNX installation in a large multi-family home. Looking for honest feedback before Phase 1.

The setup:

•	Full KNX backbone with ETS file  
•	\~120+ light groups, \~23-25 ACs, 7-8 FAUs, 14 motorised curtains, 40 keypads  
•	DALI + Cool Automation KNX-to-VRF  
•	UniFi network, one AP per room  
•	Currently on a proprietary visualisation server — works but uninspiring

The plan:

•	MDT KNX IP Router + HA on a Mac Mini M4 via Docker  
•	HomeKit Bridge to expose to Apple Home  
•	UniFi integration for room-level presence tracking via per-AP phone association  
•	OpenClaw (or NanoClaw) as the conversation brain, connected to Telegram + HA Voice satellites for “Hey Jarvis” in each room  
•	Claude or Codex as the LLM

What I actually want feedback on:

1.	Is this whole plan actually feasible and genuinely useful day-to-day, or am I overengineering something that’ll end up gathering dust? Brutally honest takes welcome.

2.	UniFi presence tracking at this scale (15+ people, multiple SSIDs) — anyone running this in production? Real-world latency for room handoffs?

3.	Is this a “set up once and enjoy” project or a “tinker every weekend forever” project? I have a developer to help me for initial setup but I want long-term reliability.

4.	Is OpenClaw genuinely safe for home automation given its CVE history? My plan is localhost binding, scoped HA user, zero community skills, no physical security devices exposed. Is that enough, or should I just go NanoClaw and accept the harder voice integration path?