You Should Maintain a Guide to Automating Your Smart Home.
Every major purchase you make comes with an owner’s manual: cars, dishwashers, even calculators. But your biggest purchase—your home—doesn’t come with instructions, which is why I’ve previously advocated creating your own guide . Little documentation means you have easy access to all the paint colors and appliance model numbers in your home.
You should add information about your smart home to this guide. By specifying which products belong to which hub, app, and automation tools, you relieve yourself of the burden in the future of trying to diagnose inevitable smart home problems . You also create the perfect guide to pass on to a future owner if you sell your home.
Start by describing your hubs
If you use a multi-system hub and voice assistant, such as Google, Amazon, or Apple, describe the general layout of your system in your reference. Talk about how to access these assistants, where these speakers or devices are located.
Then list the additional hubs and their locations – these are devices that come with some products and are required for that specific product. I tend to keep them in one place and try to label them for my own sanity (and to justify the label maker).
This process may seem unnecessary, but it takes surprisingly little time and means you can easily return when the device goes offline. Additionally, you will update and replace products in the future as technology advances. There’s no point in keeping a hub if you no longer have related products, but you’re unlikely to remember which hub connects to which devices without even remembering. This documentation will easily remind you to make these changes.
Keep an inventory of smart products
Just like you do with your home appliances—so you can easily order parts, access support, and provide documentation for insurance if you need it—you should simply keep a list of your smart products. A spreadsheet will work for this; For each product, be sure to write down which application and hub it is associated with. By adding products one at a time, you often forget how many brands you have, and this isn’t always easy to figure out. For example, smart light bulbs and plugs often don’t have names on them, and even if they do, the application isn’t necessarily the same. Many brands have adopted generic app names such as “Smart Life” or “Home Life”. I spent a ton of time keeping track of products and their apps when I needed it—and you’ll probably need it at some point.
Document your automation
I have a lot of automation running, and for the most part they perform simple tasks, like turning on the lights at a certain time, turning on the vacuum cleaner under certain circumstances, or providing information when I ask a question. The problem is that this automation is cumulative, and if you need to figure out why the vacuum cleaner is running at 3:00 pm every day, it turns out that there are many places where automation can come from: an app for the vacuum cleaner itself, your voice assistant like Alexa or Google, or a third party integration service such as IFTTT or Zapier. You’ll be shocked at how easy it is to forget how you set something up. Documenting this automation, even in the simplest terms, will eliminate this problem.
I like to think of your smart home as a sprinkler system. They usually just work, so you don’t have to think about them. But when something goes wrong, you have no way of knowing what’s going on internally, much less what’s most likely the source of your problem, without documentation. A map and inventory of the system will be very useful in such circumstances – and your smart home is exactly the same.