My Smart Home Had Become a Hoarder
I knew the house had accumulated old devices and routines. I did not know that a quarter of its records were furniture or that most scripts had never run. The useful repair was subtraction.
Writing
What broke, what I built, and what I’m still learning.
Newest first. The useful failures tend to age well.
The House Should Be Easy to Complain About
The most useful sentence in our smart-home guide is an invitation to complain. Explaining the house to the people living in it exposed rude routines that looked correct from the admin chair.
I Stopped Building the App I Wanted
The new house-control app was fast, polished, and expensive to keep correct. An outside review asked whether it should exist at all. The honest answer sent me back to the dashboard already in the house.
Alexa Could Not See Twenty Lights
Each light at the lake place was invisible to voice control. The setting that must expose the lights was dead the whole time. I fixed that. Then I rebuilt the whole voice surface, so two grandparents can run the house and never open an app.
Seven Taps on a PIN Unlocked My Somfy Blinds
Somfy's official cloud integration refused to see 18 motorized shades because of an account merger on their side. An undocumented local API let me in. You unlock it when you tap the hub's PIN screen seven times. The workaround was better than the front door.
Four Canadian Air Conditioners Refused to Connect Until I Set the Country to US
Four LG air conditioners in Canada serve Canadians. They refused a connection until I told the setup flow that they were American. The location of the hardware is not important. The region of the account is important.
After the Power Came Back, a Third of the House Did Not
The server restarted, every dashboard loaded, and the speakers and streaming boxes quietly vanished. My earlier fix had worked only until the next reboot.
The House Kept Thinking We Were Home
Arrival routines fired while I was still away, and the house stopped earning trust. A second signal from hardware already in the building helped, but only after I learned what a silent tracker actually means.