When a Smart Home becomes a Dumb Home.
By john on Oct 20, 2008 in Home Automation, featured
I’m not dead! I am, however, VERY very busy and haven’t had too much time to keep up on here. I hope to be able to post more on here in the near future as things calm down a bit.
This weekend I had a sad thing happen. My smart home became an inexplicably dumb home. Suddenly my life was thrown into disarray when I pressed a button and….. nothing happened. I was left wondering what in the world happened.
That’s when I looked at the control module for my Insteon home control system and noticed that the LED that indicates activity was no longer blinking. The unit seemed to have lost the ability to detect anything. This didn’t bode well, as while my Mac Mini is the brains behind the system, that control module is the spinal cord that allows the brain to transmit the signals… electrically… to the rest of the switches in the house.
The end result being that the spinal cord was cut and the brain could no longer talk to its appendages.
I did two things immediately. First, I ordered a replacement and had it over-nighted – I need this control module for my house to work. Second, I called SmartHome’s product support line to inquire about a replacement. I did both of these because I wanted to eventually have a backup handy in case this ever happened again. Plus, who knows if/when I will need a second control module J
When I called SmartHome I was somewhat amazed at the service. I informed them I had a bad Powerlinc module and they were able to look up my account by my last name and billing zip code, then noticed that I had bought the unit within the past year and issued a warranty replacement – with shipping pre-paid by them. They had indicated that they could do an emergency replacement shipment if I needed it, but I opted to just use the normal replacement procedure where I send the defective unit and they ship the replacement when they receive the bad unit. Since I already had one ordered to arrive early this week it just made sense to do it this way.
Until the replacement I ordered arrives a few things don’t work: My lamps in my great room, as well as my loft, don’t work. My front porch light does not turn itself on and off, my thermostat does not update itself daily, my morning mode doesn’t work – so my house doesn’t tell me the weather report in the morning, and various other automated lighting controls don’t work.
This is unsurprisingly annoying – after a few months of having a working smart home, it’s almost debilitating when it ceases to function. It is, however, a good measure of how useful the smart home features have been for me.
Lessons to learn: Avoid having single points of failure when possible, and have backup hardware available for your critical pieces.
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