A few weeks ago I read an article about how celebrities and famous people were ripping out home automation systems because they were hard to use and unreliable. I kind of laughed at the article because the systems that were likely created by “professionals” missed one of my main points about home automation and that is the system must augment, but not replace manual operations.

If someone walks into a fully automated house, they may have no idea how to turn on a light, a fan, the heat, air conditioning, etc. When I designed our home automation system, I put physical switches in the walls to control lights. Granted the early switches I bought were toggle switches that confused a babysitter once, but lights can be controlled by physically pressing the buttons. I do have a few switches in slightly inconvenient places that automation helps fix the mistakes, but worst case the buttons can still be pressed.

I would never imagine designing a system without manual control as who knows when a software update could take out the automation or there could be wireless interference taking out devices. For the most part, my system has local control (some monitoring is cloud based because I don’t have a choice at the moment), but even local control doesn’t always guarantee that it works. If a system relies on the cloud, there is even more reason for concern as their could be connection problems or cloud control could be down.

If and when I have to setup a new home automation system, I’ll take the same approach of putting in physical buttons and use the automation to make it easier and convenient to do some things. However, one area that is more difficult to have manual control is audio since we don’t own a physical tuner and have music distributed throughout the house. Luckily, this is not vital to being able to live in our house; nice to have, sure, necessary, no.