Comment on Home Automation: Simple vs Easy by KenN

I dove head-first into IoT platforms about 12 years ago, especially the ESP devices. I whipped up some test environmental monitoring, put a MQTT server on my home Linux box, put a sample webapp on my hosted webserver, flashed some SonOff devices with tasmota, etc etc. I even prototyped a whole web-based remote boat-monitoring system, til I found that another developer had gone there first and did it better.

Anyway my IoT stuff rarely went beyond experiments and proof-of-concept. I never finished a fully working home-automation system. Why? Because it's just my wife and I, and our house is small and uncomplicated and everything is working fine. About the only time I wish for home automation is when I'm going to bed on the second floor, and I can't remember if I switched the basement light off or not.

So this admission tarnishes my geek cred, I know. But we haven't yet imagined a compelling reason to do more home automation and online monitoring. If anything, remote monitoring for security and to get notifications of intrusions, system failures, flooding, power-outage, etc would clearly be useful.