housethingsgoing
A frog and a duck living in a 4rm resale flat
We've lived here 1.5 years without a smart home system - why?
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Yup, as the title suggests, our home is… not smart. We don’t have a Google Home, or an Apple Homepod or any of those super-cool remotely controlled appliances - which we realised is probably quite rare among our friends. We debated very long and hard about whether to get a smart home when we first started our reno, but eventually decided not to install any smart home related stuff. So if you’re considering whether or not to make the additional investments into making your home a smart one, here’s why we didn’t do it: 
(Check out our very boring non-smart switches ) 🤖We were… lazy. The thought of having to configure a whole smart home system sounded pretty intimidating - do we choose Google or Apple? What do we need to buy to set things up? We also moved into a resale house on a limited budget, so we wanted to retain a big part of the existing electronic appliances, like the bedroom fans and the aircons, which meant that our house also could not be completely ‘smart’ unless we replaced them with compatible appliances. All this seemed like a lot of hassle and we eventually gave up on the idea of having a smart home, reassuring ourselves that we could eventually be able to add in the smartness if we really were dying without it. 🤖 We are also pretty bad with technology - the kind of people who never found out how to change our Wi-Fi password after the tech guy set it up for us on the first day LOL. With the number of apps and the need to make sure everything is hooked up to the same system, we figured that it would be better for us to just live in our boring non-smart home and not end up fighting over tech support issues. Also, we don’t really have a fixed schedule - Duck works from home and goes to the office on the most random of days, and bedtime is never fixed when you’re two adults living your best life with some netflix binging or late night working, so having automated schedules for our aircon, lights and fans hasn’t been something we’ve wanted to have. 
🤖It’s also not like we don’t have smart appliances - we realised we’re just not programmed internally to make use of that smartness. It’s hard to NOT find smart appliances these days when it’s so popular. Our Airfryer, Steigen, robot vacuum… all those are app enabled and can actually be activated via apps (but different apps LOL) if we required. The thing is, we haven’t really found an opportunity to use these appliances remotely - we’re always at home when we want to airfry anything, or wash our clothes, or hang our laundry. We also don’t have any elderly/kids in our house who might need our help to operate these appliances while we’re not at home. As for the robot vacuum, we get how convenient it can be to have the vacuum run remotely and clean the house while we’re not at home, BUT the problem is that our vacuum is not very smart. It has a terrible tendency to get stuck in the most random of locations, whirring and screeching to no end, which is why we prefer to run the vacuum only when we’re at home to make sure we’re around to rescue it. 
So fast forward 1.5 years into living here - we haven’t really had any regrets about not having a smart home. We definitely have appliances that could become part of a smart home system - but we’ve never had any compelling need to string everything together and set up a whole system. Yet. That’s not to say that we’re completely opposed to smart homes! We think they are super cool and may or may not be secretly jealous of the people who get to say - “Google, turn on movie theatre mode!” in their living rooms. Sometimes Duck wishes she married a super smart tech guy who can automate her whole house for her - but alas! Fate has it that I’m stuck with Frog who just learnt how to use a Macbook not too long ago. So yes, we open our curtains manually, turn on and off our lights manually, and the only voice command that exists in this house is me commanding Frog to “CAN YOU PLEASE TURN ON THE AIRCON”. But that’s been okay with us so far - and…. I always remember to say please in my commands. :)
26 September
