The article discusses expectations for smart home announcements at the upcoming IFA tech show in Berlin. While companies may unveil new smart speakers, cameras and robot vacuums, the smart home remains fragmented as the Matter interoperability standard has yet to fully deliver on integrating devices. The author argues the industry needs to provide more utility than novelty by allowing different smart devices to work together seamlessly. Examples mentioned include lights notifying users of doorbell activity or a robot vacuum taking on multiple household chores autonomously. Overall, the smart home needs solutions that are essential rather than just novel if consumers are to see the value beyond the initial cool factor.
The system environment does have radio based components - but you are right, some things cannot be achieved without deep integration with the house. But yeah, I rented for a long time and while I used radio based systems it is not as good. My hope is that it does get common enough that more and more landlords adopt it,at least for the midrange segment. We do actually provide some limited integration for a small apartment we rent out but currently it’s not something people care about tbh and the law here is a bit problematic in that regard, but that’s a very local problem.
I’m also in Germany, I can believe that the law would make issues ;) This building is from the 60s (making it one of the newer ones), there is no way they are getting upgraded with something like that. OTOH ZigBee + HA works perfectly without deep integration.
Actually our building is much older…But as written elsewhere, we had to renew everything anyway. I used Homematic before switching over to KNX (/KNX:RF) and while it was okay for a rental (and can do much more than people think) it’s still clunky unless you use HA as an additional layer and you waste a lot on batteries. But still, better than nothing.
We are lucky that we actually have the best renters we could ever imagine but their flat was renovated cabling wise before we bought the object so there was little use of implementing something that would require rewiring AND puts me deep in the “functional liablity and GDPR” hole. But if I ever need to rewire it, it will be done with KNX simply because I can do that myself. German/GDPR law sadly is a bit uninnovative in that regard - I would happily offer my renters fingerprint access but the fact that I then would need to do four different data transfer aggreements is a hard reason to not do it.
When renting out you very soon find out that the law is heavily geared towards big corperations like vonovia and fucks over the smaller landlords whenever possible, sometimes even to the disadvantage of the renter. E.g: I can easily produce heat consumption directly from the heating system for each renter, even can automatically send them this. It can hardly be manipulated and is seen as evidence in other countries… BUT: As we rent out two apartments I do not fall under the “small landlord clause”,even though the smaller one is just a studio. So I need to install a wireless heat measuring system on all radiators and warm water outlets. Now here comes the problem: These measuring devices need to be capable of wireless measurement soon. Funny, as all of them are in the same room…where the heater is. right next to the gateway.
But you need them by law and now I need to put this shit on my renters side costs… almost 25€/month (and that was the cheapest offer by far) per apartment. I rent out for somewhat reasonable prices (well below Mietspiegel), as I rather have friendly renters than max out what I get…but that shit makes me mad. (We “refinanced” it by me taking over smoke detector maintenance so we could keep costs the same)