WiFi cameras
The first I bought was a WiFi camera. In the beginning, I traveled a lot between Crete and the Czech Republic, so it was nice to see what was happening here when I wasn’t here. I started with two TESLA Smart outdoor cameras and one indoor camera. One camera was recording my main driveway, the other the caravan, and the interior camera was recording the lights on my Victron Energy power unit so I would also have a visual overview if there were a problem.
It was funny at the beginning when suddenly my wife started talking to me from the Czech Republic through the camera. All of these cameras have voice output, and I gave access to the cameras to several family members who could also watch me online. 😊 Sometimes, it was “creepy” when the internal camera suddenly started rotating. It can be moved remotely within a range of 360 degrees. But then it turned out that only my brother was setting a better point of view than when he greeted me from the Czech Republic through the camera. 😉
I was surprised by how quickly you can get used to someone following you online. In the beginning, you are careful, it is uncomfortable, and you wonder if someone is watching right now, but after a few weeks, you don’t even think about it anymore.
Now I have two more battery cameras. The advantage of these is that I can place them, for example, on an olive tree without dragging dozens of meters of electrical cable to them. Recharging the battery is enough about once every three months, but recharging takes almost the whole day.
And since all cameras also have motion detection functions, including night vision, we have a complete security system for a few thousand CZK. I now have the system set to automatically turn on when I leave and automatically turn off when I arrive. So, no coding, no returning that one forgot to turn on the alarm. Everything runs fully automatically. It should be noted that I have one of the cheapest devices, so the sensitivity of the detection is somehow not world-class, and there are sometimes quite a lot of false alarms even after adjusting the settings. But it does its job. How surprised the neighbor was when he came to our property when we were all in town. I called him right away when I saw his helplessness on the cam and how he was looking for us, and I explained to him that he wouldn’t find us there and that he didn’t have to tell me he came to visit us because I can see him online on the cam.
When the house is ready, I will buy more cameras, and since the development is constantly moving forward, I am looking forward to 4K. I hope there will be more sophisticated personal detection so that every gust of wind or every moth at night does not set on my alarm. And despite having carefully set the cutouts in which the camera is supposed to shoot and in which there are no twigs with leaves, I have the shooting sensitivity set appropriately so that I don’t miss something important.
Smart water control
Along with the cameras, I also bought a WiFi water cap, water level sensors, and a smart box that can switch based on the water level sensor and communicate via WiFi. It was not an unnecessary investment at all. If anyone has lived in a caravan, they know that water needs to be added regularly, which is not easy. It was a job for two people to stretch the hose, and the other one was inside the caravan, checking to see if the tank was full. When I was alone, I had to keep going around the caravan (several times while filling the water), and occasionally, the tank would overflow anyway. I gradually learned to recognize the water level by the sound of the water being added, but it was still an unpleasant daily job. Now, when water needs to be added, I click a button in the TESLA Smart app and don’t worry about anything else. I can eat breakfast, read a book, and read social networks. When the tank is full, the sensor switches on, and the cap automatically closes the water. The next level is that I set the start-up automatically for an hour or so, and the water will always turn on completely automatically. I haven’t run this yet because it is not seamless so far. Sometimes the sensor or the box does not turn on, and the shutter does not close automatically. I then have to close the valve manually via the application. However, compared to the previous completely manual tolling, this is a fundamental simplification.
Smart lights and smart sockets
Smart lights and smart sockets have also been added. I gradually built a shelter next to the caravan, where I had a bed so that I didn’t have to set up a bench in the caravan every evening when I was here with my dad. But how do you get to the shelter after dark in the middle of the wilderness on a winding road up the hill so that you don’t fall off the slope? When there’s a full moon, there’s no problem. That’s light as day. But the other 26 days of the month are more complicated. It’s really dark in nature at night. And when the moon is not shining and the stars are behind some haze, the darkness is really very thick. Of course, there are flashlights or lights in a cell phone, but that’s not it. My wife bought me a nice LED chain. I made an outdoor electrical outlet, but the problem is how to turn it on and off. Do you go out to the shelter first, turn it on when it gets dark, and when you go to bed around midnight, then turn it off and walk the last few meters in the dark? As a result, the light shines for several hours without use. Or you plug it into the socket at the caravan and turn it on when you go to bed, but when you get to bed you have to go back to turn off the light and then go upstairs again in the dark, which doesn’t make sense. Or leave it on all night, which is very inefficient in a situation where you are completely off-grid and run on one battery.
A smart outdoor socket solved that. Unfortunately, TESLA Smart does not offer them, so I had to reach for the Sonoff brand and only later found out that the two smart standards do not communicate with each other. Therefore, I have to control this smart socket using a different application than other devices, but the comfort is excellent. When I go to sleep, I press a button on my mobile, turn on the light on my way, go to bed, lie down nicely, and turn off the light from the crib. When we later acquired a more powerful solar system and a larger battery storage and no longer had to monitor every watt, I started letting the lights turn on and off completely automatically according to a time schedule. I know I have to go to bed really before midnight if I don’t want to turn on the lights manually. 😊
After these experiences, I bought a few more smart bulbs in the shed, where I didn’t make switches anymore. So we can only control the lights there with a mobile phone, which is perfectly fine in this case. For those scratching their heads now, I’ll just point out that we will have switches in the house, and not all the lights will be smart. It is always necessary to think about future use, and it is not worth controlling everything via WiFi, not only because it costs money. It must be admitted that the reliability is not 100%, and certain problems occasionally occur. But where remote control makes sense and greatly simplifies life, it makes sense to invest in this technology despite occasional complications, not only due to the saving of electrical energy but also due to the improvement of living comfort.
Other smart plugs control my mosquito repellent. You will read in the instructions that you should turn on Raid half an hour before you go to sleep. But who needs to remember that? So, if you have a regular routine, you set the socket to turn on for about half an hour before you go to sleep, and when you get into the crib, there are no mosquitoes. And you’re not as stung as you used to be. And an even bigger problem than turning the repellent on in time is turning it off in the morning. Whoever forgets about it loses the precious filling unnecessarily, which then evaporates all day in a room in which it is not. Now the timer does it for me, and in the morning after dawn, when the mosquitoes are no longer flying anyway, the Raid turns itself off. So, another device that runs entirely automatically without human intervention and saves resources (energy and repellent fillings). One realizes the advantage of this automatic operation when it suddenly stops working (e.g., due to a weak WiFi signal).
A big advantage is also the light in front of the little basement room I temporarily built for my wife before the house was finished. After dark, the light is automatically turned on there, which is then dimmed to 1% on the tenth evening, when the wife is already asleep, and emits light like an orientation light all night long. So, when a woman goes into the “hallway” at night, she doesn’t have to fumble for the light switch or fumble through the dark, but has a nice emergency light that automatically turns off after dawn. In the fall, you need to shift the times sometimes to make it work correctly with the shift of dusk and dawn, but that’s not a problem. It’s done in a few seconds. Of course, connecting an outdoor light sensor would also solve this. However, a few seconds of work once a month is still not worth investing in a light sensor.
Smart large appliances (smart washing machine)
But it doesn’t end there. We bought a washing machine as our first big appliance. Because when you stay somewhere for a long time, you need to do laundry. A manual drum washing machine working on the principle of vacuum and centrifugal force was fine, to begin with, but an automatic washing machine with a load of 10 kg of laundry is in a completely different league. And now that my wife has arrived, she washes more often. It was a bit of a struggle, because the price difference between a regular washing machine and a smart one was more than a hundred EUR, but in the end, I managed to get the smart washing machine through. What was the main argument that was ultimately the most important to me? It is a remote diagnostic option. If we use it even just once during the washing machine’s lifetime, then the investment in this technology has paid off. For now, we have a washing machine in front of the caravan under a covered pergola. But even if there is a house, we will still be in the middle of an olive grove. It is 25 km from the nearest town, but for a specialized repair, a technician would most likely come from Heraklion, which is a hundred kilometers away. And anyone who has ever had a washing machine repairman at home knows that it is quite common for the technician to come, take the washing machine apart, diagnose the problem, and say that they don’t have the relevant spare part and will come back with it later. Living in or near a big city it’s not a big deal. Delay just for one or few days. If you live in an olive grove in Crete, it will be a week at the earliest, but more likely a month or more. Because he will order the part, he will travel from Athens, and then he will not travel such a distance just because of you, etc. However, if we have a smart Bosch washing machine, in the event of a malfunction, a real specialist will log in to the washing machine, for example, from Germany, find out what the problem is, and the technician will already come with a specific spare part. (Hopefully. 😊) I realize this may not be a win for everyone, but in our case, it’s really a critical question. It would not be possible for us not to wash for a month. And such functions as setting the washing cycle are much easier via the mobile app than using the wheel on the machine, so I can do it too. Or the ability to monitor how many minutes are left until the end of the washing without having to go to the washing machine to look (we have a really big plot of land 😊) is just the icing on the cake. The washing machine will send a message that it has finished washing, so it is possible to run right away and hang the laundry in the sun. It’s funny, of course, when my wife sent me a message from the Czech Republic saying that the washing cycle had finished. Because like any device, you can give more people access to manage it.
We still don’t have a house, but we already have more than a dozen devices registered in our WiFi network, whose smart functionality we use every day.
Oh, and not to forget. We also have a weather station connected to the internet. So, if you want to know what the weather is like here, how the wind is blowing, etc., write us, and we will send you a freely accessible link.
What about hackers?
Of course, this is a real problem for all devices connected to the Internet. Although everything is encrypted and secured with a password, permissions are assigned to specific people, almost everything can be broken. You must consider, what damage can be done if someone hacks into your system and what investment in security will it justify. Everyone has to answer this for themselves. I plan to switch to the most closed system connected to my own NAS, which I will try to have sufficiently secure. That is, the data will not be stored anywhere in the outdoor cloud.
Specific tips at the end
We will certainly continue to expand the system, taking into account the practical usability that will justify the higher acquisition costs of such devices. What I recommend to pay attention to when purchasing smart devices based on my practical experience so far:
- Buy devices of the same brand or at least of the same standard. There are two main standards Tuya and eWeLink that do not communicate with each other! Kind of like VHS and Beta for video tapes, who still remembers them. Individual manufacturers then use one of these technologies. E.g. TESLA Smart uses Tuya and SONOFF eWeLink. You can buy devices from different manufacturers and if they all use Tuya, for example, it should communicate with the other one. In the best case, everything will run through one application as well. E.g. I have bulbs connected in the TESLA Smart app that are not from TESLA Smart, but are Tuya standard. On the other hand, I have to have the eWeLink standard bulb connected to another application, because TESLA Smart does not recognize it. ☹ Google Home or Alexa can then be an integration element. I’ve already tried the integration with Google Home, and you can use your voice to control everything you connect to this system, but you lose some functions that native apps support. We will use Google Home more when there is a house.
- Ensure a high-quality WiFi signal, which is essential for the proper operation of all these devices. All devices have built-in recovery algorithms when the WiFi signal drops for a while. However, if you have a really weak signal and the outages are longer, it can cause more or less complications. Sometimes you have to re-pair the device, sometimes you have to unplug and reconnect the device to reconnect to the network, etc.
- Consider when a smart device makes sense. Even if one is a smart enthusiast like me, there is an economic aspect to consider. Any smart device will break rather than a non-smart one. And especially if one can’t solve problems independently and is dependent on outside experts, I’d say less is more in this case. E.g. it is pointless to put smart light bulbs in rooms where you go infrequently and only for a while. It is not necessary to have a smart shut-off on the main water supply, which you close only once a year when you go on vacation, etc. You do not need to have all the sockets in the house smart, but only those where you regularly turn the appliance on and off, or you need to know its specific energy consumption.
Write in the comments what you would do differently or what I should discuss more in the next article. If you would like more articles on technology topics let us also know. We are now deciding whether to use smart lights for the pool and which lights in the house will be smart and which will not. We’ll probably buy a smart refrigerator, but what about a stove and oven? What is your experience? Within the house, I want to purchase devices based on the ZigBee principle, which will completely eliminate the need for the Internet for these devices. This is a great advantage if, for example, the Internet does not work for a longer time.
I wish you good luck and success in building your smart home!
