Can a Smart Home Solve All My Problems?

It's often shocking how little changes to a home can have a big impact. You become accustomed to how things are supposed to work because that's the way they've always worked. In reality, you've gotten used to a bad way of doing things—or, at least, there's a better way of doing them.

Can life feel lighter by the simple purchase of a wireless vacuum?

Does the sun shine a little brighter if your garage closes on its own?

One can dream, one home automation at a time.

Rob: We got a new vacuum a couple weeks ago. Our venerable Shark bagless vacuum had lost just enough attachments and suffered enough other damage that it was time to consider replacing it, and I was strongly considering returning to the world of old-school vacuum cleaners with their tidy little bags. I’d loved the Shark but there were times I wondered, as I stood in a cloud of gross dust as I emptied its container into a trash can, whether a bagless vacuum cleaner really represented the kind of progress I wanted.

MK, however, strenuously opposed any move toward a bagged vacuum cleaner or toward just getting another, newer Shark. Her argument was pretty simple: we don’t really have to worry about vacuuming floors or carpets. The place we have trouble is in the corners of our apartment, or the crevices in our furniture. Those are the places we find mice making themselves overly comfortable, or where we see crumbs of food or scraps of dog toys accumulating. We need to be cleaning those areas every day, maybe multiple times a day. The kinds of vacuums I was considering, she argued, were going to fail and fail miserably.

I’ll spare you the argument we had. Suffice it to say, I didn’t see why we couldn’t just use the attachments that came with the other vacuum cleaners we were considering. The Shark could do all this, so why not just get another one if she was so unmoved by the other options? The answer was simple: because it had cords. And if it had cords, we were never going to use it.

Patrick, I have to tell you how embarrassingly right this has proven to be. I thought we’d made okay use of our vacuum cleaner, but I’d often find myself saying, “Well we just need to be better about cleaning” every time we realized we were dealing with another mouse incursion. That if we were more conscientious, we’d put the vacuum to work and stay on top of housekeeping the way we needed to. But MK’s insight appears to have been the insight. The simple steps of fishing the vacuum out of the closet, unwinding the power cord, and plugging it in were insurmountable hurdles. Not too bad if we were vacuuming the whole house or even just the whole living room but for just doing a quick spot-clean around the fridge or along the baseboards under the cabinets? It was stopping us dead in our tracks, without even being aware of it. We’d just glance at the floor and think, “That’s not bad” and spare ourselves the whole effort.

We ended up getting an LG stick vacuum that sits on a big charger stand in the corner of our living room. Truthfully, I don’t love the look of it just sitting there, but on the other hand I can just grab it, vacuum up a bit of kitchen detritus or loose dog kibble before bed, and return it to its charger in the space of about thirty seconds. I don’t even have to empty out its little chamber: the stand has a bag inside it that the vacuum discharges into when it’s replaced on its charger.

I didn’t think “plugging in a vacuum cleaner” was a hurdle between me and keeping the house clean. Since we got this thing, though, I have to admit it was the entire ballgame. From the standpoint of pure math it makes sense: doing anything with the old vacuum cleaner was going to take about five minutes. Two minutes taking it out and putting it away, a minute emptying the chamber, and then a minute fussing with attachments and cords. If you just need to do 30 seconds of work, four minutes of preparation and storage work is ridiculously wasteful. But I didn’t see it that way. I just felt like my tendency to sloth was causing me to use my nice vacuum cleaner less than I’d have wished.

Do you have any steps associated with an important chore or task that aren’t that difficult, but you kind of hate regardless? Have you ever gotten an upgrade or made a lateral move toward a different piece of equipment and realized things had been way, way more difficult than they needed to be?

Patrick: Ah, this is funny. Some of my earliest movement towards “smart” devices when we bought our house eight years ago was entirely driven by me running into an issue with the house that I could not solve through regular memory, habit, and phone/watch reminders. This is a low stakes issue, but I could not, for the life of me, remember to turn off the outdoor lights that sit encased above our front door. I also could not, for the life of me, remember to turn them on at night. When I did one, I would forget the other, leading to situations where the light was either left on all day or never flipped on when the sun went down.

Frustrated, I finally investigated these so-called “Phillips Hue” light bulbs my friends online kept chattering on about. The lights required for my light fixture were candelabras—smart candelabras. And naturally, they were more expensive. But the idea of having the lights go on, then off, then on again, then off again without ever having to think about on/off again was tremendously appealing. Being able to alter their habits when we were out of town was appealing, too. I looked up how well such lights hold up under cold weather and was told by reddit to “not worry about it.” Eight years later, they’re doing fine, and my brain has never, ever had to think about whether those lights have been in the right position for near a decade.

It’s the small things, no?