Basically, of course, everyone is busy with some things and there is absolutely no time to engage in a smart home, and do some automation, write, study sensors, different devices.

In general, of course, an interesting question is whether a smart home can save such a resource as time.

Of course, I study a smart home and spend a lot of time studying it, I study different technologies, and of course I am interested in doing this in principle, but lately, for obvious reasons, I have spent much less time studying a smart home, various experiments, and in this case, of course, I can also figure out how to find this time, find different ways and see how others can find such a time.

Of course, I do not consider the option of automation to be the simplest, there you can buy some smart socket, install the application and write a minimal script to make it work, or just manually turn on and off this socket, of course you don't need to spend a lot of time here, it's all done very quickly and special research in terms of there will be savings from this, no need at all, but if you already consider a smart home as a full-fledged system that will help, including saving time, then of course you need to take normal solutions, it can be either of course some proprietary gateway that will allow you to fully combine different devices, but this option too most likely, it will not work, because it is not flexible enough, it has a lot of restrictions, and of course in order to remove all these restrictions, especially automation, it is primarily aimed at replacing what this person does not do manually, and therefore automation should be written very conveniently and well.

There are several systems in which the direction related to scripting is also developing very strongly, there is such a direction from Google, there is a direction from Samsung, their ecosystems, there is also a lot of attention paid to the development of scripting from Apple, and in many of these systems there is even the ability to simply add different scripts in the programming language if-then the scripts will not be enough to do with standard tools.

But this is also still a limitation, first of all, these systems do not support all devices and not all manufacturers, so of course it is simply impossible to do this there for various technical reasons, so of course the Yandex ecosystem is also more popular with us, and these systems in which you can develop a script will also not be able to integrate with Yandex, but in Yandex itself, writing scripts is still at the initial level, of course, and you will also not be able to make good scripts normally.

Therefore, the main solution will still be to make your own smart home server of some kind, on some Mini-PC type equipment, for example, take Raspberry or, as I am now more focused on Orange, in principle, there are still different manufacturers of the same, there are even Russian manufacturers who make similar microcomputers and already try to use them fully install the smart home system, make all the necessary settings, then of course writing scripts and automation will reach the maximum level and it will also be possible to simply use programming languages to do various automations that will save time.

In general, setting up such a server is not very long, that is, installing the operating system on the server takes a maximum of 3 hours with all the settings, this is to download the image, upload it to the SD card, do the initial initialization of this system, connect to this system, configure remote access to the desktop or connect via SSH and learn them minimally to use it, it's not so long to make some initial configuration settings, but if we say for Orange, it's also possible to transfer the operating system to internal memory, in principle, it's not very long.

Then still choose some kind of smart home system, for example, the most common and in principle rapidly developing is Home Assistant, I also look at it in principle, it seems to me that it is the most optimal from the point of view of current use, so even here you can spend a lot of time and just install it.

If there is still a Zigbee stick for integration, then you can also install additional services to work with this stick, but they also exist in Home Assistant, such a service as a separate module, so in principle it can start itself, but of course you will need to buy this stick first and maybe even reflash it if the factory firmware is not it will be suitable for some parameters, but this is also not very long, and in principle it can also take a maximum of three hours, if something goes wrong, you will need to update some version of Python or install something else on this server, in principle it is not very long.

Then it seems to take some time to connect different devices, most likely they will be Zigbee devices, because wi-fi is a different story for everyone and using cloud connections and integration is not easy at all, but if these are zigbee devices that work under the protocol, then in principle you will need to spend some time just using a stick., to understand how it works, and then everything will go very quickly and the setup will be done quickly enough.

And the very last thing is of course already to understand the interface of the smart home system, to understand what sensors can do what devices can do and what commands can be executed and just already write scripts, here it is already to taste until you get tired or until everything is automated, maybe at some point in time it will just pass the hobby is no longer you will have to think about whether this saves time or not.

In principle, of course, in one weekend you can completely manage and even in principle in one day you can manage the setup of this smart home system, you will probably have to wait longer for all this to arrive from the store.

But in general, of course, there are time savings and very often they say, for example, savings on lighting control, that in each room there are a lot of light bulbs, different chandeliers, lamps that need to be turned off periodically, either when you leave somewhere from home or come on the contrary for everything to turn on, or when you go to bed and, accordingly, you also need to turn off everything, in the morning all turn on the walk again, of course it's long enough.

For example, if you need to turn off all the lights before going out, just by going through all the rooms and pressing all the switches, this will definitely take at least a minute, and if you spend one minute at least once or twice a day, then for a year it will be generally six hours of time that will be required just for this operation.

And then you can already understand that if you get some of these operations, for example, turning off the lights throughout the apartment or in a house especially multi-storey, where there are two or three floors, for example, and there are different rooms strongly spaced in different directions, or the apartment is large, or there are a lot of lamps in it, then of course in this way it will be much easier to turn off all these lights with one button.

When repairing an apartment, an electrician also suggested that I make a general switch, but of course this switch he just actually managed, for example, as it was done in hotels, and in some it still works like this, that there is a general switch that turns off all part of the electricity associated with lighting, of course if the lamp is plugged into the socket, then of course, this way it will not turn off and you will still need to turn it off manually.

Therefore, if you use different smart light bulbs, different switches, smart sockets or relays, then of course such a smart home can be made with one command to turn it all off, no matter if it is plugged into the socket and generally constantly powered from the network, for example, as a smart light bulb, or in some other way, well, there is a restriction if for example, the lamp has a touch control, then of course you can turn it off like this, but it is unlikely that it will turn on automatically, I have several such lamps, they certainly do not turn on themselves when power is applied.

But of course there is also an option for example, control of underfloor heating or some kind of heating, that is, an additional radiator is used for heating and even central heating is used, then the temperature changes quite often in the rooms and depending on the wind outside and the weather outside, from the season of the year and of course sometimes you want to there was a lower temperature in the rooms, during the day it was higher, you can certainly look for heaters that can do this, but it is very unlikely that they will be found at all, well, or it will be almost a smart switch that can be configured simply through the application.

Therefore, in this way, it is also quite difficult to adjust all these heaters, and even more so when you leave the house, you need to turn them off too, when you come, you need to turn them on otherwise it will be cold, of course this can also be done through the automation system and in principle I also looked it takes about 1 minute, also to bypass all the heaters, see, well, even if you do it through the offer, this is also quite a long time, you need to run the application, you need to go to a certain section there and set the temperature, that is, even this adjustment is minimal, it also takes about 6 hours a year, but in general, if automation is done for a much longer period, then, of course, in five years it will already be 30 hours, which in principle can be quite spent on making such automation very high-quality in a smart home.

It may also be an interesting option to put sensors for opening doors and windows on the windows, and in order not to have to check every time before leaving whether all the windows in the house or apartment are closed, of course, it is easier to make some scenario showing that when you leave the apartment, all these sensors are checked and automatically notified.

that you need to close a certain window, if all the windows are closed, then there will be an alert accordingly, or just for example the same light will turn off automatically in all rooms before leaving.

I specifically made a check of how long it will take me to go through all the rooms and check all the windows, this is quite difficult, because many windows are closed with curtains, you need to get close and see if the window is open or not, there are some windows that are just far enough away and you need to walk directly to them, for example, the balcony is like this, and only then it will be clear whether it is open or not, and of course it all takes a lot of time, and it took me about 30 seconds just to walk through all the rooms, not to mention just closing these windows additionally.

But the most important thing of course is that all these smart home systems, they can certainly and not only save time and make it possible to develop these scenarios while you are away from home, for example, you are traveling on the train or in the subway or are on vacation, and thus you can also improve your smart home even when in principle there is nothing else to do.

Automation in a smart home should be useful and create additional comfort, but sometimes everything goes wrong… The reasons for this, and how to configure everything, see on my channel.