Den Automation

Desmo

What's wrong with a zwave system? Choice of hubs from different manufacturers and hundreds of different devices from different manufacturers. Doesn't rely on the internet.

There's not a lot you can't do with zwave.

mushii

Z wave is great, but in its current state its still a very specialist market. These devices are Zigbee v3 so should be very robust and mesh nicely.
As other posters have said, the UK market needs a retrofit product (especially for light switches) that work with traditional UK wiring that has no Neutral, which is difficult, but not impossible. Again I think that Philips missed a huge trick not launching a UK specific retrofit light switch. I know that their products are premium, but looking at Den's pricing, it too appears to be approaching similar pricing points.

I have been looking at non-cloud based hubs for the past 2 years and playing with various devices. My leaning now is to move to Homeseer, just because of its maturity and stability. 20 years of HA I have come to learn that if SWMBO cant use it seamlessly, its an instant fail. I also helped a close friend completely Lutron / Crestron his house, when the power failed and came back on, it took over 20 minutes for the house to reboot and not always cleanly - another fail in my book.

Whatever I install now has to be seamless and has to operate in a manner that is either ultra-easy or operates in the same way as something that it is replacing (hence these lightswitches would have been a god-send if they weren't so damn ugly) and finally it cant look out of place or ugly. Unfortunately if I put these 1960 style switches in my house SWMBO would have the mother of all fits, so on that basis alone they will be a non-starter. I am probably going to use something like these

Z-Wave Fibaro Universal Dimmer 2 250W

Once I have a hub sorted.
I am really disappointed with the styling of the Den products, why launch something into the UK market as a retrofit, that doesn't match the styling of all of the other products in the house ?

Lesmor

Hi Desmo appreciate the reply
zwave zigbee is unfortunately all foreign to me
A lot of people have made automation a hobby and are clever enough to program/ flash software finding that you have to buy this to get it to work with that (see what i did there)
I spend way too much time in my AV hobby plus I am far too old to learn new skills

I want off the shelf consumer products that just work, even in my AV hobby that is proving harder and harder to find

My first foray into anything "smart" is with Hive home heating it appears that you can't use their hub for anything else other than Hive products?
I have also sorta automated my cinema room with RF sockets a broadlink RM Pro and a Google mini but even using that brings its own inherent issues
Already Two hubs and that is one too much for me
If you can point me in the direction of a hub that's compatible with my existing Hive along with Nest Hue, RF sockets and these upcoming switches and sockets then I am all ears.
Unfortunately manufacturers did not consider introducing a standard where everything can just be plug and play

Bl4ckGryph0n

The key is too automate it properly such that anyone doesn’t even feel the need to go for a light switch. It was funny hearing the other day that there was a realisation that there has been no need to touch a switch for nearly a year. The system anticipates well; always a ahead.

I was really concerned originally about the switches. Turns out that isn’t the issue or challenge at all.

mushii

Switches exist for a reason, for 99.99% of the population they are needed. I appreciate that you may have everything working just the way you want it. I can also give you some £30k HA horror stories that are just as pertinent. At the end of the day a switch is a simple device that in its current format, doesn’t play nicely with some of the newer technologies. What is needed is something that has the familiar functionality of the traditional switch, with the additional functionality of a smart device. Sadly that seems currently elusive until now. That is what the hopes were from Den.

LondonLesney

They are currently pitching (and look to have secured) a fourth round of funding so I'm guessing this is where the cash is coming from. They have quite a large team so I'm assuming they will be looking to achieve substantial volume in sales fairly early on before that cash runs out.

https://www.seedrs.com/den4

I suspect their main sales channels will not be direct to the consumer but to businesses such as care homes, etc. or even to some of the large house builders.

Bl4ckGryph0n

The cost of HA does not come into it. In fact it is likely the opposite, where it requires a separate installer team people don't get it themselves, ergo it will do things they don't get or understand why it is doing it. Perhaps fun at first but then will turn into frustration about the damn thing. It is box standard difference between UX vs UI.

Best way to compare a good home automation project is like having a good butler. Now I appreciate many people may not have grown up such niceties. But ours didn't ask what time we got home or will be home, he just 'knew' as that was his job. Likewise he doesn't ask what lights we want on in which rooms, and where the fires need to be lit. He just 'knew' that was his job. So when relaxing after dinner in the drawing room, the temperature was right, the lights were already dimmed, the curtains drawn etc. There was no need to tell him that or push a switch to make it happen. A good butler learns over time, gets his knowledge passed on, utilises intelligence from other staff.

It is no different with home automation in my opinion, the more switches get installed everywhere the less automation there actually is. That would be like telling a butler constantly what to do, now what is the point in that?

jouster

I like that way of looking at it but 99.9% of the population wouldn’t ever want to pay for a butler.

I personally don’t need everything to be automatic.  I want things to be easy for me and those I live with but not a pain so that I have to fix something every time someone goes against the grain of the HA system which is still how it is if you have many visitors or families that don’t care for it.

My mum would never get used to it (she’s 70) and whilst it may not be in her home, coming to  ours where everything needed voice control would be incredibly frustrating.  

I’ve no doubt that in the very near future, full home automation will be the norm, I just don’t think we’re there yet for the genpop

Don’t forget that HA is far from new, X10 was invented in 1975 and just a few years later Auto lights and heating were readily available, albeit it expensive, but almost everything we can do now could be done then but without the smart side of things. It was always viewed as only for the big spending rich people of the world and incredibly technical, remember the movie Electric Dreams. That came out in 1984 and yet 40 years later, it’s still only a minute number of users that have gone all in.

It’s very exciting though and I’m sure my children and certainly there’s will never have to lift a finger for anything. Well unless there is a power but or their WiFi goes down and then they’ll be very confused.

jouster

Whilst many of us on this very forum may already be attempting to dump switches altogether, the majority of the population of the planet are still used to using switches....be they old or young, people are used to switches.

We walk past light switches every day when entering and leaving rooms, so for the average person, it’s very natural to turn a light on or off when entering a room.

Hue bulbs are great, I think it’s great that they’ve managed to make a huge market out of a, in my opinion, an extremely expensive product, but they sell incredibly well so they’re obviously doing something right, but being the first to offer the service they do was certainly a big help

I’ve recently been given a set of Logitech Pop buttons and I think they are great....of course everything they can do can be done via voice now with Alexa but my wife still insists on using her phone or a physical button for most things because to her it’s natural and always will be..but the Pops make it easy for her do the things she does everyday without thinking about what to ask Alexa for and when we have visitors or family come over they won’t struggle with switches because they will be completely au fair with using one.

For me LWRF has been very interesting and I’ve read lots of good things but it didn’t look like the simplest thing to setup (but I could be wrong) and it looked complex from the outside.

For ME, the Den system looks to be a very happy medium for the control that I require.  Lighting is not going to be the main use for me but IF the switches match up better, it means I can have a few switches in the house for anywhere that they are needed (kids rooms mainly) but the ability to control a house full of sockets is a great one (for me) and if they review well I’ll be very interested.

Recently totting up all of the devices they are left on standby all day and night, all year, it’s clear to see how shutting them off when not home and when asleep will definitely save money

As I said, for me, this product looks interesting and definitely what my family and friends will find useful but unintrusive  

The futures bright .

mushii

What was the budget for your whole home-butler software and hardware? What redundancy is built into your system? Do you have a second processor in-case the first unit fails or is it a single point of failure within your system? Or is it designed and installed to a performance level, where the mean time to failure of every component or node within the system is such that system or component failure is irrelevant ? If not then your system, as elegant as it is, is flawed. At least with Den, if your internet connection fails or your HA processor goes down, the basic functionality of the switches remain. Which is just as important when designing a system for a domestic environment where you are not the only user. Too often these things are overlooked in favour of how clever the system is. Just ask the thousands of Smartthings users in the US who couldn’t operate their homes because Samsung’s servers went down for 2 days and their homes had no redundancy or alternative control installed.