You can start your smart home journey with as little as a cheap smart plug. Your home will already be smarter, but it can quickly get addictive. One plug becomes five, and before you know it you’ve decked your home from top to bottom in smart home tech.
All of this costs money, of course. Beyond the cost of the devices themselves, there are some hidden costs to setting up a smart home that can soon mount up if you’re not careful.
1
Subscription Fees For Everything
One of the most frustrating things about a lot of modern smart tech is that you only get access to all the features if you pay a subscription fee. For example, if you buy a Ring Video Doorbell, you might expect that it would record video when motion is detected and let you view those recordings from your phone. And it does exactly that, but only as long as you pay the subscription. Without the subscription, you don’t get any recordings at all.
Ring Doorbell Plus (Battery)
The Ring Battery Doorbell is now even better. The latest Plus model features a wider field of view, and you’ll never miss when someone’s at your door, so you can rest assured when you’re home or out.
Even worse is that even if you pay a subscription, it might not cover all your devices. A Ring Basic subscription, for example, only covers a single device. If you add another Ring product, you have to upgrade your subscription to include it.
It’s not just devices that come with subscriptions, either. If Amazon’s updated version of Alexa ever actually arrives, you’re going to have to pay to use that, too. It’s included as part of the Prime subscription, but you still have to pay for it. It’s getting harder and harder to run a smart home these days without having to pay some kind of regular fee.
Thankfully, there are ways to avoid these fees. You can buy video doorbells that store your recordings locally on dedicated devices or SD cards, for example. Or you can connect your video doorbell to HomeKit and store your recordings in iCloud (and even this will only save you money if you already have an iCloud+ subscription). It’s even possible to do this with doorbells that aren’t HomeKit compatible.
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Many of the smart home subscriptions can be circumvented either by choosing different products without the fees or by using software such as Home Assistant to recreate the same features without needing to pay. It can be more effort to set up, but it can save you money in the long run.
2
Rising Energy Costs
Smart home devices need power, and the more devices you have, the more power you’re going to use. Unfortunately, energy costs money; even installing solar panels to generate your own electricity has a lot of upfront costs. You may find that the more devices you add to your smart home, the more your energy bills go up.
There’s no way to completely eradicate these costs, but it is possible to reduce them. For example, running your smart home software on a powerful computer that you leave running 24/7 is going to add a lot more to your energy bill than running it on a low-power Raspberry Pi will.
You can also offset some of the costs by using your fancy smart home gadgets to automatically run power-hungry devices such as washers and dryers at times when your electricity prices are lower.
3
Batteries and Charging
While many smart home devices need to be plugged into power to function, there are plenty of others that run on batteries. These might be their own internal rechargeable batteries or disposable batteries that you need to replace when they run out. This means you’re constantly replacing batteries or having to charge them up.
The most obvious way to reduce battery costs is to use rechargeable batteries. While these are a little more expensive to buy, you save money in the long run as you don’t need to keep buying more and more batteries to replace the dead ones.
Charging batteries shouldn’t use up a huge amount of your household energy, but you can always set your battery chargers to run overnight when electricity is cheaper to cut the costs further.
4
Increasing Internet Costs
Many smart home devices work locally or if they do connect to the cloud, they transmit very little data. You can fill your home with devices like this, and you won’t notice a huge difference in your internet speeds or data usage.
However, there are plenty of smart home devices that send and receive a lot of data. For example, high-resolution security cameras that send their footage to the cloud are going to need to use a lot of data. The same is true for video doorbells. If you have a lot of these devices around your home, the amount of data being sent back and forth can soon mount up.
There are two potential issues here. Firstly, if your internet is slow, you may not be able to stream from the cloud in high definition. Even if it’s fast enough to handle it, you may find that it’s using up a lot of your bandwidth. Secondly, if you don’t have an unlimited data plan, you may find yourself hitting your data cap.
All of this means you might find yourself needing to upgrade your internet plan to one that offers faster speeds and unlimited data. If you want to keep using your high-definition devices, there’s not a huge deal you can do about this; you can either upgrade your plan or downgrade your devices.
However, if you already have an unlimited plan with high speeds, then you’re not going to need to pay anything extra if you decide to add a ton of smart home tech.
5
More Devices Means Getting Better Wi-Fi
A lot of smart home devices connect over Wi-Fi. It’s an obvious choice as you don’t need any additional hubs; your devices can communicate directly with the outside world via your router. The trouble is that the more smart home devices you add, the more they fight over the same limited bandwidth. Network congestion leads to lower speeds and increased latency.
A solution to this problem is to upgrade your router. Modern routers that support standards such as Wi-Fi 7 can offer blazing Wi-Fi speeds, lower latency, and better performance on crowded networks. However, these do come at a higher cost.
Another issue is that devices that are too far from your router may lose connection. You’re then forced to invest in a mesh Wi-Fi system or Wi-Fi extenders to keep your smart home devices connected.
A cheaper solution to both problems is to use fewer Wi-Fi devices. Zigbee devices can create their own mesh network, with each device acting as a node that can pass on information to other devices in the mesh. Zigbee devices are low-power, too, so they are usually cheaper to run.
Thread devices work in a similar way, and the beauty is that by taking some devices off your Wi-Fi network, it leaves more bandwidth for the ones that remain.
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6
Giving Away Your Data
This is a cost that’s hard to quantify, but it’s the reason that a lot of tech services such as email accounts appear to be free. Your data is worth a lot of money to companies that want to use it for purposes such as bombarding you with targeted advertising or focusing their content to keep you coming back for more.
A lot of smart home technology can gather data about you and pass it on to parent companies. Smart tech can record data such as your location, how your smart home is connected to other devices, the personal data that you use to sign up for accounts, and more. Devices with cameras will capture your image and may use your biometric data to recognize you. Smart speakers send almost everything you say to them to the cloud and will keep track of everything you’ve asked them, from shopping requests to the music you listen to.
The best way to avoid giving up so much of your data is to stop it from leaving your home in the first place. While many smart home devices need to connect to the cloud to work, they’re not the only options. It’s possible to use alternatives that run locally so that none of your data ever leaves your home.
An example is the Ring doorbell mentioned earlier. If you want to record video, you need a subscription that sends all of your video footage to the cloud. However, some alternatives can save all of that data locally so that none of it ever leaves your home.
Software such as Home Assistant allows you to connect to a huge array of different devices, and it has a strong focus on local control. You can replicate a lot of the features that supposedly require a cloud connection by using Home Assistant.
For example, some smart plugs require a cloud connection so that they can be controlled via their dedicated apps. However, you can integrate these smart plugs into Home Assistant and then control them locally so that no data ever leaves your home.
7
The Dreaded Upgraditis
This is one of the costs that you never really think about when you start your smart home journey. It’s a problem that’s all too real, however.
No matter how good the smart home tech that you have is, there will always be better tech available. Even if you own the very best product that exists, there will be a better version released before you know it. All of this means there is a huge temptation to upgrade.
Even if you do decide to upgrade a device or the machine that’s running your smart home software, it rarely ends there. Before long, you’ll be wanting to upgrade it again.
There’s no real way to stop the urge to upgrade all the time. You simply have to show enormous restraint, run out of money, or just buy something massively overpowered that will hold the upgraditis at bay for a little longer.
8
Hours and Hours of Your Time
This is yet another cost that’s impossible to quantify. I don’t even want to think about how many hours I’ve spent tinkering with my smart home, but it’s a fair bet that if I’d spent that time on something else, I’d probably be a concert pianist by now.
There’s not much I’ve been able to do to stop this from happening, but to my mind, it’s been time well spent. My home is a little smarter, and I’ve had endless fun messing around with it all, breaking everything, and then fixing it again in an endless cycle.
If you start building your own smart home, be prepared to lose money, privacy, and countless hours of your life. Wondering where to start? Try kitting out a single room and go from there.
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