More importantly: Is it worth it? Hawkinson said we were walking through a few thousand dollars worth of equipment. That is less money than anything like this would have cost a few years ago, and it did more cool stuff. With SmartThings software it looked easy to set up.
But still: A lot of it felt like a science experiment.
Hawkinson did agree to a point, but he said that some of the monitoring technology (like the leak detection and alerting) was actually really cheap insurance, and people who owned cabins or the like would see the value. Also, he said, this system could be used to tell parents when a kid comes home safely. You don’t need to go all Internet coffee machine to get value from a smart home .
He also thinks that smart and cheap(ish) sensors, plus technology like his to make sense of their signals, could make home security smarter and more affordable. Equipped homes could know much more about who’s in them and what they’re doing there, leading to fewer false alarms and thus more rapid and automated police dispatch when there are break-ins.
The challenge when evaluating this smart home stuff is sorting out the useful (alarms that can help you keep your family or your things safe) from the silly (like lighting that adjusts to your mood based on what your fitness bracelet senses). A lot of the demos smashed the sane and the silly together. You’ll want it all. But you only need very little of it.