A thought about smart homes: sometimes, not automating something is the right choice

Ideas & Suggestions
1

I have been building a smart home for my daughter using Homey, and while designing the automations, I started thinking about something that I wanted to share as an idea — perhaps not a technical one, but something about what a smart home should be.

My daughter is 32 and works as a surgeon. When she comes home after a long shift, she often studies before going to sleep.

Since she was a student, she has had the habit of reading in bed. I remember finding her asleep more than once, with a book on her chest and her bedside lamp still on.

That memory stayed with me.

Now I am designing the automation for her bedroom.

I am creating a “Sleep” scene. With one press of a button, the ceiling lights will turn off, the curtains will close, and the heating or air conditioning will adjust to a comfortable sleeping temperature.

But there is one thing I deliberately decided not to automate.

Her bedside lamp.

It has a simple switch on its cord, and I am leaving it exactly as it is.

Technically, I could easily make Homey turn it off as part of the Sleep scene.

But I don’t want to.

Maybe one evening she will fall asleep while reading, just as she did when she was a student. Maybe the lamp will stay on. And that’s perfectly fine.

And perhaps one day I will walk into her room and find her asleep with a book on her chest and that little lamp still shining beside her.

I want to be able to walk over, take the book from her chest, kiss her on the forehead, say “Good night, my child,” and then switch off the lamp myself.

That small manual switch is not something I forgot to automate.

It is there on purpose.

While building this home, I have started to believe that a smart home should not try to automate everything simply because it can.

Some things should be automated because they make life easier.

Some things should remain manual because they are part of how we live.

And sometimes, the best smart-home decision is knowing what not to automate.

I thought this might be worth sharing here, because perhaps this is also something worth considering when thinking about the future of Homey: not only how much we can automate, but also how well we can leave room for the things that should remain human.

2

Yeah sure. Do you even have a Homey in the first place?

3

Well, it’s a nice story. Yeah, could be written by or with help of AI. Nevertheless I think it holds some truth.

4 
The story is completely true. Unfortunately, I don't speak English very well, and the translation from my native language—Romanian—into English was done by AI. It might not be translated exactly the way I originally wrote it.
5

Homey is a choice I made 3 months ago. I’m a beginner but I’m learning. I thought about my daughter’s smart home with many local functions, for this reason I use zwave a lot where I can make direct associations, so I don’t go through homey anymore. What is essential connects directly, what is non-essential goes through homey. So yes, I have a Homey and I’m trying to keep up with you

6

I understand your “possible future spammer alert”, as the post by Sorin is a peculiar first post.

What I usually do is to try to distinguish a human user from AI, I always check the stats first:
AI doesn’t read posts, doesn’t view topics, isn’t online for longer than a few minutes etc, and it creates the first topic right away > not 31 days later (joined 20 July);
The profile of @Sorin_Gheorghiu doesn’t look like that, and it even doesn’t have an avatar of some Temu girl model with a “Hummer size bum” :smiling_face:

Screenshot_20260820_111522_Ecosia
Screenshot_20260820_111522_Ecosia1076×1688 143 KB

(I also realize AI is reading these posts as well, and is going to imitate humans even more).

7

It’s because there’s no Homey-specific words in the text. “Automations” for example, Homey doesn’t have automations, it has Flows. And “Scenes”, Scenes are a Hue thing, Homey calls them Moods, etc.

8

I see that my post bothers you, some people find it a strange post. I don’t know how AI would express certain feelings, but I see that you didn’t understand anything from it. I’m an electronics engineer and I’ve been working in industrial “AUTOMATIZATIONS” for many years. Did you catch the period when everything started with a logical scheme? What is “FLOW”?
The sarcasm of some shows how frustrated they are, it’s not even worth taking them into account, it’s probably like that, you have to wait many days to be able to express an idea, a state of mind.
As I said before, I don’t know English, even now I use AI to translate what I write from Romanian to English. Maybe this translation won’t come out very well either.
I see “home automation” a little differently, maybe, than you. I try to use flow only in non-essential areas, those that if they don’t work don’t matter, the rest of the automations are Homey, I’m not in flow.
It’s a rule I apply in the industry and nothing is random.
Why make a flow for everything? Isn’t it better to leave small things unautomated?