Our family spent 10 enjoyable days this summer visiting England and France. That’s us above at the Palace of Versailles (which is amazing and beautiful, like most everything we saw)! Highly recommend a visit if you haven’t already and can make it work!

Now, this a home automation blog so I’ll focus mostly on those aspects here (but some more trip photos are below). In our experience as home automation users for 7+ years we’ve found that vacations and other time away from home provide an opportunity for a home automation solution to really shine. The main reasons for this are the obvious: you can monitor, check on, secure, control, etc. your home from anywhere in the world with an internet connection. Quite frankly, in 2024 with ubiquitous mobile coverage, that is pretty much everywhere! The less obvious is it is a good checkpoint and value-add for the system and provides a unique set of benefits which are different than the day-to-day usage. At the same time, this also often identifies any gaps in the system and opportunities for improvement. Over the past 5+ years while developing and fine-tuning the products in EffortlessHome we have made numerous tweaks and optimizations to the system as we realized gaps, problems, and overall opportunities to make leaving an empty home as easy as possible. In this article I will talk about our experience with our home’s EffortlessHome Smart Home Premium solution, both what went well and what tweaks I had to make.

Leaving Home

You ever get the feeling you forgot to do something like lock a door or arm the security system when leaving home? I don’t (anymore)… because our home automation system does all of this for me. When all of the people in our home leave it detects that no one is in the home and automatically locks everything down and puts our home into away mode. On the off chance that we forgot to close a door or window it will send a notification and we can always call a friend or go back the 5 minutes we’ve traveled and fix it. The ability to just walk out the door and know the house will lock, arm, power down, turn off the water supply, etc. is my favorite and gives peace of mind and saves so much time and effort!

In case you’re wondering, we have addressed the situation of visitors like pet sitters (more on this below) or house sitters in prior iterations of the system. The EffortlessHome solution uses all available motion, door/window, and presence sensors in the home to determine if someone is there. Without this the house sitters would have a lot of issues and the house might even seem haunted if they didn’t know about the home automations!

Monitored Security and Cameras

Security was one of my top concerns, but with our professionally monitored system that includes smart cameras and motion sensors, I had complete control and visibility from thousands of miles away. I received real-time alerts on my phone when any movement was detected outside my front door, and I could easily access live video feeds via our app. What’s more, my system integrates with 24/7 professional monitoring, so even if I missed an alert, the monitoring service would respond and send emergency services, if needed. Thankfully, everything stayed quiet at home.

Smart Locks

With our smart lock with pin pad, I granted a temporary door access code to our pet sitter for the duration of the trip. No need to worry about giving out keys or leaving keys under the mat. We also have the automation set to disarm the security alarm whenever the correct door key codes are entered so there was no worry about the sitter setting off the alarm and having the police arrive! The system also automatically arms itself again (and the door re-locks) after the sitter leaves each time.

While we were having dinner in Paris one night, my phone alerted me that a package was on our front porch. It was an expensive item which shouldn’t be left out in the weather so I asked a neighbor to please bring it inside and I unlocked the front door remotely, let her grab the package, and then locked it again once she left.

Lighting Control

Using the Presence Simulation feature, our lights turn on and off at night at intervals which mimic our usual activity (it does this by replaying historical patterns maintained in the system’s actual usage). The lights turn on in the evenings and shut off at bed time, making it appear as though we were home like normal. This gave an extra layer of security, helping deter any potential intruders. The best part? I didn’t have to manually do anything because the system handles it all. But I did notice some room for improvement, which is discussed below…

Climate and Energy Efficiency

While we were away, our home maintained its energy efficiency through our smart thermostats. I programmed the temperature to remain at a comfortable yet cost-saving level while we were gone. As we are returning home the system automatically detects our direction as toward home and adjusts back to our normal climate settings so we return to a perfectly cool and comfortable home, avoiding the stuffy feeling many face after a long trip.

Water Damage Avoidance

As mentioned above in the leaving home section, our home has the ability to remotely turn on and off our main water supply. This is so great because I am paranoid about a water leak and the immense, expensive damage it causes. In my defense, this paranoia is justified as per recent stats “water damage is one of the most common reasons for insurance claims, averaging $10,234 per claim in the U.S“! We have water leak sensors as well, so with the combination of proactive reduction of damage by shutting off the water, along with the ability to be notified of a leak, we have significantly limited our risk exposure. As an aside, our insurance company also recognizes this and gives us a substantial premium discount for having this and other features (e.g. security monitoring) in our home!

Arriving Back Home

We didn’t get back home until late at night and after traveling for 10 hours or so we were exhausted. This is another one of our favorite parts about having a real, truly automated home: it senses our arrival and takes care of all of the conveniences. First, since it was night time it turns on our outside lights and our main floor lights. Second, it unlocks the door and disarms the security system. Last, it turns the water back on and, as previously mentioned, it already has adjusted the climate controls so the home is comfortable for us. It is truly a luxury (to us now, a necessity) to be able to just grab our bags and walk into the house with a well-lit path. No fumbling for keys in the dark, turning on lights with arms full of bags, etc.

I’ve said it before and will say it again, why isn’t this level of function and convenience more common in homes in 2024? We have smart phones, watches, cars, but most homes are not that different than they were in 2020!

What didn’t work as planned?

OK, so the system is always improving, and I will be completely honest here about what didn’t work as well as I’d hoped. Now, again, being completely transparent the system was 10x better than when we first started in home automation and went on vacation 7+ years ago. The system has really matured and evolved via real-life usage and experience since then.

Issue 1: Indoor motion detection

The system is set to automatically arm the security alarm in away mode whenever no one is home. In that mode all motion, door/window, presence sensors are set to trigger the alarm. Well, I hadn’t anticipated our cat being so active and triggering the motion sensor and got an unexpected security alarm triggered notification. After checking the cameras and motion history I deduced that the cat was the issue and disarmed the alarm. While we were away on the trip, I also had to temporarily remove the offending motion sensor from the alarm triggers as I knew this would be a repeating situation. Once returning home I repositioned the motion sensor so that the cat would be much less likely to trigger it the next time we were away but it still worked as expected for human presence (e.g. automated lighting). Unfortunately, some of these tweaks are needed with home automation systems to get optimal results.

Issue 2: Presence simulation

As this is a newer feature in the EffortlessHome solution I used this trip as an opportunity to monitor how well the solution worked. The good news is that it worked pretty well. In the evening the family room lights and kitchen lights would turn on as normal and around the time we typically go to bed it would turn those off and turn on the bedroom lights. However, I noticed it wasn’t randomizing it enough and it really looked like they were on a timer which (I assume) those skilled in home break-ins are not tricked by any more. I tweaked the AI-based algorithms to use a larger historical timescale and observed the changes. I am now happy with this and believe it is accurate enough. The second thing I realized is that this solution is pretty wasteful of energy as it is lighting our empty home for (at least) several hours for 10 days. As energy savings and efficiency is one of the core tenants of EffortlessHome’s value proposition, I decided to add the ability to set the lighting to reduced levels (via built-in dimming capabilities) to provide a knob to turn to allow balancing the security value with the energy savings value as the homeowner sees fit.

Summary

So this has been an assessment of what went well and what could have been better with our own home automation solution during our 10 days in Europe this summer. Of course, the EffortlessHome packages have since been upgraded to improve the functionality in the areas where opportunities were seen. Do you have any questions or suggestions, we’re always looking to enhance the system. If so, please add a comment below or reach out to us!

If you are interested in this level of convenience, security, and capabilities for your own home, please do check out the EffortlessHome Smart Home Premium solution or any of our other EffortlessHome Solutions. We have products in many different ranges with focuses on specific needs.