A few days ago, I wrote about being annoyed with the new “high-tech” gas cans. The old ones did the job they were designed to do, and did it well. I suppose it’s just the curmudgeon me, but I think it’d be nice for everything to do a particular job and be good at it. We recently installed a new hot water heater — it’s tankless and uses gas to heat the water, but it doesn’t have a pilot light. It uses some kind of an electrical gadget to light the burner that heats the water. It also comes with an app — so I can keep an eye on what my hot water heater is doing anywhere I might be. I suppose that’s useful — you never know when someone might break into our house and take a shower or wash a load of clothes and use a lot of our gas and water.
I’m not exactly sure when it became necessary to make everything in your house “smart.” Maybe it all kind of got started with the smart thermostats to control the heating and air conditioning. On the surface, that seems like not such a bad idea, but we have smart thermostats and we rarely use them in the “smart” mode.
As time goes on, I’m thinking that we’d be better off if our homes didn’t need to become so “smart.” After all, most of us know how to turn on and off lights, are able to get food into and out of our refrigerators and ovens without an LED display giving us instructions…. most of us can even operate a microwave oven without much training.
With all this stuff in our house connected to the Internet, I’m beginning to worry less about hackers stealing data generated by all the smart devices and more about how smart devices might share their home-related information with who knows who.
Just give me appliances and household stuff that works — I’ll figure out how to operate them.
There’s just something creepy about my house knowing things about me. I’m thinking there may not be much difference between a smart home and a stalking home.
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