A light switch has never failed in your house

The protocol most home automation equipment still runs on was designed in 1975. That is the single most useful fact about this field, because it tells you the technology has not been the obstacle for thirty-three years.

Newer systems exist and are better, with proper radio links and mesh networking and sensible power consumption. They will not change the outcome, because the difficulty was never getting a signal to a lamp.

The difficulty is that the problem being solved is not one anybody has.

Walking across a room to a light switch is not a burden. Nobody arrives home and thinks the lighting arrangements are costing them time. So a system that lets you turn a lamp on from a computer has to justify itself against an alternative that is free, instant, requires no configuration, works during a power cut in the sense that it works the moment power returns, and has never once failed in the history of the house.

That is a brutal comparison and the demonstrations never acknowledge it. Every one I have seen shows somebody dimming lights from a laptop, which is slower than standing up.

The one honest argument is heating, and it is honest because the saving is involuntary. A thermostat that learns you are out between nine and six, and stops heating an empty house, saves money without anybody remembering to do anything. That is a real benefit and it is the only part of this that a person would notice in the absence of an enthusiast explaining it.

Even there the sums are tight, because the equipment and the installation have to be recovered from a saving of a few pounds a month, and the payback runs to years.

The other thing standing in the way is a standard nobody wants to meet. A light switch works every time. Not almost every time. Anything replacing it inherits that expectation, and networked equipment does not clear it, because occasionally a controller needs restarting, and a light that fails once a month is worse than a switch that has never failed at all.

My expectation is more of the same, indefinitely. Genuine adoption in heating, where the money is involuntary, and thirty more years of demonstrations of lights being dimmed by people who find it fascinating and are describing it to people who do not.