Why Every Smart Home is Becoming a SCAM

Are Shelly not being bought out by Schneider Electric? So what might be true now, might not be true in a few years if they decide to pay wall it

Home assistant is the best fucking thing

I'd like to show you the way with IKEA, Matter over Thread, and Home Assistant... It's taken me 3 years of trying & failing but IMHO it's the gold standard.

I think a big clarification is needed: Shelly is not opensource: it has local APIs, but their firmware is proprietary. You can however flash (most AFAIK, maybe all) their devices with ESPHome, but can be a bit of a PITA - some models require disassembly so you can reach the internal debug lines. So, while currently Shelly is a good solution compared to all the other cloud-based stuff, now that they are being acquired by Schneider who knows what route they will go? I wont be surprised if they follow the rest of the industry and go for a cloud-based solution (for all that sweet revenue from subscriptions and selling user data) and also remove from their devices the loopholes that people use to flash them with ESPhome. Another thing that you may not have faced yet, but in my experience (with another brand) those switches without grounding eventually have a current "leak" that causes some lights to flicker or stay on. In the end I replaced all my smart switches with a model with grounding; another possible fix is to use an AC bypass capacitor in parallel, but it was already a PITA to squeeze those switches behind the boxes, so adding more things was a no-go.

What an intro 🤩. Great video. I appreciate the point that it doesn’t HAVE to be Shelly. Nice take on the subject and a video that needed to be made. ( P.S I do like Shelly! ). The thermal camera looks awesome 😅. Much better than my old flir one

I don't think the shelly products are open source themselves, but they work well with open source software such as home assistant. I recently installed a shelly in my smarthome and i already have plans to install more. They are super handy for integrating regular light switches with smart light bulbs without cutting the power to them.

Home assistant + zigbee devices (or matter over thread for new kit i suppose). Own your own network end to end and never have to rely on third party servers.

Absolutely brilliant video, can we take a moment to talk about the production quality?! Absolute next level.

If it does not work with Home Assistant directly, then i do not buy.

Speaking as someone who has loved technology for years and work in the game, these type of setups are going to be a disaster down the line when components start to fail and/or suffer issues with vendors going out of business and/or end up getting hacked. Nothing beats the old school switches and controls. Similiar to modern cars and the amount of touchscreen nonsense and electronics that go into them.

I use a lot of Shelly modules and I do like them, but you should probably make it clear that the dimmers etc need a neutral at the switch which although maybe common in new builds, isn't often the case with a lot of older houses in the UK

I minimise my use of paid subscriptions. If I'm installing something it's mine, or I'm not having it.

It is not open source. But it's easy to integrate, OR if you want, you can reflash every unit with open source software and break the warranty. A slight difference there.

I won't let anything into my house that even remotely relies on a cloud service for its essential functions. I want everything to run locally on my home server.

I'm self-hosted all the way. I have a lovely big 3-node server cluster in my home comms. I have more RAM capacity than most people have hard drive. I'm all about keeping digital sovereignty.

Bad timing with Shelly just being bought out. I’ve used them for a while but I’m not sure I believe the statements that nothing will change. Shame, but nearly half my house has moved onto ESPhome and generic Zigbee and no one can touch those, though at the moment there isn’t the range of Shelly

Did you see Shelley have just been bought by Schneider Electric? I wonder what that's going to do to Shelley prices? They seem to have been going more for Pro Din rail mounted modules. I use a few with my Loxone system and they are great. No subscription with my Loxone system but it isn't cheap.

One thing, that makes switches better than every display: You can find them blindly in the dark without having to look at it to touch the correct spot. That's why I love the possibility to wire existing switches to the shelly.

Outing myself as a nerd but the first time I heard the overwhelmed, underwhelmed thing was in the Young Justice cartoon, which as a 56 year old man I can say I loved, Robin (Tim Drake) says it at the start of an episode, and at the end Nightwing (Dick Grayson), looks at him and says he is very whelmed, OK back to electrics

When Chester said “Alexa” he set mine off and it kept asking what I wanted turned on. 4:55