My husband and I were in the process of moving homes, and as part of the delightful mess, we’ve had to uninstall every smart home product we’d set up in our old rental to move it to our new place. A Roborock vacuum, a connected air quality monitor, a smart air purifier, a Nest Audio, a Google TV Streamer, and a bunch of cool, nerdy, and smart gadgets that we’d gotten so used to. As everything went into packing boxes, waiting to be moved, unpacked, and re-installed, and we had to live without our smart home for a few days, we realized the intrinsic value of each item.
And the one element we both immediately missed was my Hue smart light setup. And by “immediately,” I literally mean within minutes of removing the lights. Three years we’d spent with our lights, we relied on them through automations and scenes, and we loved how bright and convenient they were in our ground-floor, east-exposed, small Parisian suburb apartment. Suddenly, we were back to the dreary bulbs our landlord had left behind, and we had to use wall switches, like common folks, to turn on and off the light. How very archaic!