My introduction into the Internet of Sh!t (IoT)

I am a bit embarrassed to admit this, but even as an IT pro, I hardly have a smart home. Up until recently I had absolutely no IoT devices hooked up in my home. The only things I used on my wireless network were phones, laptops and my Apple TV. This week that all changed when I purchased a Sensibo Sky to hook up to my living room air conditioning unit.

I recently purchased my first home, in a somewhat rural part of New Jersey. It’s an older home (built in 1955) so there are some older components to it. We use oil for heating (Uhh yeah I know I feel like I live in the 1700’s). There is no central air, so we have window A/C units.

When I moved in there was an A/C unit in the living room that was old as hell, probably from the 70’s or 80’s. My wife literally would not even let me turn it on, despite it being 80 degrees in the house, so I had to go buy a new unit and install it.

After I did this, I realized that we are going to waste a crap load of electricity using this thing, I wanted a way to automate turning it on/off. That is when I found Sensibo.

Sensibo basically takes the place of the remote for A/C units. You basically point your remote at it and hit the power button and suddenly the thing can communicate with your unit. It kind of blew my mind to be honest.

I immediately set up a scheduler to turn the unit on and off at specific times during the day when I know we wont be using it. Even better, it has a feature to act like central air and turn on and off based on the temperature in the room. Even better than that, you can use an app with it and if your phone leaves your house, the unit will turn off using location-based tech. When you come home, it turns on. Its pretty wild stuff.

So far it works well with one caveat. There is no way to override the temperature control feature with my scheduled jobs. Meaning, if I turn off the unit every night at 10 PM, the temperature control stills turns it back on if it goes over a certain temperature in the room. That really blows but hopefully they provide a solution for this.

Anyway, I know how a smart-ish home and although IoT devices are going to be a massive security hole, they do make living easier. I will probably be adding more soon.