I'm betting that most of you have never considered just what it's like to put
smart home equipment outside in minus 40 degree weather and today I'm going to
tell you exactly what happens to it
hello Automaters thanks for tuning in again I'm Brian from automate your life
and today I'm going to take the frustration out of automation by helping
you understand just what happens when you get your smart home gear into these
intensely harsh environments and when I talk about this I hope what you actually
glean is just how tough some of these products are and you can take your smart
home gear and do different things with them so there are some products I'm
going to identify today that you can take and put in extremely difficult
situations and have them work for you you're also going to hear I think a
couple of very interesting stories and you'll learn about some of these devices
in very specific ways so this is a very interesting video to me and I'd been
waiting about a year for a week like this and that's exactly what it was it
was almost a week of minus 30 to minus 40 degrees Celsius weather here in
Alberta and when I read this kind of coming back from CES that this is what I
was walking into I was actually a little bit excited terrified a little bit about
my car ever starting but a little bit excited because then I could go and
deploy some more things in an unheated garage and outdoors as well just to see
what happened so the first thing I want to talk about actually is the 360 video
doorbell that I brought onto the channel just a little while ago and this was
device I didn't have a lot of faith in when I brought it in I wanted to show
you guys a video doorbell that just wasn't going to perform and why you kind
of step up but the fact of the matter is I've been fairly impressed with this
device it's been highly reliable and through this time period of minus 30 to
minus 40 wind and snow and everything we had this thing was perfect I still can't
believe it actually it did everything it was supposed to the battery indicator
did draw down a little bit but not a ton and that's
kind of expected in in that cold of an environment you would expect a battery
to look like it's lower and then come back after charge and I haven't even had
to charge that device as of yet and it worked flawlessly nothing broke all the
way through that time period and speaking of batteries this is what
you can expect from most of your devices I reached out to Glenn actually he's
been a longtime subscriber he lives in the area and he had to go through the
same weather and he has a Tesla and what happened to his Tesla was significant
range reduction because that's a electric motor with battery cars so
that's what he expected of course it started every time but it's lower power
or it's got lower capacity in the batteries basically and so you're given
a lower range they just don't perform the same so that's what you can expect
from your devices that go outside in those kinds of cold conditions because I
was able to see this coming I took a number of devices outside and then put
some devices into my garage as well so I took a whole range of smart home sensors
from Samsung smartthings outdoors put them outdoors so I put a leak sensor in
my garage it was obviously going to think there was always a leak with the
moisture on the ground but so I couldn't put it outside but I put it in the
garage and the minus 22 minus 30 that I had in there it performed reliably no
change in the battery I had a contact sensor on my garage door that was easily
in the minus 30 range no change whatsoever worked perfectly every time
that garage door opened and closed although the garage door eventually
broke in that kind of a cold condition separate story the motion sensor worked
fine I put that outdoors on my front step we're totally fine so no real
reductions in the in the batteries either as I brought them back into my
home they seemed to warm up everything remained perfect now the smart plugs I
put a ZigBee smart plug from smart things and that you can hear something
actually closing you can actually hear a contact or a switch I'm not sure which
it is inside they're opening and closing and I
thought that might have a problem no problem throughout and neither with my
outdoor smart plug which is actually rated only to minus 20 so that's an i
home smart plug totally worked all throughout I left my Christmas
lights out there because when it's that cold I'm not changing it and it worked
the entire time now what's interesting about that is the rating so it's only
rated to -20 and it was minus 40 and this was something that actually we saw
with a gentleman named Brett Miller and and I reached out to Brett as soon as he
sent this out to Google Nest on Twitter he actually showed his nest hello camera
had turned pink and it was about three-quarters of the way across his
picture it was pink and then there was about a quarter left and as soon as he
sent it I reached out and I said hey you probably don't want to tell him that
it's minus 40 because that's outside of the specifications and that's what you
will find with most of the devices that even even the ones that say their
outdoor rated they're about minus 20 rated we just haven't seen that move to
minus 40 so right away Google said hey that's outside of specifications this
can happen but just wait and I think there was some confusion around why he
would just wait but what had actually happened here and this is very common on
smart home cameras and another reason why I was so impressed with the 360 is
the IR filter gets stuck so it's trying to get out of the way or it's trying to
put that IR filter on and basically it gets stuck and then your your pictures
and your video look pink so this is something that can happen to you now he
had it happen on a nest hello and it did go away once the temperatures drop back
down but he also had an outdoor camera an outdoor nest cam that survived
performed perfectly never changed so you can have this on certain cameras even
from the same brand and I think what I'll tell you here is the outdoor camera
is just better sealed than the nest hello in general and you're
less likely to have any humidity in that device and that's probably what stopped
that from working in that case inside of my garage
I had a me Ross garage door opener and so did Glen and both of those continue
to perform admirably I stuck some wise cams out and a sim cam which actually
does the rotating and I thought if I put that outside in the minus 40 it's gonna
break for sure but I put it in the garage at that minus 22 minus 30 range
it performed perfectly all the way through never changed same with my wise
cams and same with Glen's wise cams they performed all the way through so
everything in the garage actually because there's no real humidity and
there's no real massive change in temperature really quickly those devices
stamped absolutely perfect and I can include smart bulbs in that I put
Philips hue outside I put Samsung smartthings bulbs outside and I had San
C smart bulbs actually outside as well and all of those perform perfectly minus
40 all the way through there was no change in the lighting capability and
there was no change in connectivity so all of those perform perfectly as well
so and you might be sitting here waiting for me to talk about something that went
catastrophic aroung the only thing that went catastrophic ly wrong was my
physical garage door actually broke and I mean that's kind of to be expected
when you have that much ice and and that much cold so there was nothing from a
smart home perspective I didn't go put any crazy things like smart displays
outside those aren't gonna work but everything else if it's relatively well
sealed and I think that's the important component here the the cold rating is
not going to be in a lot of cases a realistic thing for these devices
they're just not going to have tested them outside in those kinds of
conditions and a lot of cases now what you will find is if they're not well
sealed then you are going to get the ingress of snow and then therefore
humidity when it warms up a little bit and you get water in there and
then that's when things are going to start going wrong so as long as they're
relatively well sealed I think you can put almost every one of these devices
outside deal with the loss of battery life that comes with being outside in
those kinds of cold conditions and otherwise enjoy your smart home products
outdoor so I hope this has been a pretty interesting story for you I mean I don't
have a lot of visuals to show you other than some of the devices and quite
frankly I didn't want to be outside with my cameras during these times but this
is what is realistic with your smart home gear you can take it outside
you can do more with it now the flip side of this is heat and I think that's
an entirely different discussion that we will have as we go here on the channel
clearly I'm not in that kind of a location so I'm going to have to build
this information from you guys so I'd love to hear your stories down below in
the description what are your stories with putting your
smart home gear outside and in both cold and heat situations otherwise make sure
you subscribe to automate your life guys we do these kinds of tutorials and great
deep learnings about your smart home gear all the time otherwise of course
thanks for watching and don't hate automate