yep I've moved and I'm ready to share with you how that went from a smart home
perspective we all know how stressful and frustrating moves can be in general
and when you add a smart home to that mix it can be a whole other level of
pain
hello Automators thanks for tuning in again I'm Brian from automate your life
and today I'm going to take the frustration out of automation seriously
because I mean a move can be one of the most difficult things that people do
when you have a ton of stuff and now as you add in the Smart Home components how
do you handle that now I'm going to give you my experience what it was like but
I'm also going to give you a lot of tips and tricks and they're not just going to
be tips and tricks for when you go to move and you know you'll you'll be able
to implement them now these are things you should be implementing now and they
will help you if you ever have to replace any of your smart home devices
in general so let's get going now let's start with the situation that I was
walking into with this I mean I have over 70 Wi-Fi devices and I've shown you
guys some of this here with different videos on the channel and I have over 50
ZigBee and z-wave products it's getting a little ridiculous and even though I'm
giving away lots of products to friends and family and colleagues I'm still
ending up with a ton of devices at this point just to keep up with the industry
so lots of these devices were brand new but some of them were fairly old and had
been sitting in my home for three to five years in some cases so we had a
real gambit of things to deal with as we left I also had five fully implemented
or at least in service smart Home Hub so I had philips hue Samsung smartthings
those are kind of my primaries I also had switch bought which was really
managing my gym so not critical in terms of moving and I had habitat which I was
really just doing testing and playing with a lot for the channel and then on
top of that I had the ikea trad freehub as well so five hubs to move now that
doesn't count Google or Amazon all the devices I have from them and
with Amazon I kind of took this as an opportunity to restart restart really
fresh with Amazon you know I'm a Canadian customer and I really wanted
access to all of the American services and features that we just don't get so I
actually took this opportunity to just take everything out of that Canadian
account and start fresh in an American account so while that was the situation
going in there was a couple of things that I wanted to kind of keep in mind
and be my basis here for this move and the first thing really is that I didn't
want to leave anything behind no man Louis left behind here and this move and
really the reason for that is some of these devices and you're going to
struggle figuring out which ones they are
will contain some information so you don't want to necessarily leave that
behind it could contain Wi-Fi credential information it could contain personal
information or your login so you kinda gotta watch that so I didn't want to
leave anything behind as number one and the second basis really was that I
didn't want to change a lot so I didn't want to be changing a bunch of settings
before I came over or after I was here because that adds to the complexity of
troubleshooting should you run into any problems so with those two things in
mind I started to prepare my home in some of the simple tips with hubs and
Wi-Fi devices if you can take your router or at least copy down your Wi-Fi
credentials and your security that you're using take that with you and put
it into the new router or the new access points when you get to your new place
that will mean all of your Wi-Fi devices will just reconnect and get working
right away as long as they have a good signal where you are now the other thing
that is really important as you come into a home is to minimize you know you
don't know what interference you're gonna have from networks from your
neighbor so you want to minimize this and you also want to maximize where your
hubs are located now there are directions for antennas that we have
shown on the channel before and that you know specifically I've shown Samsung's
are things where there's igby and z-wave antennas point where their Wi-Fi
antennas point if they have one and how that kind of all works so you want to
try and locate them and if you're struggling with locating because let's
be honest as you buy a new home or as you go and get a new place
well you're not necessarily going to be able to plan everything out so one of
the tips or tricks that I have been using for a long time is the Ethernet
over power devices and this allows me to go and locate my hubs really anywhere
without having to run Ethernet cabling and I can use a little unmanaged switch
to attach to all of them and this makes it easy to locate them wherever I want
in my new home so what I want you to do is to pick a good central location that
will not necessarily have a lot of interfering networks from your neighbors
and this will help you get started in a really simple and quick way now within
those hubs there's one little tricky part that you might want to watch out
for and this this goes for the Google and the Amazon and and smart things and
all of your hubs that have a security component well they have a location in
them and something you could do is before you unplug them actually change
their address location to your new location so that when you plug them in
there instantly expecting you to be in that area and that means you know for
something like smart things again that it recognizes when you leave your home
and remind you to put on your security system or automatically turns it on
other than that little tidbit really most of the smart home hubs move on
their own as long as they have a good network connection there's really no
problems but the one caveat to this was actually in the end devices and so when
I had battery based devices so this is a good example a button here it's a z-wave
button and what I noticed is that lots of the batteries actually drained on
lots of my sensors you know and what I think they were doing is sitting there
trying to connect and reconnect and and really just searching a lot for that
ZigBee network and maybe when I got here as well they were trying to connect
again through a lot of interference because they were in boxes and Barry
equipment and material and so you know what I found some of them that were dead
now because I had been really careful about not changing a lot it was easy to
quickly troubleshoot that well my battery is dead here I just need to
replace that but keep that in mind that is something that happened in the matter
of a couple of days I lost 40 to 50 percent on some of my sensors and in
some cases those devices reconnected immediately once I had plugged in my hub
but they don't always do that and so you have to actually be a little bit patient
here that's my recommendation for you because in a lot of cases ZigBee or
z-wave networks take time to repair themselves so kind of plug in your stuff
if it's a lightbulb or a light switch or whatever device it is if it's ZigBee and
z-wave give it some time let it just sit there and let the network kind of self
repair and just be patient with that and if you do that 90% of things will come
back you might have to reboot your hub every once in a while and really once I
did that two or three times rebooted my hub and let devices kind of sit there
everything came back online with those networks the next thing to really talk
about is really those physical components of this move because these
are physical devices that we're dealing with and when you talk about light
socket or a power socket rather a light switch then you have something you've
physically installed in your home and the nest protect is another great
example of something like that if you've changed to a smart smoke or CO detector
well you have these physical components installed in your home and during those
installations if you weren't careful or you weren't thinking about how you would
back out from this it can be a bit of a tricky situation and a great example of
this is a little sawing off switch stuck in behind a light switch you probably
ended up having to cut your wire short add some other wires and you know this
this might be a problem to kind of back out of so those are things you want to
look at early and you know a nest protect is another great example of
something you want to look at early and maybe even take out of your home
for you list the home and have people looking and the reason I say that is in
a lot of cases you kind of have to leave whatever is attached to your wall so you
want to think about this even before you go and list your home and really you
want to have been thinking about this when you did the installation so that
you made sure you had enough wire sitting there to reconnect say an old
light switch or an old smoke and CO detector something that I think will
surprise a lot of people here actually is you know we get these 3m tapes on
sensors and smart home devices and then we go and we stick them on our walls and
those things never move and that's great but what I will tell you is that stuff
is way overkill and it becomes really difficult to deal with and there's a
couple of methods I'm gonna give here give you here in a minute but in general
what I've been doing over time is I've been learning to use less and less of
that 3m tape and actually cut off the original manufacturers or just peel it
off when I get it or just not use it and then use something small or little
strips of it and that's that's what I would say is one of the biggest things
is the little strips of it instead of the full backing is more than enough
your devices stay on the wall I've never had one fall and I've even been using
kind of a two-sided tape it's called palak or poleaxe we can't figure out how
to say it but that has been very effective and in small strips you won't
rip up your wall now a couple of tricks with this that I learned heat gun is a
very powerful thing to loosen up the glue on the back of 3m tape and you do
have to be careful with that because you can still kind of weaken your wall or
weaken your paint and still peel things off but the other thing that you can
really do with that is a little bit of fishing wire actually in behind and you
want it to be a good quality fishing wire don't get cheap because it just
breaks off in behind lots of these are really really stuck to the wall and you
just kind of come down and you will loosen it and you might have to go
through the whole device a couple of times so this is not going to be a quick
pros and you need to be patient but with a
little bit of heat and a little bit of fishing wire you can actually get most
of these off without ripping off lots of paint in your home now in all of this
there was one thing that I did that was really simple and I think it was
probably the smartest thing I did is anything I took out of my home I labeled
and as soon as I took a smart bulb out or a smart switch or a smart whatever
and just said what it was what the name was in the previous space and that meant
when I went to the new place I could put those things back in the same location
or at least if I didn't I still knew what I was putting in there and I knew
which hub it connected to and I knew all of those things that allowed me to
adjust the name and adjust the automations and adjust what I needed to
and this made the process actually really seamless and it allowed me to
install things kind of room by room and really just go about things in a very
expedient way now no matter what you do there are going to be some tricky
moments if you do move your smart home or just if you have to replace a lot of
different components now if you have more questions about this process feel
free to let me know down below and hopefully some of these tips and tricks
will help you going forward I really want you guys to think about this as you
install some of these devices and so if it has helped you make sure you join the
channel hit that subscribe button right now join us here on automate your life
otherwise guys thanks for watching and of course don't hate, automate!