Popular Mechanics (South Africa)
THE WELL-MONITORED HOME
How to secure a far-off house made vulnerable by solitude.
My house is half an hour from the nearest hospital. Thirty-five minutes from a grocery store. A bad one. There are two policemen in my local town, and a volunteer fire department. When I bought my house – deep in the country, at the edge of a forest, next to a broad stream – a rival estate agent told me it wasn’t smart. “If there’s a fire,” he said, “just be sure you save the lawn chairs.” Lawn chairs? “You might as well be comfortable,” he said, “while you watch it burn.”
It was the distance. I was too far out to count on the volunteer fire department or a quick response from the two-person police department. I stared at the bare tinder pile of my house and thought: dumbass.
I needed to get smart. Or at least, smarten up the house with some new gadgets to solve this issue. I layered systems on top of each other, undoing the distance by connecting to the authorities and staying on top of things at home or away. It might be a dumb nine-minute drive to the filling station where I sometimes buy snacks, but I banked on making the house a freaking genius.
I started with a Simplisafe home-security kit, which featured door-entry warnings, a smoke detector, a motion detector, and a communications hub that had a SIM card so it could call my local police department. I laid it out on my bed: a splay of ugly, white plastic pieces, a fistful of batteries, a 130-decibel alarm, a smoke detector, a central keypad and a single futuristic spire (the hub) to place in a central location. It seemed a lot of steps. It was not a gloomy installation, however, mostly requiring snapping the exit sensors together and attaching them using an unusually reliable double-sided tape. The whole thing took thirty-five minutes, with the hub informing me by voice when finished. While I hate the look of the blazing white sensors at the top of the doors, I do enjoy hearing a dulcet tone from the hub alerting me whenever someone enters or exits the house while I’m in the shower.
Next was the supremely August Smart lock. This baseball-size aluminium cylinder sits atop a pre-existing deadbolt, turning when you use a virtual key on your smartphone. The device looks clunky coming out of the box, and slightly industrial once clamped to my veranda-deck door. But it operated beautifully, turning the deadbolt on the first try from my iphone. It is a friendly, if medieval-looking, device, a guardian oversize and overstrong, turned by the hand of a ghost. I plan to get one for every door.
Blink home-security cameras and motion detectors went up in two spots. Again: incredibly easy installation. Snap, snap, screw, snap, and connect. Twenty minutes. Now I can view the images, smallishly, on my phone even when I’m out acquiring snacks. I began to think the house was getting smart.
Unfortunately, since I live in the grips of nowhere, where I am granted only DSL connection, it seems I can only get just so smart. By the time I got to the device I most wanted, the Nest Cam Outdoor to accompany my Nest thermostat, it couldn’t connect. Even when I disconnected every other smart system in the house, my router was utterly consumed by the demands of the Nest.
Furthermore, two weeks into the smart exercise, my family started noticing that they could no longer stream movies unless they disconnected one system or another. Annoying. Soon, they started leaving various systems disconnected until we left. Then all of them. Also annoying. Such is life at the far end of the world, in the country, where you’re too far out for fibre-optic cable. I complained to my Internet provider. But there are no plans for upgrade in the immediate future. This is the price you pay when you live at the great remove. It’s not fair. And it sure doesn’t seem smart.