Outsmarting the smart home

Last year I bought our first HomePod Mini and our adventure into building a smart home began. The HomePod mini works as a hub for Apple’s HomeKit smart home system. Basically the HomePod mini works as an always on computer for the various smart devices to connect to.

One of the first smart devices we purchased was this smart switch from Meross. It’s an inexpensive device that connects to the HomePod via Wi-Fi. The advantage of adding a smart switch is that you are able to control it via your phone or Siri in various ways. For the most part they work great and we have 5 in our house at the moment.

One issue that has come up is that the switch will lose connection to the network. When this happens the small status light on the switch starts flashing to let you know it is not connected. Re-connecting this specific switch requires you to enter an 8 digit code.

Unfortunately the manufacturer has placed this code on the switch underneath the switch cover. If the switch is by itself removing the cover only requires unscrewing 2 screws. If the switch is located with other switches the number of screws increases by 2 for each switch. Removing the cover in those cases can be considered to be a pain in the ass.

After having to do this a couple of times I realized I could just take a photo of the switches without the cover and then have the codes always available. I then created a photo album titled ‘Smart Home’ so that we can reference if we need to reconnect any of them.

The switch on the left is a dimmable smart switch. We have not update the switch on the right as it’s part of a 3 way switch. These are more expensive and also we have not yet found a need to upgrade that light so far.

There are more expensive smart switches that have a separate hub and supposedly have less issue with disconnecting from the network. So far the disconnect issues have been very minor and adding a hub to the network is less than ideal for me. It is still early days for our smart home experiment so this may change.


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