Look, it’s a blog post where the title is a question, and therefore, as per Betteridge’s law of headlines, the short answer is ‘no’. But that wouldn’t make for a very interesting blog post, and so I’ll attempt to offer some more nuance.
Most supermarkets, and many discount stores like B&M, have a hardware section which will have some smart home devices on sale. These are typically colour changing light bulbs, or smart plugs. They’re often relatively cheap too. So, should you buy them, and if so, what are you getting?
Firstly, what do we mean by ‘smart’?
I write a lot about smart home tech – my wife has decided that it’s my mid-life crisis, and, to be fair, I have a whole category of posts about Home Assistant. But I don’t think I’ve ever defined what I mean by ‘smart home tech’. So, for the purposes of this blog post, I’m defining smart home tech as devices that can be controlled using a phone, computer, smart speaker or a remote control.
I’m including those with a remote because you often see colour changing lights in these sections in shops, but they don’t use a standardised smart home protocol like Matter or Zigbee. People may pick these up, expecting them to integrate with a smart speaker, to find that the remote control only works over infrared. It’s with this in mind that recent Home Assistant releases have added support for infrared bridges, so that you can use Home Assistant to control infrared devices. However, you’ll need to buy an additional device, such as a Seeed Studio Xiao IR Mate, flash it with ESPHome, and find an integration that supports your remote. It’s possible, but all of this is at an early stage.
So, it’s best to avoid devices that just have a remote if you’re buying new. I have one (remote pictured), and getting it to work in Home Assistant is a long-term project.
They’ll most likely be Wi-Fi or Bluetooth
The first smart plugs I bought were Tuya Wi-Fi devices, and I imagine these devices will be too. Buying smart home tech that uses Wi-Fi has its advantages:
- Almost everyone already has Wi-Fi at home
- You don’t need to buy a separate hub
- They’re usually easy to set up
However, there are some disadvantages that it’s worth considering:
- Most Wi-Fi smart home tech uses 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi, and not the 5 or 6 GHz bands, which may mean poor signal quality.
- If you have lots and lots of Wi-Fi devices, then this can affect the performance of your network.
- Wi-Fi devices need more power when idle than some other protocols.
- Unless they’re Matter devices, and you have something that can act as a Matter hub, every command will be going via the internet.
- Tuya devices tend not to work well with Apple Home.
That last point is why I disassembled my Tuya Wi-Fi smart plugs to re-flash them, initially with Tasmota and later with ESPHome. They now work without needing internet access, which is better from a privacy perspective, and means they’ll still work even if Tuya turns off its servers. Which, considering the likely billions of Tuya devices there are out there, is unlikely but not impossible.
Some of these smart home tech devices only use Bluetooth Low Energy. These can’t easily be connected to Google Home or Alexa, and for Home Assistant, you’ll need a Bluetooth proxy. And whilst you can control them with a phone, you’ll need to be in Bluetooth range to do so. Like with the infrared devices mentioned above, these are best avoided.
Better devices are available from elsewhere
Knowing what I know now about smart home tech, I wouldn’t have bought those Tuya Wi-Fi smart plugs. Instead, I would have probably invested in Zigbee equipment from Ikea with one of their hubs. But the need to pay extra for a hub was off-putting, as, at the time, I only wanted to control one device.
Nowadays, you can get Matter Wi-Fi devices, like these Meross smart plugs that I use. Most smart speakers include support for Matter so you don’t need to buy an additional hub. They work better with Apple Home, and don’t rely on a cloud service like Tuya. Matter is still a relatively nascent standard, but it’s improving all the time.
I’m less keen to recommend Matter over Thread to new users. For Thread devices to work, you need a Thread Border Router – a hub, in other words. Thread devices use less power, and form a mesh that avoids the performance issues of too many Wi-Fi devices, but the need for some kind of hub is a barrier to entry.
So, should you buy cheap smart home tech from supermarkets? If you’re careful, and stick to Wi-Fi devices, sure. Just be aware of the limitations, in terms of them needing internet access and the performance impact. You may be able to use something like tuya-cloudcutter to change the firmware to something that works locally, should you have the desire, technical knowledge and means to do so later.
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