A Bristol man who has invested £2,400 in smart home technology over the past eighteen months continues to physically walk to his bedroom light switch every evening, it has emerged.
James Colborne, 34, currently owns four smart speakers, three separate hub devices, seventeen connected bulbs, two smart thermostats, and a voice-controlled bin that cost £89. The bedroom light remains on a standard switch.
“The bulb is technically compatible,” Colborne explained. “I’ve got it connected to the app. Sometimes Alexa recognises it. Other times she tells me the device is unresponsive, which seems to be whenever I’m actually in bed and want the light off.”
The situation has been complicated by Colborne’s decision to purchase devices across three incompatible ecosystems. His living room operates on the Philips Hue system. The kitchen uses a cheaper alternative he found on Amazon. The hallway lights are controlled through an app that hasn’t been updated since 2022 and may have been developed by a company that no longer exists.
“I did try setting up a routine,” he said. “Spent about two hours on it one Sunday. Worked perfectly for three days, then Alexa started turning the lights off at 2pm instead of 10pm. No idea why. I’ve given up asking.”
Colborne’s partner, Emma Thornton, 33, maintains that the old system of manually operating light switches was “essentially fine.” She has been banned from saying this aloud.
The couple’s monthly electricity bill has increased by £14 since installing the smart devices, all of which remain on standby and draw power continuously. This does not include the cost of replacing the router twice after it collapsed under the weight of managing forty-three connected devices.
“The theory is brilliant,” said Dr. Michael Pembridge, a technology researcher at Surrey University who conducted a study on smart home adoption involving twelve households, three of whom abandoned the project entirely. “The practice involves seventeen software updates, six different passwords you’ve forgotten, and an inexplicable requirement to enable Bluetooth even though everything connects via WiFi.”
Colborne remains optimistic about his investment. He recently purchased a smart plug for £32 that allows him to turn his regular coffee machine on and off remotely, provided he remembers to fill it with water and coffee the night before, position the switch to ‘on,’ and successfully navigate an app that requires two-factor authentication.
“It’s definitely worth it,” he insisted, standing up to manually adjust the living room thermostat after Alexa misheard his command as “set temperature to fifteen degrees.”
The bedroom light switch, installed in 1987, continues to function with one hundred percent reliability.