CLAIRE: It’s given me a lot more control over everything in my home. I think the biggest thing is that I don’t have to think about it anymore. It’s freed up so much space to not be thinking about whether the lights are how I want them or whether someone will walk in in a few hours and I’ll be sitting in a dark apartment, which is a weird vibe.
JON: You’re so moody and mysterious.
CLAIRE: It’s not inaccurate.
CHRISTINE: I’m Christine Cyr Clisset.
ROSIE: I’m Rosie Guerin and you’re listening to The Wirecutter Show.
CHRISTINE: Hey, Rosie.
ROSIE: Hey, Christine.
CHRISTINE: Today we are talking about accessibility. I’ve thought a lot about this through my work with Wirecutter, but thinking back, the first time I fundamentally understood how difficult it can be to do simple tasks in your daily life when the world isn’t designed for you was when I had my first kid. I was living in Midtown Manhattan just a couple of blocks from where we’re recording. Back then, the sidewalks in Midtown didn’t have ramps where they meet the road. Some of them did, but a lot of them didn’t. And I remember walking with my newborn in her stroller and this lack of ramps was a total barrier. I couldn’t lift the stroller off the sidewalk to cross the street because I was recovering from labor. And I just remember thinking, how do people in wheelchairs or walkers navigate this? This is insane. My mobility was limited and it really opened my eyes to a different world that many people are forced to navigate.
ROSIE: That’s so interesting. I remember living in New York thinking a lot about the inaccessibility of so many subway stations in the city. I think about the way products are designed and that obviously plays a crucial role in accessibility.
Today we’re going to lean into the discussion of products specifically. We’re going to talk about some simple smart home devices that can make a home more accessible for people with disabilities or frankly, anyone with mobility concerns, issues, short-term, medium-term or long-term.
CHRISTINE: That’s right. We’re talking with Claire Perlman, our accessibility editor, and Jon Chase, our smart home editor. They recently collaborated to retrofit Claire’s apartment with smart switches that have allowed Claire more control over the lights in her apartment. She wrote this great piece about this, which we’ll link to in the show notes.
ROSIE: After the break, Claire and Jon. Stick around.
ROSIE: Welcome back. Today, Christine and I are in the studio with two of our coworkers and we’re going to talk about how smart home devices can make a home more accessible. Claire Perlman, Wirecutter’s accessibility editor, and Jon Chase, friend of the show, and our smart home editor. Claire, Jon, welcome.
CLAIRE: Thank you.
JON: Yeah, great to be here.
ROSIE: Happy to have you.
CHRISTINE: It’s so great to have you here. So we want to talk about this project that you two worked on together. Claire, you wrote an article about it. Jon, you helped install these smart switches in Claire’s apartment. Claire, I want you to set the scene. What were you dealing with in your apartment in terms of your lighting? Give us the picture of what a day in your life looked like to turn the lights on.
CLAIRE: Yeah. So I’m in a wheelchair, which means I can’t do a lot of things including using my arms to do a lot of things. The light switches in my apartment are a little bit too high, so I can’t turn them on and off easily. I can actually turn them off, but I cannot turn them on, which is really not that useful.
ROSIE: It’s less useful than you’d think.
CLAIRE: Yeah, it really is. So I have someone who comes and helps me in the morning and they’re there for hour, hour and a half. During that time, I have to have them do everything that I need for the next 12 hours. And so that includes having the lights the way I want them because I haven’t historically been able to turn them on when I want them, or off easily when I want them.
CHRISTINE: So when your helper leaves for the day, the way the apartment was set up was the way it was set up. So if the lights were on in your office, they were on, but if they weren’t on in your office, you couldn’t really do anything about it.
CLAIRE: No. And I would look very dark in my Zoom meeting.
CHRISTINE: I’ve been on many Zoom meetings with you and I never thought it looked dark, but I could see where that would be very annoying.
CLAIRE: It was.
CHRISTINE: Did you have any other smart home devices in your apartment before you and Jon worked on this project?
CLAIRE: I had a few smart plugs set up and so those were connected to… One was connected to a lamp and then another one was connected to an air purifier. I wasn’t really maximizing that usage necessarily. I also had a couple of smart bulbs that I had in lamps, but they were in and out of being useful.
JON: She’s throwing shade on me right here. When Claire and I met a couple of years ago, most of the time people were running away from me with smart home stuff.
CHRISTINE: Like me.
JON: Exactly. And Claire was super game to talk about it and you were curious and I don’t recall if you had an Alexa device. I’m going to tell anyone listening. Trigger warning, mute your smart speakers so they don’t go off. But Claire was willing to try out some smart bulbs. And so separately from the smart plugs you have, which are basically on and off switches, you had a collection of three hue bulbs, but they had gone out of sync. So basically she would use those to speak to Alexa to say, “Hey, turn on my bulbs or whatever.” And then sometimes it would work, sometimes it wouldn’t work.
CLAIRE: This was partly because I bought a knockoff Noguchi lamp and-
JON: Well, the knockoff was the problem.
CLAIRE: Yeah. The knockoff was the problem. The switch is like not…
CHRISTINE: The design gods are coming down to punish you.
CLAIRE: Also, the switch was very janky.
CHRISTINE: So in theory, you could use a light bulb, a smart light bulb to say, “Hey, turn the light bulb on smart speaker,” and that might have helped with your problem, but those had gone out of sync.
CLAIRE: Yeah. Although they worked for a very long time. I ended up fixing them before you came to my apartment all by myself.
JON: Well, It was a great talk, so I will see you guys later! But the other thing is also just to differentiate, those often are used for table lamps and things like that. And the lighting that was controlled by switches is overhead lighting. And so there was a bank of switches and one of them was actually controlled in two locations. And the second location actually was like, I don’t know, chest height for me. And so if you click it on in one spot and then click it off at the other or something like that, Claire explained that sometimes she would relegate it to using her head to turn off a switch, which is not ideal. And your apartment is technically an ADA compliant.
CLAIRE: Yeah. it is supposed to be. I mean, ADA compliant doesn’t mean accessible to every person. It just means accessible to some people.
CHRISTINE: Right. It’s kind of like a median standard that is out there.
CLAIRE: And it’s supposed to be encompassing a very wide variety of needs. There are older people who can’t bend over so they need things that are higher up and that is deeply unuseful for me.
CHRISTINE: Right.
CLAIRE: So that is the problem with the ADA, although I love it.
CHRISTINE: It’s good we have it, but yeah, it doesn’t work. Not all the standards work for everyone. So okay, just to encapsulate, you could turn on some of the lights in your apartment, but these overhead lights were the real issue.
CLAIRE: Yeah. And I had devised systems for turning on and off of those lights as well. I would use my cat’s wand toy to turn on the lights sometimes if I really needed them or a straw for my drink.
ROSIE: Right. This is really ad hoc. This is like you get what you get and you are dealing with whatever it is for the rest of the day.
CLAIRE: Right. Which is not ideal in your own home. That’s fine if you’re like-
CHRISTINE: As a long-term solution, not a great long-term solution.
ROSIE: Right.
CLAIRE: Could be better.
ROSIE: So you come together, you decide to do this project. Where did you begin, I guess, with the lighting problem specifically?
JON: Well, so Claire described her apartment and her needs and the more we talked, I don’t go small. I like to go big. You might know that about me. So I was like, “Yeah, we’ll knock down a wall.” But we reigned it in and made it a much more reasonable approach, which was because it’s a studio, she has a kitchenette and there’s these overhead lights, LED lights, they can get quite bright. And she’s like, “There’s times where I’ve had to like… They were on it at the end of the night and I just had to sleep with the lights on all night, or they’re not on in the morning and you have to sit around in darkness kind of thing.”
ROSIE: Which is particularly problematic in a studio.
JON: Yeah. It’s irksome. And then on top of that, we also, she talked about how she had a heat pump like an HVAC, air conditioning system. The thermostat would be the way that you can control it, but you were unable to control it because one, it’s the height of it, but also it’s finicky with like 25 button presses. We were trying to figure out a way to make a substitution and put in a smart thermostat that would allow her to again, use her voice to change the temperature.
So we talked about doing that. We talked about maybe putting in a, instead of having smart plugs, which are external and they go into the wall and sometimes they take up space, they’re useful and they’re great, but you can actually just replace the receptacle itself and have a smart version.
CHRISTINE: Like the outlet receptacle where you would plug something and you can actually-
JON: You can make those so that you could individually control them. So the idea you could be like, “Hey Alexa, hey Siri, hey Google Home, turn off my light,” and that outlet itself would turn on and off kind of thing. So we went big that way and then once we got to her apartment, reality kicked in. It has a pesky way of showing up?
ROSIE: What did you see as limitations or challenges when you went to do the assessment in Claire’s apartment?
JON: Just speaking from the usability of this stuff, some people are definitely would need help with any of this, right? Either-
CHRISTINE: Like help installing it and programming and everything like that.
JON: All of those things. And they’re different things, right? Some people just, they may not have the use of a smartphone and a lot of these. Almost everything requires the use of a smartphone to set it up. And we showed up and it turns out that Claire’s thermostat is of a particular type where it wouldn’t work with the model we were going to set in. They just wouldn’t be able to communicate with each other. So we ended up just kind of cut and bait on that one and moving on.
CLAIRE: That one was very sad. I was really hopeful that-
CHRISTINE: Maybe that’s the next challenge.
CLAIRE: Yes. All I want is to be able to turn the AC on and then off in middle of the night whenever I want.
CHRISTINE: Oh, yeah.
JON: And your compromise, do you have a fan that you can-
CLAIRE: I’ve been using my air purifier as a fan, which is not the most efficient.
ROSIE: Okay. So what did you end up actually installing then?
CLAIRE: We ended up installing three smart switches. Is that it?
JON: Well, we did. Okay, so we did-
CLAIRE: Not it, but.
JON: Right. So that’s it. Yeah. That’s all, and it only took me however many hours. So what we did was we, one, we resynced your bulbs, which you said you did on your own without me, but whatever.
CLAIRE: I did one of them and you did the other one.
JON: For the kitchen lights, we removed the existing switch, like physically removed the switch, and then replaced it with a smart version. This version communicates with like a plugin wifi relay basically. An important thing that we talked about was that this switch should work just like a regular switch in terms of you can manually turn it on and off so that you’re not bound to using the smart features for people who don’t want that.
But then on top of that, once we installed that, we could then, in this case she has Alexa speakers, so using the Alexa app, we connected the light switch. This model was a Leviton model. They have a whole bunch of models and this is one of our Wirecutter picks. So we connect them in the app. From then on, she can say, and you give it a name and you can say, “Alexa, turn the kitchen lights to 50%.” It not only turns it on and off, it also dims.
CHRISTINE: So it’s like a dimmer too.
JON: Yeah, exactly.
CHRISTINE: Okay.
ROSIE: Did that mean you had to change the bulbs themselves?
JON: No.
CHRISTINE: You’re not using smart bulbs in those overhead lights.
JON: Exactly.
CHRISTINE: These are regular bulbs that are being controlled by a smart switch.
JON: Which is so cost-effective and useful. Because if you’ve already got lights in your ceiling, you don’t want to have to replace those. And these are LED lights, can light.
CHRISTINE: Yeah, like can lights.
JON: So she was able to use the existing ones with literally just taking the wires out of one port, putting it back into the other and the switch. It’s a very, very simple operation. We did have some issues getting it to sync up initially. I think part of that has to do with, and this is a bugaboo for the smart home in general, when you have wifi, there’s generally 2.4 gigahertz and 5 gigahertz. They’re just different frequencies. And a lot of times networks have both and hers does each type of-
CHRISTINE: Is that why you get like the two different wifi signals when you’re connecting to your wifi?
JON: Exactly. One is 2G, one is 5G, something like that. Exactly. And so 99% of smart home devices connect using 2.4 gigahertz only. It can be a hiccup because what happens is, your phone, which you’re using to connect these devices, may be connected to the 5 gigahertz network. And so sometimes, not always, depends on your router and modem and all the other kind of stuff, it may be that when you go to set them up, the smart device is like, “I can’t see you essentially,” and the connection, the pairing will fail.
So most routers have the ability to like, if there’s an app associated with it, you can turn off the 5 gigahertz for 5 minutes, 10 minutes, whatever while you’re doing the setup. Your phone would then be on the same network and then you can make this happen. This is such a huge issue and I don’t know why it’s not solved at this point. So I believe that was the failing. So I ended up resetting the switch, turned my phone on and off and whatever, and then it just connected and it was fine.
CHRISTINE: So as a general rule of thumb, maybe a takeaway for this episode is if you’re using smart devices, you want to make sure they’re speaking to each other over the same frequency on your wifi, right? So if you’re having trouble maybe disable that 5G on your router, I’m saying that like I know how to do that, but I’m sure I could figure it out.
JON: Yeah, you talk a big game.
CHRISTINE: I’ll just call you Jon.
JON: I like this. Yeah, exactly. At any rate, this is a bit of a diversion, but it’s an important point because this is often a failing [inaudible 00:14:17].
CHRISTINE: So kind of like following in on that, because this might seem intimidating to some people, right? Installing smart home devices. Like Claire, you may not have done this without Jon’s assistance, right? I mean, it might’ve been a little daunting, right?
CLAIRE: No. It would’ve taken me two to four more years to finally get around.
CHRISTINE: So the first lesson is find a friend who knows how to do this. But I guess my other question is, how hard is it actually to install a smart switch? If you’re not a super handy person, you’re not comfortable with electrical wires, do you need to get a handy person to come in and do this? Or if you’re like reasonably comfortable putting in a regular switch you’d be fine doing this?
JON: I would say I’m not an expert electrician or anything like that, but I’m very familiar with doing this stuff. I’ve wired our home with multiple different smart switches, trying them out and testing them over the years. If you are a competent DIY person who has done any kind of …wired an electrical switch or an outlet before, it’s identical. But it can get complicated if you have more exotic wiring, like a bank of switches, sometimes they’ll have pigtails going on and joining of multiple lines and things like that. So it can get a little slightly exotic. It’s absolutely handyman level. I don’t think you would have to hire an electrician to do it. But obviously the first thing you would do is like go to your breaker, turn off the switch, use a voltage tester to make sure that there’s no stray currents or anything like that. It’s very doable.
But even then, some of the outtakes of the video probably showing me, I’m like, “Get in there, you.” Because there’s wiring, it’s stiff, it’s big, it’s thick, the existing wiring in the wall, and you’re connecting onto it and so it takes some doing.
CHRISTINE: And Claire, your apartment is a new apartment, right?
CLAIRE: Right.
CHRISTINE: So if you’re dealing with an older building, you might have a whole other host of things to think about.
JON: Yeah. So all modern code compliant homes have what’s called a neutral wire in the box. Older homes often don’t. There’s a few smart home switches that actually can work without a neutral wire, which is pretty cool.
ROSIE: Claire, how has this changed your day-to-day?
CLAIRE: It’s given me a lot more control over everything in my home. I think the biggest thing is that I don’t have to think about it anymore. It’s freed up so much space to not be thinking about whether the lights are how I want them or whether someone will walk in in a few hours and I’ll be sitting in a dark apartment, which is a weird vibe.
JON: You’re so moody and mysterious.
CLAIRE: It’s not inaccurate. But yeah, I think not having to think about it in the morning when I have other things. I have work to be thinking about, I have my cat to be thinking about. I have plenty of other things to be thinking about besides whether the lights are exactly how I want them or not.
And also it has given me the freedom to change my mind whether I want the lights on or off, which is not a thing I used to have. So it’s been really big for that. Even at night when the lights are off, but maybe I want to FaceTime with someone or read a book, see what my cat is doing on the counter at 2:00 AM. Now I can turn on the light and see and then turn it off again.
ROSIE: So what is the routine that you’re in now in terms of like you wake up in the morning? Are you using your phone? Are you using your voice? What’s-
CLAIRE: I’m pretty much always using Alexa I don’t usually use the phone because I’m too lazy to figure out which app I’m supposed to be doing that on.
JON: But that’s the whole point. That’s the beauty of you being able to use voice speakers and stuff like that. I think you don’t have to get up and go over to the switch to activate it. You don’t have to pull out your phone to activate it. You don’t have to browse to find the right thing. You don’t have to do an update of the app or that kind of stuff. It mostly just works.
But one of the things that Claire and I kind of keep discussing, I think, and one of my writers, Rachel Cericola, has written guides to accessibility and aging in place that involves smart home devices in particular. I’ve been covering smart home for almost a decade at this point and I feel like there’s so much usefulness to it for this audience of people who have mobility and accessibility needs and also aging the place, which they overlap. It didn’t dawn on me and I think to our whole team for a really long time how useful these things are.
CHRISTINE: I manage our teams that review appliances and kitchen equipment. I think we saw a lot of smart features being integrated into appliances. We’ve seen this for years and at first our reaction was like, why do you need to have a smart feature on an oven or on a washer? It just seems like this is just added. But we’ve seen over the years, especially Claire and I have worked on, we have a paid tester group that comes in, we have various people with different mobility issues, and these smart features can be quite helpful to a variety of people, because you can operate things with your phone. And I think we’ve seen this across different coverage areas. Forever, I remember we were like, “Why would you need a smart toothbrush?” But it actually can be quite helpful for certain people to be able to have these smart devices.
JON: Yeah, that’s the thing, there’s so many products that where you might be like, “Well, I don’t need that.” And it’s like, “Well, you don’t need that, but other people do.” Because these products don’t tend to be sold. They’re not marketed.
CLAIRE: No, they never are.
JON: One of the things we also talked about, Claire has this wall that’s basically a window and glass door, like the whole back wall of her apartment. And I was like, “Maybe our 2.0 version is you get automatic shades which go up and down on a cycle.”
CLAIRE: That’d be amazing.
JON: The sun can be blinding or it can be too hot in the summer and the quickest way to cool down your place. Boom, blocks the sun from coming in.
ROSIE: Particularly if you weren’t able to hook up the smart thermostat.
JON: Yes, exactly. Exactly.
ROSIE: There’s an intimidation factor here when approaching some of these installations and I think it would be a turnoff in terms of judging how much is this worth versus how much am I going to have to learn to enable me to use these seamlessly? What is that learning curve like? How do you think about that?
CLAIRE: Yeah, I think it is really hard for people who are not… I mean, even just connecting the app to the thing can be daunting. I made my brother come all the way from Manhattan at one point to do it for me. And I think there’s the tech brain part of it and then there’s also the physical part of it. Sometimes you have to get your phone really close to the thing and it’s in a weird place in your apartment and that requires some physical ability.
I think there’s also avoidance because it could build up in your head as a scary thing to do, but then once you’re actually doing it is truly not that hard. I mean, for smart plugs, they were very simple. Plugging in a smart speaker is very simple. There are things like that where it’s like, “No, you could do this.”
ROSIE: We’re going to take a quick break and on the other side, we’re going to talk about some other smart home gear that can make a home more accessible. Plus Jon and Claire’s recommendations for some bang for your buck products. We’ll be right back.
CHRISTINE: Welcome back. Before the break, we discussed how a smart switch really helped you, Claire, in your apartment and really changed the game for turning on your lights. Now I want to talk about other devices that can make a home more accessible. For most people, where do you think the biggest payoff is in terms of smart devices? If somebody is trying to decide what to get, what are the devices that you think, let’s start with you, Jon, that are things that are just going to have a huge payoff.
JON: I am a little biased here because I write the guide to smart locks, but I have smart locks at our home and I don’t know anyone who’s ever come to our home and then been like, “I hate this device.” Most often people are like, “Oh, I’m curious. I kind of want to have this.” Because once they see how it works and how functional and how useful it is, I won’t go all the way down the rabbit hole, but it’s like I have little kids without phones who can get into the home where they don’t need to carry a key around, they use a code, that kind of stuff. I get a notification if the door is unlocked at a weird hour. I can also give, when my parents come to visit, they have their own code, or when we have someone came and fed our pets while we were gone, they had their own code and that kind of stuff. So it’s just-
CHRISTINE: I think I see these on a lot of Airbnbs as well.
JON: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. They’re so useful. It’s like when you get a smartphone or a cell phone and you forget what it’s like to use a regular phone, I forget what it’s like to use a key to lock a door anymore. So for me, that’s a big one.
You had a number of devices you said that you used with smart plugs, which I think is really interesting because a smart plug is, essentially it’s an on/off switch. And they might have extra features in there. You can put them on a timer, they can tell you how much electricity or amperage or whatever was being used, but you had three or four in your home.
CLAIRE: Yeah. So before we did all the lighting, basically the only way I had to control any lighting was the lamps. So I used smart plugs with lamps. I also used to use one on my sound machine because I used to live in the East Village and it was very noisy.
ROSIE: And are you controlling those with your voice as well?
CLAIRE: Yes. Also voice.
JON: And just to emphasize what Claire is saying is those aren’t smart devices per se, but she’s smartening-
CHRISTINE: She’s smartening them up.
JON: Smartening up. She’s given them if they only had a brain.
CHRISTINE: If they only had a brain. What about safety devices? You have recommendations for smoke detectors, right?
JON: Yeah, exactly.
CHRISTINE: Do you think this is a good place for people to start with smart home?
JON: For a long time, we had a piece that was, if you only buy one smart device, this is the one to get. And a smart smoke detector is, there’s different varieties of them, but at a base level, they alleviate most of the reasons that regular smoke detectors are a pain and then therefore get disabled or pulled off the wall. Anyone who’s had, it’s always at 3:00 AM. The 3:00 AM chirping thing, smart detectors will say, “Hey, my battery’s low, [inaudible 00:24:46].”
CHRISTINE: In that voice.
JON: “Hey, baby. Go change my battery.” Most fires where people are injured hurt or there’s mortalities, it’s because they either had a detector and it was disabled on purpose or the batteries were dead, because they are hard to turn off. You got a 10 foot ceiling, you’re not going to be able to get up there and hit the mute button. So these, you can mute using an app usually. They can interconnect to each other so if one goes off, they all go off, things like that. It’s just smart.
ROSIE: You also mentioned blinds as a hugely helpful-
JON: Yeah. Again, this is one of those ones where they’ve now expanded to it. It’s like blinds, shades, cell blinds, and then also retrofit ones that you can add on. If you can’t lift your arm up to pull a shade down, you’re just going to get sun staring in you all day long and that really radically can alter the temperature of a room. And also it’s just annoying. I have three in our kitchen where sort of around dinnertime a laser beam of sunlight pours in and so the blinds come down automatically and then they go back up and then they go back down again. And that sounds like a complete luxury, but if you pull and open and close shades, these are shades, not blinds, but if you pull, open them, they’re going to break. They always break and they get that flappy thing going off.
ROSIE: The sound of childhood.
JON: So I love those and I have it in our kids’ bedroom too. In the morning, their alarm goes off, the lights come on and the shades go up and it’s like, all right, it’s go time people.
CHRISTINE: Wake up.
JON: Yeah.
CHRISTINE: So okay, we’ve talked about some of what you guys see as the most useful devices. If somebody’s listening to this thinking, “I am curious, I’d like to try installing some smart device,” how would you advise someone on how to choose what to get? Let’s start with you, Claire.
CLAIRE: I would think about my morning perhaps and walk through it and identify where you are most pissed off about not being able to do something.
JON: That’s a good way to put it.
CLAIRE: And so mine was, I was really annoyed about the lights. I’m also really annoyed when I can’t put my blinds up in the morning because I face the east and I want sunlight. So that’s next on my to do list for Jon and-
JON: Noted.
ROSIE: My to do list for Jon.
CLAIRE: But it’s the things that really aggravate you every single day and they seem little and they’re not. That is where various smart home things can come useful in a million different ways. There’s the ones we’ve talked about, but there’s also, for example, I have a smart litter box, because one of the things that would drive me insane was a stinky litter box right next to me.
CHRISTINE: Oh my gosh. Yeah.
CLAIRE: Horrible.
JON: Start small. Don’t go out there and buy seven different devices. It’s sort of like you got to babystep it a little bit and understand, one of the big concepts within the smart home thing is like, are you going to use one device with an app and control just that and then maybe you have another device from another company and that one has an app? You can use apps that control a lot of your devices and so you have to consider compatibility.
Alexa is generally compatible with almost everything. If you want to consolidate control into a single device so that you can say, “Hey, Alexa, do this. Hey, Alexa, do that,” if that’s going to be your control scheme, then you’d want to ensure that there’s compatibility. If you are only going to get one device, you’re just going to get a smart lock and not integrate it with a whole bunch of other devices, which is fine, that’s how I do it, then it doesn’t matter as much.
But also Nest makes a lot of very nice devices if you’d want to use the Google Home app for that. And so then you would do like a Nest doorbell, a Nest camera.
CHRISTINE: A thermostat.
JON: Thermostat, that kind of stuff. Yeah. But I do think, do buy name brands. We generally frown upon these kind of rando devices that seem a lot like something else. Don’t buy rando products, established brands that generally speaking what we cover. Even if it’s not a pick, you’ll see that we’ve tested it in our competition and we might give you… consult our guides. We have an excellent team of, I would say the best team out there of people testing.
CHRISTINE: That’s the one ad you get to place in this episode.
JON: Smart home. The future is now.
ROSIE: Who do you both think about when you think of folks who could most benefit from smart devices in the home?
CLAIRE: I think it’s anyone who can’t get up easily and go do a thing. If you need to be able to do something from where you are at that exact moment, then this is going to be great for you. So that’s disabled people, but that’s also people aging in place, people with new babies, people who just broke their legs for whatever reason. I think it really can be applicable to anyone. I mean, even I’ve talked to a friend who said it erased all arguments with her husband about who had to get up when they were already in bed to go turn off the lights. It’s saving marriages out here.
ROSIE: It’s a spectrum.
CHRISTINE: I love that. And it can also be, like to your point, there’s some statistic about how there’s some huge amount of people who will be disabled temporarily in their life, whether it’s like you broke your leg, you had a hip replacement. Some of these things could be temporary solutions for those moments, those touch points.
CLAIRE: Totally.
CHRISTINE: All right, one last question for you. I’m thinking about all of the things I could install in my own home and it sounds like these things are kind of futsy. I know that Jon, you’re going to tell me that they aren’t, but how often do they disconnect or get out of sync like the bulbs that you installed Claire? How much maintenance are you having to do on this thing?
JON: How stable are they?
CLAIRE: Can I just say that my light bulb that went out of sync, all I had to do was manually turn off the lamp and then turn it back on again.
CHRISTINE: Ah, okay.
CLAIRE: So it was not-
ROSIE: Unacceptable.
JON: No, it’s a real thing. So one of the components of smart home stuff is that almost everything connects to the cloud. You connect to the app to control it, the device often connects to your wifi or to a hub, and then that goes to the cloud because that’s where the commands go back and forth and things like that. And so you can get outages. You have to update the software sometimes. Things go wrong, in the same way that things go wrong with your computer or your smartphone or something. So things can go off for sure. I do think rare is the 100% uptime device, but more often than not it’s kind of, I have shades. They’ve been in my house for almost 10 years.
I would say that’s one of the things we grapple with in recommending products is almost no company will tell you how long they expect the product to last. And so if you’re going to spend a couple of hundred bucks on something, you want it to last for as long as possible. Like a smoke detector, they have to last 10 years. So you know you’re getting 10 years out of it. It’s good investment. But some stuff where it’s like, okay, is this going to disappear after two, three, four, five years? How long are they going to provide updates to the software? How long are they going to support it in the cloud?
So that’s a real issue as well, not just the maintenance of it, but the longevity of it. And again, that comes down to a company’s reputation. If they’ve been around for 10 years, it’s very different than some company that is based in another country that may or may not be around in two, three, four, five years.
CHRISTINE: Okay. Well, we have our classic last question I want to ask both of you. What is the last thing that you bought that you really loved? Claire, you go first and then Jon.
CLAIRE: Okay. The truthful answer for the last thing I bought would be the perfect strawberries I bought at the farmer’s market on Saturday. But a more permanent answer would be the very cute little Egyptian cat earrings I bought at the British Museum a few weeks ago.
CHRISTINE: Lovely.
CLAIRE: I was [inaudible 00:32:43] in London.
CHRISTINE: That is a flex.
CLAIRE: It was fun.
ROSIE: That’s awesome.
JON: I was going to say an update. Last time I was here however many months ago, I had purchased that Ryobi power washer. And I’d said I was unhealthily excited to use it. It’s so great.
CHRISTINE: What’s the last thing you power washed?
JON: I mean, the sidewalk-
ROSIE: What’s the last thing you power washed that you really love?
JON: Doing the second floor windows, that thing is like a fire hose. It’s wonderful.
CHRISTINE: All right.
JON: I know how to party.
CHRISTINE: You really do.
ROSIE: I’m happy for you both. Thank you guys for coming. This was really, really great.
JON: Yeah, great to be here.
CLAIRE: This was so fun. Thanks.
ROSIE: Thanks.
ROSIE: If you want to find out more about Wirecutter’s coverage or if you want to check out Claire and Jon’s reporting on accessibility, smart home, aging in place, check out our website. You can find a link in our show notes. That’s it for us. Thanks for listening.
The Wirecutter Show is executive produced by me, Rosie Guerin, and produced by Abigail Keel. Engineering support from Maddy Masiello and Nick Pitman. Today’s episode was mixed by Catherine Anderson. Original music by Dan Powell, Marion Lozano, Elisheba Ittoop, Rowan Niemisto, Catherine Anderson, and Diane Wong. Cliff Levy is Wirecutter’s deputy publisher and general manager. Ben Frumin is Wirecutter’s editor in chief.
CHRISTINE: I’m Christine Cyr Clisset.
ROSIE: And I’m Rosie Guerin. Thank you for listening.
CLAIRE: Mine started chirping with a low battery at 2:00 AM one day.
ROSIE: Was thinking like, “What are you doing if this starts going off?”
JON: Oh, really? Hold my beer. I will be over
