Every big-ticket item you buy comes with an owner's manual: your car, your dishwasher, even your calculator. But your biggest purchase, your home, doesn't come with instructions, so I've previously advocated creating your own manual . A little documentation means you have easy access to every paint color and appliance model in your home.
You should add smart home information to this manual. By listing which products belong to which hub, app, and automation, you can relieve your future self of the burden when trying to diagnose inevitable smart home issues . You can also create an ultimate handbook to pass on to future owners if you sell your home.
Start by describing your center
If you use a multi-system hub and voice assistant (such as Google, Amazon, or Apple), describe the general layout of the system in your manual. Discuss how to access these assistants, where these speakers or devices are.
Next, lay out any other hubs and their locations - these are devices that come with some products and are only required for that product. I tend to keep them in one place and try to label them for my own sanity (and defend the label maker).
This process may seem unnecessary, but it takes surprisingly little time and means you can easily backtrack when your device is offline. In addition, as technology develops, you will also upgrade and replace products in the future. There's no reason to keep a hub if you no longer have the associated product, but you're unlikely to instantly remember which hub connects to which devices. This document will easily remind you when you make these changes.
Keep smart products in stock
Just like you do with appliances, where you can easily order parts, get support, and provide documentation to your insurance company if needed, you should just keep a smart product list. A spreadsheet can do the trick; for each product, make sure to note the apps and hubs it links to. When you add products one at a time, you often forget how many brands you have, and it's not always easy to figure out. For example, smart light bulbs and plugs often don't have names printed on them, and even if they do, apps don't necessarily match them. Many brands have adopted generic app names such as "Smart Living" or "Home Living." I spent a long time tracing products back to their app when I needed to - and you'll probably need to do that at some point.
Document your automation
I run a lot of automation programs, and most of the time they perform simple tasks like turning on a light at a specific time, running the vacuum cleaner in a specific situation, or replying to a message when I ask a question. The thing is, these automations add up, and if you need to figure out why your vacuum runs at 3pm every day, it turns out the automation could be coming from a lot of places: the app on the vacuum itself, your voice assistant like Alexa or Google, or a third-party integration Services (such as IFTTT or Zapier). You'd be surprised how easy it is to forget how to set something up. Documenting these automations, even in the simplest of terms, will eliminate this problem.
I like to think of your smart home as a sprinkler system. Usually, they just work so you don't have to think about them. But when something goes wrong, without documentation, you have no way of knowing what exactly happened, let alone what is most likely the source of the problem. In this case, the system's map and inventory will be very helpful, and your smart home will be exactly the same.
