Yes! I did it my self, but it definitely was not worth it.

Throughout time, the pattern of moving from doing everything ourselves (DIY) to delegating it to others has been persistent. This pattern is usually seen in areas where a simple and clear path of operation is hard to find. Here is a story of one of our very first customers and their attempt to create their very own smart home. Needless to say this has been one of our biggest motivations for establishing our company.

“About two years ago I decided to make my home smart. There were A LOT of smart home products out there, so I thought it shouldn’t be that difficult to do. Especially for someone who has been involved with the Automation industry for about 5 years.

To start, I had to choose a platform. After days of searching and online investigation, I found out there are a lot of them out there. So I thought “Let’s choose a communication protocol first and narrow down the platforms based on that!”. That certainly helped, but still there were too many options.

After days and days of reading blogs and forums and multiple discussions with professionals, I came to the realization that the smart home market is very messy. There are tons of pitfalls out there; unreliable devices, security measures, connectivity issues, high prices and bad customer service were all part of the problem.

After checking my laptop time tracker I noticed that I had spent about 150 hours of product research, reading forums, and follow ups to be able to setup an operational system. To be fair, I enjoyed some parts of it, especially the part with tweaking with devices and their features; but that was only about 15 hours of the whole process.

A quick calculation showed me that an average person ( which with my tech background, I believed I wasn’t) spends about 130 hours of precious time on this painful process. This would cost them about 5000$ or more worth of their time!

At first, I thought I am saving money and I am going to have some fun “Doing it myself”; but I was wrong on both aspects. My hardware cost was less than 5000$, and I definitely did not enjoy the time and hassle of going through the forums. Plus I had to call an electrician at the end to double check all of my electrical switches’ wiring to ensure there are no hazards, so that it does not interfere with my home insurance policy( This cost me another 400$).

I am a handy person, but sometimes It just makes sense for me to take my car to the shop for service and not do it myself. I wish I were SMART enough at the time so I would have done the same thing with my SMART home from the beginning. “

After years of experience, we still hear similar stories. This does not mean that DIY projects are failures, but it is important to know where we should start from. Our time is limited and precious; maybe that is the reason we don't start building a house from growing a tree to supply wood.