Three Questions Before a Smart Device Comes Into Our House
September 15, 2026
One theme that has run through nearly every networking article I’ve written during our smart home build is that reliability starts with architecture, not gadgets. I’ve talked about running Cat6 wherever possible, taking unnecessary traffic off WiFi, using wired access points and PoE, relying on local protocols such as Z-Wave, Zigbee and Thread, and designing the network so the house doesn’t become useless when the Internet goes down.
There’s another part of that strategy I haven’t spent as much time discussing: how I decide which smart devices are allowed onto that network in the first place.
Being a technology professional makes it very easy to become fascinated by the latest smart-home gadget. But I’ve become increasingly selective. A device being “smart” isn’t enough anymore. Before adding something to our house, I want to know how it communicates, what happens when its manufacturer’s cloud disappears, whether I’m signing up for another monthly fee, and whether the company behind it has demonstrated that it intends to support the product for the long haul.
Increasingly, one of the things I look for is Matter.
Why Matter Became Part of the Plan
Matter is the cross-brand smart-home standard developed by the Connectivity Standards Alliance and backed by many of the industry’s biggest players, including Amazon, Apple, Google and Samsung.
For me, the attraction isn’t simply having another logo printed on a box. Matter addresses two issues I’ve worried about throughout this project: interoperability and local control.
Matter devices communicate locally over IP using technologies such as Ethernet, WiFi and Thread. Thread is particularly interesting for smart homes because it’s a low-power mesh network designed for devices such as sensors, switches and other IoT equipment.
The important part is that Matter’s core device-control model is local. Basic operation doesn’t inherently require sending every command through a manufacturer’s cloud server.
That’s consistent with what I’ve been trying to accomplish throughout our house.
If I turn off a light, I don’t want that command traveling hundreds or thousands of miles to a data center just so a server can tell the light six feet away from me what to do. More importantly, I don’t want that light to stop responding because my Internet connection — or somebody else’s cloud — is temporarily unavailable.
In simple terms, Matter gets us closer to a smart home where the light still turns off even when the company’s servers don’t.
Matter Doesn’t Mean “No Cloud”
There’s an important distinction here.
Buying a Matter device doesn’t mean that device will never use the Internet. Manufacturers can still provide cloud-based services, remote access, advanced analytics, firmware updates and proprietary features through their own apps. Some advanced features may still depend on those services.
What Matter changes is the foundation. For supported functions, Matter provides a standardized local communications layer rather than requiring every manufacturer to build everything around its own proprietary cloud. That’s a much healthier architecture for a house I expect to be living in long after today’s apps and cloud services have changed.
One Device, Multiple Ecosystems
Interoperability is the other big attraction.
We already have devices and services spanning multiple ecosystems. Amazon Alexa plays an important role in voice control. SmartThings provides another automation and device-management layer. Ecobee handles our HVAC zones. SmartWings controls our motorized shades. And Aqara sensors are becoming increasingly important for presence and environmental awareness.
I don’t particularly want the house permanently tied to one company simply because I bought a light switch five years ago.
Matter’s multi-ecosystem capabilities allow compatible devices to work across platforms rather than forcing homeowners to commit everything to one ecosystem. A Matter device can potentially participate in Alexa, Apple Home, Google Home, SmartThings and other compatible platforms without replacing the underlying hardware.
That’s important because I have no idea which smart-home platform we’ll prefer ten years from now. Neither does anyone else.
Matter Is Growing Up
One of my early concerns with Matter was that, while the concept was great, the first versions supported a relatively limited number of smart-home devices. That’s changing quickly.
Recent updates have expanded Matter well beyond basic lights, switches, locks and sensors. Matter 1.5, released in late 2025, added cameras, soil sensors, expanded energy management and better support for motorized shades, blinds, gates and doors. Matter 1.5.1 followed with improvements to camera streaming, reliability, doorbells and intercom devices. Then Matter 1.6, released in June 2026, improved device setup, thermostat control, device-status reporting, multi-ecosystem sharing and product-security requirements.
For our smart home, the individual version numbers aren’t nearly as important as the direction Matter is heading. Devices such as our Smartwings motorized blinds, Ecobee thermostats and Aqara sensors, along with potential future cameras and energy-management equipment, increasingly have a common standard through which they can work together.
That’s important because the real value of Matter isn’t another feature or another app. It’s the possibility that I can choose the best device for a particular job without worrying as much about whether I’ve permanently committed the rest of the house to that manufacturer’s ecosystem.
Why That Matters for Our Future Plans
Matter’s expansion into cameras and energy management is particularly interesting to me.
We’re already using wired Reolink PoE cameras, and I’m certainly not going to replace a reliable wired security architecture simply because Matter now supports cameras. But standardized camera support could eventually make it easier for security events and video to participate in the broader smart-home ecosystem.
Energy management may have even greater long-term potential. We’ve already seen encouraging efficiency results from our three-zone Ecobee HVAC system. Looking farther ahead, imagine smart electrical panels, EV chargers, batteries, solar, HVAC systems and other major electrical loads communicating through common standards. Instead of every system independently trying to optimize itself, the house could eventually coordinate when and how it consumes energy. The same concept applies to our Smartwings motorized blinds and climate control.
I’ve recently been experimenting with Aqara FP300 presence sensors that provide occupancy, temperature, humidity and ambient-light information. One of my future goals is to use that information along with our SmartWings shades and Ecobee system to better manage comfort and solar heat gain.
During a hot Texas afternoon, for example, strong sunlight and increasing room temperature could become conditions for closing our west-facing shades before the room gets excessively warm. During colder weather, we could potentially reverse that logic and use the sun to our advantage.
For me, that’s the important story behind Matter’s continued development: the standard is gradually becoming capable of connecting more of the whole house rather than just a collection of individual smart-home gadgets.
My Second Rule: No Subscription Just to Make the Thing Work
Matter isn’t my only purchasing guideline. I’m increasingly resistant to devices that require an ongoing subscription to perform the basic function I bought them to perform.
I’m not opposed to subscriptions altogether. If a company is providing continuous cloud storage, professional monitoring, sophisticated AI processing or another service with genuine ongoing operating costs, charging for that additional service can be perfectly reasonable.
What I don’t like is buying hardware and then discovering that a fundamental capability is locked behind $5, $10 or $20 a month. That’s particularly problematic when you’re talking about an entire smart home. Five dollars here and ten dollars there doesn’t seem significant until you have dozens of connected devices and a credit-card statement that looks like you’re running a small data center.
My preference is simple:
The hardware’s primary function should work without a subscription.
Get Tod Caflisch’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Optional services can be considered separately.
What Happens When the Internet Goes Down?
This ties directly into another theme from my recent networking articles.
I’ve tried to reduce our dependence on WiFi wherever practical by hardwiring devices with Ethernet. Early in the build, one of my rules became: if it has an Ethernet port — or might someday — it gets Cat6.
That’s why devices such as our Reolink security cameras and Alta Labs access points are hardwired. Every device that doesn’t need to be on WiFi is one less wireless client competing for airtime.
I’ve also deliberately incorporated technologies such as Z-Wave, Zigbee and Thread that allow smart-home devices to communicate locally without requiring every switch, sensor or controller to have a direct relationship with somebody’s cloud. That’s not because I dislike WiFi. Our Alta Labs AP6 Pro indoor and outdoor access points provide excellent wireless coverage across the house and property.
It’s because Internet access and home automation shouldn’t be the same thing.
If our Internet provider has an outage, we’ll obviously lose services that genuinely require the Internet. Streaming services aren’t going to work. Some Alexa capabilities may be limited. Remote access to cloud services may disappear.
Fair enough. But there’s no good reason a local light switch, shade, lock or automation should necessarily stop working simply because the Internet does. Matter and established local protocols help reinforce that separation.
Local Control Also Makes the House Feel Faster
There’s another benefit that connects directly to some of my recent articles about why certain smart homes feel slow.
Local control isn’t just about surviving an Internet outage. It can also improve responsiveness.
Every time a simple automation has to travel from a sensor in your house to a manufacturer’s cloud, through another cloud service, and then back to the device sitting ten feet away, you’re introducing additional opportunities for latency and failure. Local communication removes much of that journey.
That’s one reason I’m increasingly interested in combining Matter, Z-Wave, Zigbee, Thread and local automation with the wired network we’ve already built. The goal isn’t merely having a house full of connected devices. It’s having those devices respond quickly and predictably.
The Third Question: Do I Trust the Company?
There’s one final requirement that’s harder to quantify:
Has the manufacturer earned my trust?
Smart-home hardware is different from many other consumer electronics.
I might replace a phone every few years. But I don’t want to replace dozens of switches because their manufacturer decided to leave the smart-home business. Some of the technology we’re installing is effectively becoming part of the house.
Switches are inside electrical boxes. Motorized shades are mounted to windows. Sensors are attached to walls. Cameras are mounted outside. Irrigation equipment is buried underground. Network cabling is literally behind drywall.
The longer-lived the installation, the more important manufacturer support becomes. I want companies that issue firmware updates, address security vulnerabilities, maintain compatibility and demonstrate that they intend to support products after the initial sale. A spectacular feature list means considerably less to me if I don’t believe the product will still be supported five years from now.
The Three-Question Test
After everything we’ve learned designing, building and now living with our smart home, I’ve boiled my purchasing philosophy down to three questions:
1. Does it require a subscription to perform its primary function?
2. Will its important functions continue working if the Internet goes down — ideally through Matter or another local protocol?
3. Has the manufacturer earned enough trust that I’m comfortable making its product part of our home?
A “wrong” answer doesn’t necessarily eliminate a product. There are legitimate exceptions, and not every device we own checks every box perfectly. But it does mean that product has to make a pretty convincing case for itself.
Build for the House, Not the Gadget
There’s a common thread connecting this philosophy with almost everything I’ve written recently about our home network.
- Cat6 wherever practical.
- PoE for cameras and wireless access points.
- Wired devices where possible instead of unnecessary WiFi clients.
- Local protocols where they make sense.
- Matter interoperability where it’s available and mature.
- Subscriptions only when they provide genuine additional value.
- Manufacturers we have reason to believe will support what they sell.
None of these choices individually guarantees a reliable smart home. Together, however, they create an architecture that’s much less dependent on any single company, cloud platform, wireless technology or Internet connection. That’s ultimately what I’m trying to build.
I don’t know what Alexa will look like ten years from now. I don’t know whether SmartThings will still be our preferred automation platform. I don’t know what future versions of Matter will support — or what completely new smart-home technologies will emerge. And I shouldn’t need to know.
If we’ve built the infrastructure correctly and continue choosing devices based on interoperability, local operation and long-term support, the house should be able to evolve as the technology changes.
Because I’m not particularly interested in building a smart home that works brilliantly today. I’m trying to build one that still works brilliantly years from now.
Let Debbie and I know what your thoughts are on our smart home in the comments, DMs or email. Thanks again to all those following Debbie and I through our smart home journey. It’s great to hear your success stories and suggestions as we’ve moved through the process of our new smart home build. And if you like the content I’m posting each week, don’t forget to ‘Like’ and ‘Follow.’
