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Homeowner baffled after washing machine uses 3.6GB of internet data a day (www.newsweek.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 18 points 2 years ago (16 children)

You already have a phone in your hand just put an alarm on there. There are you eliminated the supposed use of internet on a washer.

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  • [–] 15 points 2 years ago (7 children)

    1. Newer washing machines vary in time depending on how dirty your clothes are. So the same program may take 50 minutes or 90 minutes. This cannot be solved with a regular timer.

    2. If you have a job with varying hours, you might want to start the washing mashine when you're heading home. Then you're clothes are ready to be hung as you arrive and they aren't laying around for hours.

    3. If you own photovoltaic, you might want to time energy intense home appliances such as washing machines, dish washers etc. to a period of overproduction.

    Not saying, these issues are super important but there definitely are use cases for smart devices. However, I'd always recommend using a local / self-hosted rather than a cloud-based solution.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    I just want a washer that can work with the water softener to determine if there's enough soft water for a load or if it should request the softener regenerate first. So the smart home I'd like to have is one where sometimes it will advise against doing laundry until I've acquired more salt. All without any data leaving my home network, and if I'm accessing it remotely, it's by accessing my home server without any other computer needing to be involved.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    If smart options were actually smart you could do that.

    With the right devices I’m certain this can be done with HomeAssistant, but everyone who makes these appliances wants to wall you into their cloud ecosystem and harvest your activity data.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    Yeah, technologically, it's not only possible but even simple. It would come down to the washer knowing how much water it needs for a cycle and the softener knowing how much soft water it can provide, a means of getting that information from each of them, and then an if statement with a > check and a way to tell the softener to cycle and washer to start.

    I wonder when an appliance hacking community is going to rise up. I know that all that information is available to my water softener controller because I use it to manually check that before running the laundry or dishwasher. So a custom controller could add network capabilities. Then just give it an API so it can be queried and directed and the actual smart software can exist entirely on the server.

    Kinda makes me want to buy an extra softener to hack and see if it's as easy as I suspect it might be, but don't want to try it with my only one because I also suspect I'm wrong lol.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (2 children)

    I thought they go off of weight. How could they tell how dirty they are?

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  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago (5 children)
    1. I rarely carry my phone at home unless I'm also going to be outside.
    2. Washer can be variable on time and such (and mine's not even an IoT/"smart" one)
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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (4 children)

    Well if one's true then a smart washer doesn't help you anyway does it?

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (3 children)

    My phone can send alerts to my watch up to like 30m away, so I would still get notifications anywhere inside and many places outside my house.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (2 children)

    Well congrats I bet it gets alarms from your phone too then.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    Not that I've found, actually. Certainly not on any that I set by default. Also, if I don't know how long the washer will run, I can't just set an alarm for it, now can I?

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    Yeah brother get good. On both counts. I mean you know good and well you can get your alarm to sound from your phone to your watch. I can't sit here and let you pretend that's not possible. That's just sad.

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