Give All Your Smart Home Gadgets Unique Names, Even Across Different Services

Author: Eric Ravenscraft / Source: reviewgeek.com

Most smart home gadgets like Hue or Nest will make you use unique names within their service. However, if you want to save yourself a lot of trouble, make sure they’re unique across everything you own.

How I Got a Cold, Dark House With a Simple, Dumb Mistake

Giving every smart gadget you own a unique name might sound like an obvious tip.

That still didn’t prevent me from screwing it up when I moved into a new place this month. First, I set up some Philips Hue lights. I added three in each room, naming them Living Room 1, 2, and 3, and likewise for the bedroom. Then, I went to add them to Google Home. Where, once again, I created rooms to put all these devices in. Google even helpfully auto-detected which rooms my lights should go in, based on their names.

Then, a couple days later, I set up my Nest Thermostats. I gave them unique but meaningful names in the app: Bedroom, and Living Room, to correspond to the rooms they’re in. Again, I went into the Google Home app and made sure the Nest skill was linked properly and all of the devices were in their proper room. It was an easy, breezy set up and none of the apps I used gave me any kind of error at all!

Then I started noticing problems.

First, my lights weren’t working properly. If I controlled them through the app, everything worked great. I could use Google to change the colors just fine. I was even able to turn the lights off, but only if I said, “Hey Google, set living room to 0%.” Simply saying “Turn off living room” did nothing. Google didn’t throw an error or anything. It just said “You got it!” cheerfully, while my lights stayed on. I’ve occasionally had connectivity problems with Philips Hue, so I assumed that was the case.

I also had some struggles with the Nest Thermostat. I’d already had to struggle to erase the previous owner’s learned schedule. And yet, after clearing it out and without making any changes to my thermostat, I woke…

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