The clocks change at the beginning of November, and nearly every device in your house handles updating the time on its own. As the clocks fall back, the sun sets earlier and the days get shorter. The schedules you built around daylight, including smart routines, now hit at the wrong hour.
Before time changes next week, here’s DFN’s list of things to do to get your smart home ready to fall back.
Schedule by Sunset
Let’s say sometime last summer you set your porch light to turn on at 6 p.m., around dusk. As the cooler months loom, 6 p.m. will already be an hour into full dark. You can move the light’s schedule to 5 p.m., and then in March you’d be wrong again in the other direction.
Instead of scheduling your light routine on the clock, consider setting it to the sun.
Alexa, Google Home, Apple Home, Ring, Kasa, and Wyze all let you trigger a schedule on sunset or sunrise. You can add an offset too, like thirty minutes before sunset. The device looks up the real sunset for your location and shifts itself by a minute or two every day. Set it once and you never think about it again, this year or any year after.
This schedule is ideal for porch and entry lights, driveway, yard, shop and barn, coop doors, and anything else meant to be on when you get home or off in the morning.
The Things That Don’t Fix Themselves
Most of your tech should update its own clock, but a few things still need some manual help.
Walk through the older programmable thermostat, the microwave and the oven, irrigation controllers, generator exercise timer, water heater timer, any mechanical light timers, and your alarm panel just to be sure everything is on the right schedule.
If you have a camera system that records to a DVR or NVR box, check its clock. The timestamp on footage matters, particularly on the day you have to hand it to an insurance adjuster or a deputy.
While you’re in the settings, check the time zone and the location on your smart devices. A device that doesn’t know where it is guesses at sunset, and it likely guesses wrong. This kind of missed location can trip people up after a factory reset or a move, and it explains why a device may not update its clock correctly after time changes.
Charge Doorbells and Outdoor Cameras
Batteries don’t perform optimally, or at all, in extreme temperatures. Now is the time to inspect them for any damage, then charge or replace before colder temperatures drain them.
Google states that the battery in a Nest camera or doorbell cannot charge at 32 degrees or below. The device keeps working down to around 4 below zero, but it runs on whatever charge it already has and never refills. Close to that lower limit, Google says the battery may deliver less than half the life it gives in warm weather. The app shows “Charging paused.”
Ring notes similar behavior, with an operating range of 4 below to 122 degrees, and recommends bringing the device inside to charge with a USB cable instead of waiting on a solar panel.
Charge everything outside to full while it’s still above freezing, and plan on carrying the doorbell indoors to charge at least once this winter. If you can run power to a camera or doorbell instead of relying on a battery, run the wiring before the ground freezes.
Prep Your Home Network
Winter is the most active stretch of the year for a home network. Everyone is inside more during daytime hours, guests show up for the holidays, and one snow day puts every device in the house online at the same time.
Late October is the time to sort that out, not the Wednesday before Thanksgiving when guests are arriving. Ask yourself whether the router sits in a spot that gives signal to every room. If the room where everybody gathers has always been a weak spot, or if a guest room that will suddenly be in use isn’t getting a WiFi signal, fix it now.
Holiday decorating changes your WiFi field more than you’d expect, between a large tree, metallic garland, and a common move of relocating the router to make room for all of it. Equipment living in an unheated garage or in the chilly basement has a harder winter than equipment in a closet, mostly because cold electronics collect moisture as they warm up.
Help Us Help You
As the weather turns bleary and you’re working to keep driveways clear, we ask that you try not to pile snow against the pedestal in your yard. The day a technician needs to reach it is usually the day the weather is at its worst.
If you know where your pedestal sits, mark it before the first snow so that plows and snowblowers don’t accidentally run them over. A snow day at home with the kids in an arctic blast is not the day to lose service.
As the time falls back and the days grow cooler, DFN has all the bandwidth you need to keep the streams going all winter long.