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Walzmyn [soylentnews.org] writes:

We are in the very early stages of building a new house and I would like to incorporate "Smart Home Tech" into the house.

I've been doing a little research on the subject and it will quickly make your eyes bleed. Everyone from Amazon [amazon.com] to Samsung [samsung.com] and dozens more I've never heard of [smarthome.com] are getting in on the new industry. And I'm not sure I trust any of them.

The primary lessons I've learned thus far is that this stuff is expensive, "interoperability" is a foreign word said companies want nothing to do with, and security is a late afterthought at best.

My questions to the community are: does anybody have experience with smart home tech they could share with the rest of us? Is there a specific system that works better than others? Is there a good non-biased place a novice could go to properly educate themselves on the in/outs and comparisons of the competing technologies? And is any of this secure enough to actually use or should we all run away?

For the sake of the community, I would like to open the floor to pretty much anything that is "smart tech". Personally, I'm interested in lights and door locks. I'd love to be able to hit one button as I left the house and lock all the doors and kill all the lights. However, I'd be nice if all systems were linked together. Google's Nest [nest.com] seems to be trying to accomplish a unified control center for all things smart tech, (Kwikset makes a bluetooth door lock [kwikset.com] that links to Nest, neither of which seem like a good idea to me). But the (in)security of letting Google in my home scares the crap out of me [soylentnews.org].

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