Keeping The “Home” In Smart Home

Nexia Smart Home Control System

- Darryl Wilkinson

I WAS BEGINNING TO WORRY that we’d run out of acronyms. After all, what would we do if we had to speak or write actual words instead of just using three- or four-letter shorthand? Saying “do-it-yourself” is so much more time-consuming than “DIY.” Thank goodness there’s a new acronym making the rounds: DIFM, which stands for do-it-for me. Although people have always wanted to have things done for them, the appearance of the acronym DIFM is the result of the wicked hangover that the DIY smart-home industry is suffering, after a couple of years when rapacious startup enthusiasm sucked all of the rational oxygen out of the air. The fact is that there are plenty of rooms in the smart home to accommodate the yourselfers, the for-me-ers, and the dedicated custom installers.

The smart home platform from Nexia, the company whose products we’re reviewing here, is interesting for a variety of reasons—some of which you might think would be deal killers. To begin, there’s the $9.99/month subscription fee that’s required to keep the system running—and that’s after you’ve bought the hardware. (Thankfully, there’s no long-term contract, so you’re not screwed for a year or more if you don’t like the system.) Perhaps the most interesting bit is that Nexia isn’t the latest smart home system-of-the-week. Its roots go back to 2009 when the nascent version of the platform was introduced as Schlage LiNK. (It was rebranded after Schlage, the lock company, was spun off by Ingersoll Rand, the parent company, which now owns Nexia.) Nexia is also intriguing because it’s uniquely positioned to appeal to both DIYers and DIFMers, but I’ll get to that in a bit.

Bridge Over the River Smart Home