My brother and his wife bought a new house. He mentioned that it seemed like the previous owners had installed a lot of technology. I told him it was an exciting mystery for both of us. No matter what speakers and smart home gadgets were defined, we could reimplement them. But then he moved in. Slowly, over weeks of tech support calls and hours digging through deep coat closet mysteries, we learned that while the old owner had disappeared, his digital ghost remained. It lurked within the lights, shadows, and thermostat of the house, turning what was supposed to be a smart home into a very haunted one.
I never thought I'd have to be the IT counterpart to a haunted home controller when my brother messaged me about it for the first time. I've set up a number of smart homes, worked in IT, and am currently surrounded by some of the smartest technology journalists around. As resources for smart home problem-solving increase, I have more than the average person.
There was no trouble getting him to maximize the performance of the existing Google Nest Wifi system (including a full reset to factory settings). But then… the problems started. Lights that would always flicker on at 8 am and off at sunset. My brother disconnected what seemed like a hub, and yet, as they worked on some inaccessible internal clock, the hues continued as scheduled.
The Nest thermostat was no different. It refused to connect to their Nest account alongside the cameras left behind, meaning every midnight, the heat would blast, scaring off the long-gone homeowner and sending my aunt downstairs three flights of stairs to fix it.
Almost every room had elaborate-looking buttons that tried to control the lights, shadows, and sometimes even the fans – only it was a guess which buttons would work and which would just flicker, sending signals to devices that couldn't pick them up.
We thought my brother just needed a few cheap hubs to get things working better, so I sent him an old Samsung SmartThings hub, which had built-in Zigbee and Z-Wave. It made all the lights work as they should, but the shades continued to misbehave. A schedule set by an owner long gone.
1/3
Sending a plethora of images to the home smart controller Jenifer Pattison Tohey led to a better understanding. (Especially after she raised the smart home device's concerns on social media.) Apparently, my brother's smart home system was mostly built around the now-defunct Insteon. The company was once popular for building cool and complex smart homes around an internet-connected hub – think a step above homes that run on Alexa or Home Assistant – only Insteon closed in 2021 and shut down the servers that their hubs needed to function.
But there were good news. In 2022, enthusiasts bought Insteon and revived it, releasing a new hub that would work with more modern devices and still allow the old devices to operate the servers. Of course, there was a catch. To make things work – not necessarily smoothly, but maybe better than the current state – my brother had two options. The first option was to keep the faulty hub and try to utilize an old Java-based desktop application to run scripts. The dead silence on the phone when I mentioned this option raised the fact that it was not going to fly (and also canceled my plan to integrate it into Home Assistant).
The second option, proposed by smart home consultant Richard Gunther via Jen, was to shell out $99.95 for this new hub and then pay a monthly subscription. This proposal roughly translated to the one that includes the phrase "Java-based".
This is the state of homeownership in 2024! People have been making their homes smart with off-the-shelf parts for over a decade. Sometimes, they sell these homes, and the new homeowners find themselves stuck troubleshooting when they have to try to choose wall colors.
Some former homeowners will provide access to the smart home system of the house, but most do what the guy who used to own my brother's house did. They walk away and leave it as an adventure for the next person. I know I've done that twice myself now. I really hope the new tenants of my old walk-in closet in Brooklyn appreciate all the 2014 Philips Hue bulbs I left installed in the basement.
There's an account you do simultaneously. It's a hectic time, and there's a lot to do. Do you want to spend half the day freeing all these Hue bulbs from their hideous broken recessed light fixtures, or do you want to leave a potential gift to the next homeowner and start fresh in your new place?
I, and many others, chose the second option. Sometimes it means someone gets eight old but perfectly functional Hue bulbs. Sometimes they inherit the digital ghost of their Insteon's past.
