In a world of me-first smart home gear, can smarthubs make them all play nice?

“Home automation" has become ho-hum. It’s a catchall term describing the idea of a futuristic, connected home; what’s essentially an array of Internet-enabled home devices hopefully working in harmony. Current home automation appliances employ wireless protocols so that they can all be operated by a single remote—or, more commonly, smartphone app. So many so-called “smart” devices come out every month, these days you can even smarten up your fireplace.

However, there’s a dirty little secret to all this modern intelligence—individual smart devices do not get along with each other.

Each device in this scenario—each light bulb, motion sensor, wall plug, thermostat, speaker system, and more—ships with its own separate means of triggering, app or otherwise. By default, you’re better off walking to your various devices than picking through a glut of icons (and worse, loading times) on your smartphone. I received a box full of these devices, along with the seemingly nightmarish demand to automate this old house.

Given the home automation landscape, this shipment was less about each individual device and more about the hubs that promised to make them all work in unison. With the right home automation hub, you can manage your entire house without even pulling your phone out of your pocket (for a grand total of $500 or less, to boot). Toggle door locks, turn on devices, and monitor home activity in one fell swoop, either by tapping an associated, catch-all app or by merely returning to your house with a GPS-enabled device. Imagine all of your lamps turning on as your car broaches the driveway; who needs a happily barking dog these days?

I spent nearly two weeks with my small army of smart devices connected to two wireless hubs known as Revolv and SmartThings. After testing the limits of home automation at my fingertips, I didn’t come out on the other end of this experiment feeling forever changed. But it wasn’t an abrasive, obnoxious, always-fretting-with-my-phone experience either. Allow me to cast a little app-powered light on the current world of our future homes.

So many devices, so many apps

The first thing I received was a Nest thermostat, which made my assignment easy to explain to tech outsiders. The round, glossy device has proven the automation industry’s Trojan horse, thanks in part to satisfied reviews and sexy, simple design.

Nest offers an ideal test case for our newly connected world, too. How many times have you wished you had more thermostat flexibility outside of a daily temperature timer? Our long-ago review already lauded that on-the-go functionality.

But my total automation haul eventually outpaced a single, fancy thermostat. In all, I received an LED light bulb with dimming support; two types of wall outlets, each employing a different wireless protocol; two GPS-enabled keyfobs; a motion sensor; a moisture/leak sensor; and two hubs, which I later used to make them play nice with each other.

Some of these devices, like Nest and the Belkin Wemo power outlet, have their own dedicated smartphone apps. The former offers a ton of customization and data options, but the latter is, quite frankly, a mess to use. I plugged a lamp into a Belkin Wemo, then loaded the Wemo app on my Samsung Galaxy S3, which instructed me to turn on my phone’s Wi-Fi and connect to a “Wemo”-themed network. By doing this, I could tell my Wemo to talk to my actual Internet router. And from there, I’d be able to turn the socket (and thus, my lamp) on and off wirelessly. It was a weird not-quite handshake between devices.

It proved doubly bad in my case, because Samsung handsets won’t maintain a Wi-Fi connection if they don’t log onto the Internet. I had to disable mobile data just to get to the next step, which confused the Wemo app as it tried to complete the setup process. Thirty minutes of trial and error later, I had gotten nowhere. I had to use an iPhone to complete the setup, at which point the Wemo worked fine—and even loaded on my Galaxy S3 after the fact. Weird.

This is the kind of experience that home automation advocates fear when trying to convince average Joes and Janes to connect their gizmos to the Internet. But for that crowd, there is the hope of Revolv.

Revolv: Set 'em and forget 'em

The Revolv home automation hub doesn't make a good first impression. Quite frankly, it looks like the cheap, shiny younger cousin of a Roomba. It’s largely made of a semi-translucent plastic shell atop a red plastic base, rounded into a teardrop shape. It features one small plug to a wall outlet. Nothing about its looks scream “my home is from the future,” which would be forgivable if the device was either priced less than $299 or designed to blend into your home entertainment system.

The setup instructions are brief. Plug Revolv in, then load an official app—currently iPhone only, coming to Android “soon”—which then asks you to place your iPhone face-down on the Revolv’s top. At this point, your phone’s screen will flash a pattern, which seeps through the plastic top of the hardware. After roughly 15 seconds, phone and hub are paired, and you can begin loading your local Wi-Fi login and other info via the app. Lo-fi, certainly, but a lot quicker than that Wemo nonsense.

As a hub, Revolv is useless by itself. Rather, it’s a companion for all of the other Internet-enabled devices you might have just purchased, from a Belkin Wemo to a Nest to an Insteon lightbulb, along with almost all other devices that work with Wi-Fi, Insteon, or Z-Wave protocols. Revolv promises to support more such protocols in the near future, including Zigbee, but that promise has lingered for months.

In very, very good news, Revolv loves making friends. It immediately found my newly installed Wemo and Nest and did all of the legwork on its own end to enable control of both. It partnered up to a Z-Wave wall outlet as well. I had to flick an Insteon bulb on and off over a span of 10 minutes before the Revolv noticed it, but at that point, Revolv took over its control, too. From there, you can set all kinds of rules about how to turn your things on and off.

On the simplest level, you can trigger lights, power outlets, and other compatible equipment whenever and wherever you want. (If you’re wondering, yes, I absolutely installed Revolv without telling my housemate. I began playing with the living room’s lights when he was home alone on the first night of testing, and he very nearly soiled himself. This alone may be worth the price of entry for some people.)

Additionally, each device can have its own power-on and power-off schedules, or you can group devices together to turn on and off with a single tap. If you’d like to add your GPS coordinates or address to the app, then you can also assign rules to whenever your smartphone leaves or enters your house. Need some theme music whenever you get home? Hook up a Sonos player!

Native apps play nice with Revolv, by the way, so if you want to revert to a device’s original app at any point then go ahead. In particular, Revolv’s implementation of Nest is pretty boring—nothing more than a temperature gauge, with no full-fledged way to manage “away” states or other specific features—but it’s still nice to have Nest embedded within the greater suite of Revolv-compatible gadgets. That’s one less tap when you want to check your home temperature or adjust the thermostat on the fly.

Over my two-week span, the only device connected to Revolv to give me any trouble was the Insteon LED light bulb, which didn’t respond to the app’s triggers on three separate occasions. Powering Revolv off and on fixed that. Funnily enough, that light bulb is the pack-in bonus when purchasing Revolv from its official store for $299. That’s quite a bit of cash for something that solely exists to unify a bunch of home automation devices; essentially, Revolv exists to make the process easier for people who’ve already started putting together their house of the future in a piecemeal manner.

Revolv: The good

• Device compatibility and triggering, whether by GPS or manually, worked without a hitch. This truly is the catchall home automation hub for homeowners who already own a variety of smart devices.

The bad

• If you don't use an iPhone, you'll be stuck waiting for Android compatibility.
• You'll want a wide variety of devices to add value to your Revolv investment; otherwise, that's a lot of money to control merely two or three switches in your home.

The ugly

• The hub itself. A $300 product shouldn't resemble a plastic doorstop from a dollar store.