My primary candidate is the Echo Plus. Not because it's as full featured as Insteon but because of its integration with Alexa. The smart home is many things to many people, but for me it is 3 primary functions:
- Integration with Alexa: Controlling lights with my voice is far more useful that I first imagined and has become my number one feature of my smart home.
- Device-based Scenes/Routines: Having multiple devices turn on the same light. For example, a switch on one side of the room and a keypad on another.
- Time-based Scenes/Routines: Having lights turn on at sunset or my garage fan start up in the afternoon heat has made things easier.
Just about any smart home solution can do 2 and 3 but for seamless integration with Alexa, the Echo Plus, I assume, is without peer. Sure my Hue lights and Insteon hub integrate with Alexa but it's not seamless and there are some annoying shortcomings.
So, time to pick up an Echo Plus right?
Not quite. I'm having this entire dilemma because my Insteon Hub went down and that effectively destroyed my entire smart home setup. So now I need to add another requirement for a smart home technology: recoverability.
4. Recoverability: The ability to recovery all devices, groups, routines, etc. from a failed hub.
So how does the Echo Plus stack up? This is where my review becomes unfair. I don't have an Echo Plus. I haven't purchased one, I haven't set one up, I haven't recovered from a failed one. That said, I've read the documentation and asked questions on the forums. So here's my best guess on how it stacks up to my needs:
Integration with Alexa
The purpose of an Echo Plus is to integrate your smart home devices with Alexa. I have seen not complaints about any shortcomings of the Echo Plus on this.
You can create a group with an Echo in it and control the devices in the group without having to state the group name. "Alexa, turn off the lights" instead of "Alexa, turn off the lights in the kitchen" for example (this works with Hue but not Insteon).
You can create a routine that does a specific action. For example, "Alexa, night lights" dims the lights to 5%.
The setup for groups and routines is simple and has a lot of possibilities. They are also not limited to the Echo Plus. I have groups and routines set up for my current smart home devices but not everything works as well as I would like.
I feel the best platform for integration with Alexa is the Echo Plus. For lack of a better term, the Echo Plus is Alexa.
Device-based Scenes/Routines
This is one of the areas where the Echo Plus is limited. It only supports a small number of devices and its controls are very limited. In fact, at present it seems focused on voice activated routines as opposed to device-based routines. It makes sense as it's a young product and I would expect Amazon to play to its strengths. Devices based routines can be more complicated than simple voice control.
Now, just because the Echo Plus doesn't support this at the moment, doesn't mean it won't in the future. That functionality could pop up at any time and, because it would be a software update, it won't require new hardware.
Time-based Scenes/Routines
Can the Echo Plus do time-based scenes? Yes and no.
You can create a routine to flip a switch at 3:30pm every day. That works fine. But advanced functionality isn't there yet. You can't flip a switch at sunrise or sunrise + 30 minutes. You can't have it play music on your Sonos at 8am on weekdays.
Recoverability
One of the advantages of the Echo Plus is that it will auto-detect your devices. When my Insteon Hub died, I had to manually re-register each device by its unique address/serial number. With an Echo Plus, it will re-discover all of your devices automatically (or at least it's supposed to).
This leaves the question of what happens to your groups and routines? I don't know. Since that configuration is shared across devices, you may just need to repopulate them. This, to me, would be acceptable. If I had to recreate all of my groups and routines, that would be a big disadvantage.
Conclusion
If you're setting up a simple smart home - maybe some Hue bulbs (the white ones as the color lights don't work) and a couple of switches, the Echo Plus will work great. I have a more complex setup (color Hue lights and device-based routines) so the Echo Plus is not a replacement. However, if the recoverability question is answered to my satisfaction and Amazon implements sunrise and sunset times it its routines, then I may pick one up to supplement my system with the idea that it may eventually be able to replace my system. For now, however, I'm going to be keeping an eye on it.
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