Tech Shortcuts for Life
Use Home Automation to Solve Your Annoying Lamp Problem
How to start simple in your smart home
Tech Shortcuts for Life is a weekly column from Thomas Smith on Debugger exploring the apps, automations, gadgets, and other tech tricks that can make your life more efficient.
Late last year, I bought a house that was built in the 1980s. This was apparently a time when people enjoyed turning on and off room lamps one at a time. My living room is large, airy, and totally devoid of overhead lighting. It has six electrical outlets, but none of these are wired together or controlled by wall switches. I placed six lamps around the room, and as a result of this unfortunate wiring choice, they all have to be turned on and off independently. For our first few months in the house, any time my family wanted to hang out in the living room, it prompted a ritual that made me feel like a Victorian lamplighter from a Charles Dickens novel.
I’d scurry around the room — which is about the size of my first Bay Area apartment — frantically switching on all six of our lamps in a mad shuffle. By the time I finished, my kids would usually have left the room to do something else. So I’d either repeat the whole process in reverse or figure “Screw it, our energy is green anyway" and leave all…
