My brother and his wife got a house. He said it appeared to have a lot of technology installed by the last owner. I told him it was an interesting mystery for both of us. No matter what speakers or weird smart home junk you have installed, you can probably reuse them. But then he moved on. After weeks of calls to tech support and hours of digging through my surprisingly deep coat closet, I discovered that even though the old owner was gone, the digital ghost remained. It was lurking in the house's lights, shades, and thermostats, turning what was supposed to be a smart home into a very haunted one.
When my brother first emailed me about Ghostbusters, I didn't think we needed an IT equivalent. I've set up multiple smart homes, worked in the IT industry, and am currently surrounded by some of the smartest technology journalists. I have more smart home troubleshooting resources than the average person.
It didn't hurt to walk you through the steps to maximize the performance of your Google Nest Wifi system while it's still installed (including a complete factory reset). But then… trouble began. The window shades always open at 8am and close at sunset. My brother removed everything like the hub, but working with an internal clock he couldn't access, the shade continued to work as it was once programmed.
The Nest thermostat was similar. My camera was still there, and I refused to connect to my Nest account, so I turned on the heater in the middle of the night every night, burned the long-deceased homeowner, and scrambled to send my sister-in-law on her third flight. Ta. Stairs to fix it.
Almost every room had complicated buttons that claimed to control lights and shade and even fans. It was just guesswork as to which buttons would work and which would just flash and send a signal to devices that couldn't receive it.
We thought our little brother needed some inexpensive hubs to make things work better, so we sent him an old Samsung SmartThings hub with Zigbee and Z-Wave built in. The lights all worked fine, but the shades continued to work. The schedule was set by the deceased owner.
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Sometimes we wake up in the morning to a photo of a strange electronic device, nicely lit.Photo credit: Peter Krantz
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Sometimes we wake up in the morning to a photo of a strange electronic device, nicely lit.Photo credit: Peter Krantz
After sending a bunch of photos to Verge smart home critic Jennifer Pattison Toohey, she understood. (Especially after she raised the smart home bat signal on social media.) Apparently, my brother's smart home system was primarily built around the now-defunct Insteon. The company once gained popularity for building cool, complex smart homes around internet-connected hubs — think a step up from your Alexa or home assistant-powered home — Insteon only closed in 2021, shutting down the servers needed to run the hub.
But there was good news. In 2022, a fan bought and revived his Insteon and released a new hub that works with more modern devices, but older devices can still use the truck to continue powering the servers. Ta. Naturally, there were pitfalls. In order to make things work, not necessarily seamlessly but potentially an improvement over the status quo, my brother had his two options. Option 1 is to keep a stopped hub and use an older Java-based desktop app to run scripts. The silence on the phone line when I told him about this option suggested it wouldn't work (also ruining my plan to have him use Home Assistant).
Option two, proposed by smart home consultant Richard Gunther through Jen, was to spend $99.95 on the new hub and pay a monthly subscription. This suggestion was accepted, as was the suggestion for the phrase “Java-based.”
This is the current state of home ownership in 2024! People have been making their homes smarter for more than a decade using off-the-shelf components. Sometimes those homes are sold, and new homeowners find themselves in troubleshooting situations when they need to choose wall colors.
Some former homeowners offer onboarding to smart home systems for their homes, but most do what the man who once owned my brother's home did. They walk away and leave it as an adventure for the next person. I know because I've done it twice myself. I really hope the new renter of my old Brooklyn walkup appreciates all of his 2014 Philips Hue lights that I left installed in the basement.
Calculations are made on the move. It's a busy time and there's a lot to do. Do you want to spend half a day freeing all your Hue bulbs from their unpleasant and broken recessed light housings, or do you want to leave a potential gift for the next homeowner and start nesting in a new place? mosquito?
I and many others chose the second option. In some cases, that means he can get eight old but fully functional Hue bulbs. From time to time, they encounter ghosts from Insteon's past.