My Smart Home Year in Review: Best and Worst Purchases of 2024
It is December, which means it is time for my annual tradition of looking back at every smart home purchase I made this year and being honest about what was worth the money and what was not. I tracked every device I bought in 2024, including the price paid and how much I actually use it now. The results are enlightening and, in a few cases, embarrassing. Here is the full accounting.
Best Purchase: Aqara FP2 Presence Sensor ($55)
This is not close. The Aqara FP2 millimeter-wave presence sensor has been the single most impactful smart home purchase I have made in years, not just in 2024. Unlike traditional motion sensors that detect movement, the FP2 detects presence — it knows you are in a room even if you are sitting perfectly still reading a book. This fixed the number one frustration I had with my smart home: lights turning off while I was sitting on the couch because the motion sensor could not tell I was still there.
I have three of them now (I kept buying more after the first one impressed me). One in the living room, one in my office, and one in the kitchen. The office one is the most useful — it keeps my lights on while I am working at my desk and turns them off within 30 seconds of me leaving the room. It also supports zone detection, so I have different automations for when I am at my desk versus on the office couch. At $55 each, they are not cheap for a sensor, but the automation improvement they enable is worth every dollar.
Best Value Purchase: Sonoff SNZB-02D Temperature/Humidity Sensors ($9 each)
I bought six of these little Zigbee temperature and humidity sensors and scattered them throughout the house. They are tiny, run on a CR2032 battery for about a year, and report accurate temperature and humidity data to Home Assistant. Having per-room temperature data transformed my thermostat automations — instead of one temperature reading from the hallway thermostat, I now have data from every room and can make smart decisions about which rooms need heating or cooling.
At $9 each, they are almost disposable. If one fails, I replace it without thinking twice. The data they provide — especially the humidity readings for managing indoor air quality in winter — is worth far more than the cost. These are the kind of boring, invisible devices that make a smart home actually smart.
Most Overhyped: SwitchBot Curtain 3 ($90)
I wanted to love the SwitchBot Curtain 3. Automated curtains sound amazing in theory — open them with the sunrise, close them at sunset, include them in scenes. And the SwitchBot Curtain does work; it physically opens and closes my curtains on schedule. But the execution has ongoing annoyances that I never fully solved. The motor is louder than I expected. Not wake-you-up loud, but noticeable-from-the-next-room loud. The calibration drifts over time, so the curtains do not fully open or close without periodic recalibration. And the device occasionally falls off the curtain rod, requiring me to re-mount it.
I still use it, but it has not been the seamless experience I anticipated. The Ikea FYRTUR smart blinds in my bedroom (which I bought in 2023) are a much better automated window covering solution, but they require replacing your existing blinds rather than retrofitting onto existing curtains. If I were doing it again, I would have bought FYRTUR blinds for the living room instead of trying to automate existing curtains with SwitchBot.
Biggest Waste: Smart Plug Energy Monitor Pack ($45)
I bought a four-pack of energy monitoring smart plugs with the intention of tracking energy usage on major appliances — the TV entertainment center, the office setup, the washing machine, and the dryer. The plan was to create an energy dashboard and find opportunities to reduce my electricity bill. What actually happened: I set them up, looked at the energy data for about two weeks, found that my TV setup uses about $4/month and my office uses about $6/month, said "huh, interesting," and never looked at the data again.
The energy monitoring plugs are still installed, but the monitoring feature is completely unused. They function as regular smart plugs now. The lesson: energy monitoring sounds useful in theory, but unless you have a specific goal (reducing a high electricity bill, tracking solar production, etc.), the data is interesting for about a week and then irrelevant. Save the $15-20 premium per plug and buy regular smart plugs instead.
Surprise Hit: Wireless CarPlay Adapter ($70)
This is not technically a smart home device, but it connects to my smart home through my phone, so I am counting it. A wireless CarPlay adapter (I bought the Carlinkit 5.0) lets me use CarPlay without plugging in my phone. Why is this relevant to smart home? Because it means I can trigger "I'm leaving" and "I'm arriving" automations through geofencing without having to remember to plug in my phone for CarPlay. The geofence triggers consistently when my phone is connected wirelessly, which was not always the case when I would forget to plug it in and my phone would not connect to CarPlay at all.
The indirect benefit to my smart home has been more reliable presence-based automations. Lights turn on when I arrive home, the thermostat adjusts when I leave, the garage door opens when I am in the driveway — all of these work more consistently because my phone is always connected and sharing location. A $70 adapter improving the reliability of $2,000 worth of smart home automations was an unexpected return on investment.
The Numbers
Total smart home spending in 2024: approximately $680. That is down from about $1,100 in 2023 and way down from the $1,800 I spent in my first year of building the system. The spending curve is flattening as my setup matures — most purchases this year were additions or replacements rather than building core infrastructure.
Devices I removed from my setup in 2024: three Wyze Cam v2 cameras (replaced with Reolink for local storage), two aging Zigbee smart plugs that kept falling off the network, and one Google Nest Mini that I never used after switching to Apple Home and Alexa.
Devices I use daily: the Aqara presence sensors, the Ecobee thermostat, the August smart lock, two Echo speakers, the bedroom smart blinds, the circadian lighting automation (which runs on 14 tunable white bulbs throughout the house), and the Reolink camera system. These are the devices that have earned their permanent place and genuinely improve daily life. Everything else is nice to have but not essential.
What I Am Planning for 2025
My 2025 smart home priority list is short: replace the remaining Zigbee motion sensors with millimeter-wave presence sensors, add a whole-home energy monitor (the Emporia Vue 2) to get real energy data instead of the plug-level monitoring that I never used, and invest in better outdoor lighting automation for the yard. I am also cautiously optimistic about Matter improving enough that I can simplify my hub situation — right now I run both Home Assistant and Hubitat, and I would love to consolidate to just Home Assistant with Matter handling the device communication.
The smart home hobby has shifted for me from "buy new shiny devices" to "optimize and maintain what I have." That is probably a sign of maturity in the hobby, or maybe I am just running out of things to automate. Either way, 2024 was a good year for my smart home — fewer purchases, better choices, and a setup that runs reliably enough that I forget it is there most days. Which, honestly, is the whole point.