What actually fails in a smart home, and when.

The short version

Smart home hardware does not mostly fail the way people fear it will. The common worry is that the electronics stop working after the warranty expires. What we actually see is that most returns cluster in a small number of specific, boring, predictable places. The components people worry about least are often the ones that go first.

Failures by component

The sections below are the categories worth covering. Each needs the same four things: what goes wrong, roughly how often, at roughly what age, and what it costs to fix.

Touch panels

The most visible component and the one customers ask about most, because a dead panel is a dead board on a wall in the middle of the house.

Retrofit modules behind the plate

Hidden in the back box, so a failure here presents as one circuit that stops responding while everything else carries on.

Curtain motors

Mechanical rather than electronic, which makes them a different kind of risk. Wear rather than sudden death.

Water tank controllers and sensors

Sitting on a Jaipur terrace, exposed to 45°C summers, monsoon, and dust, doing the least glamorous job in the house.

Locks, cameras and door phones

The category where a failure has the highest consequence, because it can leave somebody outside their own house.

The failures that are not hardware

A meaningful share of what gets reported as a fault is not a broken component at all. A router gets replaced and the Wi-Fi password changes. A brand pushes a firmware update that changes how something behaves. Somebody removes an app while clearing space on a phone. A cloud account gets closed.

These matter because they are the failures a standards-based system survives and a proprietary one often does not. That is the practical argument for leading with Matter and Zigbee rather than a brand's own ecosystem.

What we would not buy

The section that makes this page worth reading, and the one that is uncomfortable to write.

What this means before you buy

Three things follow from all of the above, and they are the reason we design the way we do.

Every wall switch keeps working. A component failure should cost you the smart behaviour, not the light. This is why we will not sell a house where one tablet on one wall is the only way to turn something on.

Standards first, proprietary named as proprietary. Matter and Zigbee wherever a good product exists at a sane price, so a dead brand costs you one device rather than the house. Where we specify something proprietary, it says so on your design sheet along with what happens if that company disappears.

Repairable locally beats replaceable remotely. A component we can fix on a bench in Jaipur in days is worth more to you than one that is marginally cheaper and has to be couriered to another state. How the service bench works