We bought our house in 2021. I had spent the previous decade-plus living in apartments, where the porch light situation was very simple. There was no porch, and there was no light. Now I had both, and I was bad at them.

The pattern went like this. I’d be heading upstairs to bed and notice through the front window that the porch was completely dark. Forgot to turn it on. Again. Or I’d work from home through the morning, walk out around noon to grab the mail, and see both porch sconces still glowing in broad daylight. Forgot to turn it off. Again.

You’d think after the third or fourth time you’d just remember. You would be wrong about me.

So I did what any reasonable person does when they discover they’re bad at being a person. I tried to outsource it to a computer.

What I knew about smart homes (nothing)

In 2021 I knew the phrase “home automation” the way I knew the phrase “macroeconomic policy.” It existed. Smarter people were doing it. I was not one of those people.

I work in digital advertising. I am, professionally, the reason your phone shows you ads. So when I tell you that one of the things that pulled me toward this hobby was blocking ads on my home network, you can decide for yourself whether that’s irony, hypocrisy, or just a guy who wants a quiet dinner.

The other thing pulling me in was the front door. My parents had moved fifteen minutes away. We had a baby and would soon have a nanny. I kept thinking how nice it would be to have a code on the lock. Give the nanny her own four digits, give my mom hers, never have to copy a key again. And if I ever locked myself out, just open the thing from my phone.

So I started researching smart locks. That led me to Schlage. Schlage led me to a thing called Z-Wave. Z-Wave led me down a hole I have not yet climbed out of.

Z-Wave vs. everything else

If you’ve never tried to buy a smart light switch, here’s what you need to know. There are roughly seven different ways your switch can talk to your house, and none of them are obviously correct. The big ones are Wi-Fi, Zigbee, and Z-Wave. (Matter and Thread were just starting to be a thing in 2021. Today they would have changed this story. They didn’t.)

I read what I could. The arguments I latched onto, fairly or not:

Wi-Fi switches were the easiest to set up but used more power and were one more device on a network I was already trying to keep small and secure. Working in advertising had made me allergic to anything that wanted to phone home constantly.
Zigbee was solid but felt like the second-place option in everything I read.
Z-Wave was supposedly the most efficient, ran on its own frequency band so it wasn’t fighting Wi-Fi, and (critically) was what the Schlage lock I already wanted also used.

That last part sealed it. One protocol, one hub, both devices on the same network. I bought the lock first. Then I bought the switches.

The Home Assistant detour (read: disaster)

Around the same time I’d been reading about a Raspberry Pi 4. Credit-card-sized computer, costs about $50, can do a hundred different things. One of those things, depending on which Reddit thread you fell into, was running an open-source home automation platform called Home Assistant. The same Pi could also run a thing called Pi-hole, which blocks ads at the network level for every device in your house.

So now my plan was: Pi 4, Z-Wave USB stick, Home Assistant, ads blocked, lock connected, switches connected, eternal glory.

The Pi showed up. I plugged it in. I installed Home Assistant. I plugged in the Z-Wave stick. I tried to add the lock.

Home Assistant in 2021 was, I want to be charitable here, aggressively configurable. There were settings for things I didn’t know my devices were even capable of doing. I’m pretty sure at one point it asked me what wattage I wanted my lock to draw, which is not a question my lock should ever have been asked.

I was deep in some authentication flow between Home Assistant and the Schlage lock, setting some kind of pairing password I think, when the whole thing seized up. I couldn’t get back into Home Assistant. The lock wouldn’t pair. I tried to reset things and made it worse. The lock ended up needing to be replaced, and Lowe’s was great about it.

I sat there with a working Pi, a non-working lock, an unhelpful piece of software, and the slowly dawning realization that I was in over my head.

SmartThings to the rescue

Back to Reddit. Someone mentioned Samsung SmartThings. A hub you plug in, an app you download, a setup process that did not require you to know what wattage anything draws. I bought one. The model was an Aeotec-branded SmartThings hub, which Samsung had sort of weirdly outsourced to a third party. (As of writing this, the exact unit I bought doesn’t seem to be sold anymore. The newer ones do the same thing.)

The new lock paired in under five minutes. The hub said “found a Schlage Door Lock,” I named it, done. When the Z-Wave switches arrived, same thing. Pair, name, schedule. I felt like a wizard. I was not a wizard. SmartThings was just designed for me, and Home Assistant was designed for someone with significantly more patience.

Installation day

Here is the part of the story you are probably here for.

When you walk into our house, immediately to the left of the door is the garage entrance, and on the wall there are two switches sitting in the same plate. The left one runs the front porch lights. The right one runs the chandelier above the entryway stairs.

I’d watched a couple of YouTube videos about how to swap a light switch. The instructions were the same in every one. Turn on the light, go to the breaker box, flip the breaker for that circuit, come back, confirm the light is off. So I did exactly that. Porch light on, breaker off, porch light off. Confirmed. Safe.

I started disassembling the old switch. Wires came out, switch came out. I attached the wires to the new Z-Wave switch. Now I just had to push the whole thing back into the wall box, which (anyone who’s ever installed a switch knows) is always slightly too small for the new switch and the wires both. I was wedging it in, fingers spread, trying to fold the wires into the box so the switch could sit flush.

My middle finger on my right hand brushed the side of the other switch. The chandelier switch. The one I had not turned off. The one I had no reason to think wasn’t on the same circuit.

What happened next happened faster than thought. I jumped. I yelled, not a word, just a sound, somewhere between a yelp and a screech. From the kitchen my wife yelled back, “what happened?” I shouted, “I just electrocuted myself!” She laughed. (Reader, in fairness to her, it was kind of funny.)

I sat down on the entry tile for a minute with my finger throbbing, and the realization came in slowly. Nobody told me that two switches sharing one wall plate could be on two different breakers. The chandelier and the porch light are right next to each other. They serve adjacent areas of the same room. Why are they on separate circuits?

This is one of those things about owning a house that nobody warns you about. The previous owner (or the original builder, or somebody) made a decision twenty years ago that you are now finding out about with your fingertip.

Did it work?

Yes. After all that, the switch went in, paired with SmartThings on the first try, and started doing exactly what I wanted. On at sunset, off at sunrise, automatically adjusting through the year. The Schlage lock has been running on the same hub since 2021 with no real issues. We’ve given codes to the nanny, my parents, contractors. We’ve never been locked out. The porch lights have not once been on at noon. They have not once been off at 11pm.

The whole system has been remarkably boring, which is the highest praise you can give a smart home setup. The only time it complains is when our internet drops, and even then, SmartThings reconnects on its own as soon as the internet comes back. The schedule survives the downtime.

What I’d do differently

Honestly? Not much. The 2021-version-of-me made a couple of decent calls (Z-Wave, Schlage, eventually SmartThings) and one bad call (trying to start with Home Assistant) and one truly stupid call (assuming the two switches in one box shared a breaker).

If I were starting today, in 2026, I might lean toward Matter-over-Thread devices instead of Z-Wave. The protocol war has shifted. But Z-Wave still works, my devices still work, and “it works and I haven’t thought about it in four years” is a hell of an endorsement.

The one thing I’d absolutely do differently: flip every breaker in the box, not just the one you think you need. Or use a non-contact voltage tester. They cost twelve dollars. The previous owner of this house did not consult me when wiring decisions were made, and I have to assume yours didn’t either.

Did it work? The verdict

Yes, mostly. Lights work. Lock works. Marriage survived. Middle finger fully recovered.

I never did get Home Assistant working that first time. But (and this is a story for another post) Claude and I rebuilt it on a fresh Pi a few months ago to do something much more interesting than a porch light. More on that soon.

For now, if you’re a new homeowner thinking about your first smart switch, my advice is start simple. Get a hub that does the thinking for you. Buy one device. Get it working. Buy the second device only after the first one has been boring for a month. And please, for the love of god, turn off both breakers.

Joe out.