When considering the different objects in your life that could benefit from a WiFi connection, you’d likely start off with things like your smartphone, laptop, and maybe your TV. Less likely choices might be things like towel, banana, or sofa — although I was surprised to learn about the Buttkicker Wireless Couch Kit. The number of everyday objects where engineers decide to inject wireless capability seems to be increasing daily. And even though I’m a tech nerd, I’m decidedly not on board. I have reasons.
We just moved into our new home in March of 2024. It’s our first purchased home after renting for the last 32 years of our marriage (go ahead and fill in your Hacker Bingo card for that one). You can imagine it’s fairly significant for us. The house came equipped with the typical things you would expect in our modern age; indoor plumbing, a roof, flooring, electricity. Good stuff to have. It also included some bonus items, like a refrigerator, microwave, stove/oven, washer/dryer, and automatic garage door opener. There’s nothing particularly interesting about any of the appliances, except that the range and garage door opener are WiFi-enabled.
As we got settled, we set about figuring out how the appliances worked. When we open the refrigerator door, a light comes on. It keeps things cold. Yay! Same with the microwave, it does what we expected. Not a lot to figure out there. The range, however, is a whole different ballgame. Not only are there no knobs or switches for the oven, it comes equipped with an LED console that I imagine is similar to the cockpit of a 737-MAX — and I’m just as dubious about this system as the FAA is about the MAX. It also has WiFi. The more I think about that feature, the more I wonder, “Wi?”
I started to walk myself through all the scenarios where we would need to control the oven from a distance. And even as I write, “control the oven from a distance,” it sounds more like a bombing plot than an aid to cooking.
First, let’s talk about the necessity of remotely controlling the oven from my phone. Our home is under 2,000 square feet. From the farthest room away from the kitchen, it takes about 20 seconds to get to the range (yes, I timed it, and yes I am that person). It takes roughly the same amount of time for me to grab my readers (grumble), open/unlock my phone, find, and open an app. In terms of time savings, we’re talking about a few seconds. WiFi is not the time saver the LG marketing people seem to think it is.
But let’s pretend we wanted the convenience of controlling the oven when we’re not at home. What if we were out somewhere and wondered if we had turned the oven off? Wouldn’t it be comforting to know that we could turn it off from our seats at Wrigley Field? In full transparency, we used to have a Nest thermostat and I enjoyed the convenience of adjusting the temperature when we weren’t home. The odd (stupid?) thing about using that feature is that 90% of the time I used it, our older kids were at home and I could have just texted them to adjust it. Similarly, we could have our neighbor pop in and turn off the oven. Obviously, not everyone has neighbors they want inside their house — whether they’re home or not. That just happened to be a feature that also came with our house. Either way, I can’t think of an instance in our entire married life where we forgot to turn off the oven when leaving the house.
For a third example, let’s talk about baking. My wife is a baker. Not like a Jiffy corn muffin box baker, like an accomplished bread-from-scratch baker. So there are several steps in her process of baking bread. There’s proofing the dough, which entails letting it rise in a bowl at a temperature no warmer than the oven light. Sometimes there’s a second rise, and then there’s the actual baking. This all requires a fair amount of attention. We might be able to run up to the grocery store during proofing or rising, but otherwise the baking process is very much eyes-on. In all of this, I can’t imagine how controlling the oven remotely would be effective. Unless we get free smells through our smartphones, it doesn’t seem advantageous.
To sum up, I can’t imagine a single scenario where remotely controlling our oven makes life any easier.
Our garage door opener is another device with unnecessary WiFi capability. Again, it came with the house and the previous owners left instructions on how to set it up. The day we closed I decided to download the app and see how it worked, purely out of curiosity (see: tech nerd). It turns out I have to reset it and scan a QR code on the back of the opener. It was too high for me to see, and our moving truck hadn’t arrived yet, so no ladder. The opener came with two remotes anyway, so the WiFi could wait. I moved on to more important projects, like how to unlock the oven console.
Since then, I’ve been thinking about different scenarios where we would need to use WiFi and an app to open the garage door. If we’re home, we can either use a remote or go inside the garage and press the button. If we’re pulling into the driveway, we can use the remote from inside the car. Potentially, we could leave the house and forget to close the garage door. I deem that highly unlikely, considering we would have been looking at the door as we pulled out of the driveway. I couldn’t think of any real-world scenarios where we would need WiFi. So I started getting creative and thought up some other potential WiFi-necessary garage door situations:
- What if we’re not home and a neighbor needs to borrow a handsaw for an emergency backyard amputation?
- What if there’s a zombie apocalypse, we’re not home, and a friend needs to retreat to our garage for safety?
- What if we get an alert that Kool-Aid Man is running around town and we’re not home? It sure would be nice to have the garage door up to avoid any “Oh yeah!’s.”
Another aspect of all this WiFi-enabled lunacy is cybersecurity. What if someone hacks our network and decides that it would be fun to turn our oven up to 600° F? Or they open up our garage to pilfer our handsaw — or worse, our holiday decorations?
My garage door opener needs WiFi as much as a banana does.
More seriously, the hacking potential for IoT devices in the home is real. Imagine if your home has all the connected things; thermostat, security cameras, water heater, air conditioner, refrigerator, oven, garage door opener. What if they get hacked? Or what if they just simply go on the fritz and you can’t use them? I’m no Luddite by any means. I drive a Tesla, for Pete’s sake. I have a smartphone, several laptops, and I even run a web server from my home. For all those connected shenanigans, I’ve set up extremely good security. But I’m no fool and I know there’s always the potential for hackers to sneak in somehow.
Security, possible tech fails, and Kool-Aid Man aren’t my biggest concerns, though. For me, setting up WiFi on every appliance in my home just doesn’t seem worth my time. Spending hours tinkering with multiple configurations and educating my family on how it all works, for the tiniest sliver of convenience? Nope. I’ll keep turning on my stuff the old fashioned way.
My oven doesn’t need WiFi.
Photo by Discover Savsat on Unsplash
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