Home Tech
How a robot vacuum decides where it has already been
Navigation in a cheap consumer device is a genuinely hard problem, solved differently at different price points.
Home Tech
Appliances, sensors, smart home kit and the standards fighting over your house.
21 articles · updated August 11, 2026 · page 1 of 2
Home Tech
Smart home standards keep fighting, and your house is the battlefield
Devices that will not talk to each other are the visible result of an unresolved commercial dispute about who owns the home.
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Home Tech
A fridge does not make cold, it moves heat somewhere else
The whole appliance is a pump that carries heat out of an insulated box, which explains the warm back panel and the noise.
Home Tech
How an induction hob heats the pan and not the surface
A changing magnetic field induces currents inside the metal of the pan, which is why the glass stays cool and why some pans do…
Home Tech
Why a microwave heats unevenly, and what the turntable is really for
Standing waves inside a metal box create fixed hot and cold regions, and every design feature is an attempt to work around them.
Home Tech
Why the eco cycle on a washing machine takes three hours
Most of the energy goes into heating water, so saving energy means using less heat and more time to compensate.
Home Tech
How a smart speaker listens for its name without recording the room
A tiny model running locally on a low-power chip watches for one pattern, and only what follows it is sent anywhere.
Home Tech
Why a smart bulb flickers, and what colour temperature actually means
Dimming an LED is not like dimming a filament, and the mismatch between old dimmers and new bulbs explains most complaints.
Home Tech
How a motion sensor decides that somebody is there
Most household sensors detect a change in infrared radiation, which is why they miss slow movement and trigger on warm air.
Home Tech
Turning the thermostat up does not heat the room any faster
A thermostat is a switch with a target, not a throttle, and the belief that it is a throttle wastes a great deal of energy.
Home Tech
Two kinds of smoke alarm detect two different kinds of fire
Ionisation and photoelectric sensing respond to different particle sizes, which means the type you fitted decides which fires you…
Home Tech
Why your television makes films look like a soap opera
Motion interpolation invents frames that were never filmed, and the resulting smoothness fights the frame rate cinema has used for…