Runs in the House
If the internet goes down, the house doesn't care.
The house's brain is in the house. The rules that close the water main, hold the heat, and turn on the lights run there, on hardware you own, talking to devices on your own network. Nothing in that loop goes to a server in another state.
That isn't a philosophy for its own sake. Cloud services go down, change their terms, get acquired, and shut off. When they do, the houses that depend on them stop working, sometimes for good. A house that runs itself doesn't care.
What still needs us
We'd rather be precise about this than promise something we can't keep.
| Internet down | Our servers down | LMI gone for good | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Safety: leaks, freeze, smoke, CO | Works | Works | Works |
| Lights, heat, modes, schedules | Works | Works | Works |
| Your phone at home | Works | Works | Works |
| Your phone away from home | Stops | Stops | Stops until someone takes over |
| Push notifications | Text messages still come | Text messages still come | Text messages still come |
| Monitoring | Our radio still hears the house | Stops | Stops |
If we stop
Every LMI house keeps a document describing itself: every room, every device, every safety rule, and what's behind it. The house keeps it current on its own. That document, and the source code for everything we build, are held in escrow. If LMI ever stops, they're released to you, so any competent integrator or staff member can pick up where we left off.
You own the hardware. You own the house's keys. You'd lose us, but you wouldn't lose the house smarts.
Privacy, specifically
- No vendor accounts. If a device needs its maker's cloud to work day to day, we don't use it, or we rebuild it so it doesn't.
- Devices that try to phone home are blocked, and a device the network has never seen before raises an alert.
- Voice is never recorded. When you want it, it's transcribed to text as you speak, and the audio is never kept.
- We can reach your house's systems to fix them, and every one of those sessions is logged.