Good “Buy for Life” Brands
Some that come to mind are:
Benchmade - knives Darn Tough - socks Carhartt - good work gear Doc martens - footwear
What are some good reputable brands that you have had for 5 years + with little to no issues or with a lifetime warranty.
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I’ll throw a weird one in here. If you want to do any smart home automation stuff, Lutron. Their stuff is famously bulletproof and generally “just works” and almost never needs troubleshooting.
It can be a little pricy for a light switch, but it will work with just about any platform you want to use. Also, all of their wireless switches work without internet.
But why do you want a WiFi enabled light switch?
You don't. The Lutron switch is not wifi. The Lutron hub is not wifi.
100% you don’t want WiFi smart home devices.
WiFi is really handy because it’s easy and accessible, but as you add devices, you wind up with WiFi network issues.
Because these devices can just talk to the internet, they can talk to their manufacturer’s websites and tell them everything they learn about you from your network, such as all the other devices on your network, any open file sharing protocols (and the files on those devices), any other devices that are willing to talk to the WiFi device. So - literally - everything on your network becomes exposed to the manufacturer of the device. It’s unlikely the manufacturer would be nefarious, but they would extract all your data.
And if the device has poor security, opens a port to the outside world, or - as I discovered this weekend on my soundbar - just has a root ssh shell with no password requirement, it could pose a security risk to you and your devices.
…. And I just remembered outbound federation is currently broken on my instance and maybe one person will actually see this comment. Fuck.
Convenience, automation, remote control.
Flexibility. A hardwired switch is choosing your lighting configuration at build time, but when you have light bulbs that can all be controlled individually through software, then you want a switch that can interact with that software.
For instance, let's say you do something crazy and unprecedented like add a lamp to your room, with hardwired switches now you either have two switchs in two different spots to deal with every time you enter a room, or you need to call an electrician to wire up a switched plug. If your switch was instead a software switch you could just reprogram it to also control the lamp.
It's one way of wirelessly communicating between devices of different types.
You can have a WiFi-enabled light switch that you can control with your phone without it connecting to the internet.
I have my lights set to turn on slightly before I am supposed to wake, turn off after I go to work, before I return from home, and after I go to bed. I've recently added mmwave sensors to turn them on and off based on my presence within a room. I can do all kinds of automations that I could do manually sure but if I don't need to and can minimize the amount of excess energy waste then why wouldn't I want a wirelessly controlled switch and or lights?
And yes most everyone can do this. Google Home Assistant and get lost in the rabbit hole.
The door from my driveway opens into my office. The light switch in my office is in a really shitty place. When coming into my office at night, I have to navigate to the light switch in the dark to turn on the light.
Or, at least I did. Now when the door opens at night, the light in my office comes on at 10%.
Stuff like that is why.