Durability Plague

I have been having very little time over the recent months to visit the wooden cabin in the country. It is a beautiful place but the intensive work/travel schedule offers barely any opportunities to go there, even for a couple of days.

My seldom visits, however, are all maintenance visits. Which is the sad illustration of the false economy we all live in.

That cabin has been a great test bed for many systems. This is where - over 10 years ago - I realized the IoT opportunity has been the software opportunity. And I was foolish to think that it was only software that was unreliable those days. With efforts focused on designing defensive software architectures and building ultra reliable smart home management software, I hit the hardware problem hard. In a nutshell: while the software keeps on running without a single reboot for 7 years now, the hardware parts are falling apart.

Things break for different reasons. Last summer we had an invasion of mice which were followed by martens. Both ended up chewing power cables, proving the point that wireless is the way to go. Radio waves are immune to rodents. But you still need to provide power to devices somehow... And now I am thinking of running the powerline cables inside protective metal pipes. Hopefully that will survive...

Then there are batteries. I try avoiding them, but it is not possible to eliminate them entirely. The cabin is in a tiny settlement at the end of an overhead power line and the line voltage is very unreliable. I run several uninterrupted power supplies there and they all failed. Mostly because their gel batteries died.

And electrolytic capacitors that I keep replacing here and there on a regular basis. This plague continues on and on. Essentially no consumer - grade electronic equipment available today is designed to last more than 5 years. Which we probably accept for personal devices that evolve so fast that when reaching 5 years are of no use anyway. But smart home equipment should not follow these design principles. Unfortunately it does. Because vendors compete on price and seek cheap components. And there is no way to specify - when making a purchase - that you want a device that has ceramic capacitors instead of electrolytic.

This problem probably extends further, to professional smart building equipment. We pitch durability of LEDs. But what worth is an LED that would last 50 thousand hours (that translates to ~10 years) if capacitors in the driver will dry out after 3, or maybe 5 years?

Can software help here? To some extent - yes - by monitoring the operating conditions: how many hours at what load and temperature, giving an early warning to replace things before they fail. But there is only so much that software can do. The hardware is still fundamental. We need to upgrade the current standards here. The economy of cheap power supplies is completely false. What good is hardware that has to be thrown out and replaced every couple of years? The maintenance costs are huge. The environmental impact is even more costly. It is the high time to wake up!