Photo by Anete Lusina on Pexels My Smart Home Worked Great — Until It Didn't For about eight months, my smart home setup ran fine. Lights responded, the thermostat did its thing, a couple of sensors triggered routines without drama. Then, seemingly overnight, devices started falling off the network. A bulb would just... not turn on. A sensor would stop reporting for hours, then come back like nothing happened. Nothing had changed on my end — no new router, no firmware update I remembered approving, nothing. I spent a weekend doing the thing everyone does: power-cycling devices, re-pairing the ones that dropped, blaming my Wi-Fi router even though it had nothing to do with it. What actually fixed it was a fifteen-dollar puck-shaped box I'd been ignoring in a drawer for months: a dedicated Thread border router. I've written before about how the boring, well-integrated tool usually beats the flashy new one. This is maybe the purest example of that rule I've hit yet...
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