Technology

but I’m not techy

That’s the entire problem. Automation products depending on the cloud do have fewer requirements, are simpler to get started with, even if they’re overall poorer choices. They’re a fundamental fact that something needs to control your devices: cloud devices means the company takes care of that for you.

Taking the cloud out of the loop means you need to manage some sort of automation hub. There are many choices but I don’t know which may be approachable for non-techies. The new Matter/Thread standard tries to solve this while making everything work together, but adoption has been slow so you may not be able to use it for much yet. Your choice of automation hub drives your choices.

Maybe some of what I do is applicable, but I AM techie, I love to tinker, and I own my home, so maybe not. I try for local control where possible plus make choices that are additive: things still need to work normally.

• Prefer smart switches, not bulbs, so they still work normally. They also act as repeaters for local Zigbee or Z-Wave networks
• Z-Wave and Zigbee are local low-powered mesh networks commonly used in home automation. “Thread” is a newcomer but not widely used yet. Think of them as a network between Bluetooth and WiFi, but designed as a mesh to better cover your home. These are local networks only, there is no cloud connection (directly). They use a lot less power than WiFi, which makes battery devices more practical, and different frequencies for less interference. You should expect to pick one.
• Home Assistant (HA) on a Raspberry Pi. This was always the techie choice as opensource software that supports everything but in the last two years they have made it a lot more approachable, and Nabu Casa sells it installed in custom hardware. Among other things, it lets me use all of Z-Wave, Zigbee, and Thread devices, as well as Ethernet devices and gives a lot of automation power. When you’re starting out, you should stick to one for simplicity
• I do use Alexa, which requires internet access. I choose to subscribe to Nabu Casa to manage that in HA, since it also funds further HA development but this is not required and there are no ads or data collection
• My latest automation was for my teen staying up late all summer: at midnight, dim the family room lights and announce over Alexa that he should go to bed. He’s back at college now but I’m sure I’ll want it next time he’s home

Personally, instead of smart bulbs, I'd use smart switches for automating lighting. There's no need for every bulb to be individually controlled and carry all of the overhead involved in that. On that note, I'd also love to see DC circuits that can take LED bulbs without needing a transformer for each bulb (which tends to be what causes it to fail IIRC).

Just tried looking at the state of the smart switch market and fuck Samsung for naming their app for transferring files from phone to PC "smart switch". Especially because there's plenty of ways to do that already that don't require a shitty Samsung app.

Excluding Samsung from the search, I'd suggest not looking for products directly but finding enthusiast communities that are building their own smart homes. There is more to it than just getting devices that don't rely on some specific company's web services. You'll need to also setup a controller/server, connect all of the devices to that, and then figure out how you want to interact with it (eg via phone, scheduling, voice commands, etc). I haven't done this myself, but I'm guessing all of these are solved problems, but doubt that anyone would call setting it all up easy.

Philips Hue have the ability to work without internet and it seems like a lot of people like them, though they are kind of expensive. I've used Sengled bulbs before and they were fine, not sure how well they work without internet. But I think for you the problem isn't the bulbs reliance on the internet, they just seem very forgetful. For both Hue and Sengled, when the power comes back on after being out, they just start working again on their own after about a minute. No need to reset anything.

The main non-techy issue even for locally controllable smart things is that the big voice assistants are all entirely internet dependent. So even though Hue bulbs are technically controllable locally if your internet is out, Alexa and Google Home both won't be able to do anything with them.

There are several competing protocol: zigbee, zwave, and the newest is matter. They just require a hub to be controlled.

I use all zigbee smart switches, and a conbee II usb stick. I have a old laptop running homeassistant os, and it has a one click addon for conbee II. I think amazon echo also have builtin zigbee controller.

If the power goes out, all the switch automatically connects back to the hub when the power is back. Obviously, this setup is not affected by google, amazon, even the entire internet goes down. As long as my router is functional, I can control everything using my phone, when I am at home.

There’s no reason a laundry machine requires an internet connection

• if an internet connection provides additional functionality such as notification, it easier to have the machine work normally without notifications
• there’s no reason a machine requires an internet connection, especially with the release of the Matter/Thread standard to unify home automation local protocols

When I got new machines about five years ago, I briefly considered connected machines. It would be really nice to get notifications on my phone but how can it possibly cost that much and why does the only option depend on a cloud service?