My wife and the children were puzzled by my enthusiasm as I gathered them by the window to reveal a new mysterious gadget. With all eyes on the curtains, I pressed a command on the phone. The room was hard to anticipate. After an agonizing delay of 10 seconds, the left curtain suddenly opened in spurts. A few seconds later, the right curtain tried to join, but moved less than an inch and made a very unpleasant, loud whistle that lasted about 30 seconds.
Everyone burst out laughing.
Why would you need a robot that automatically opens your curtains anyway, they asked. The “need” is a bit strong, but the temptation of SwitchBot is automation. Wouldn’t it be nice to wake up to the sunlight touching your face instead of the alarm (or, in our house, a cat crying at breakfast)?
This is the premise of this charming little gadget. It can be easily mounted on most types of curtains in minutes. Costing $ 99 or $ 189 for two (and you’ll need two for most curtains), it makes old tired curtains smart. You can open and close them from your phone using the SwitchBot application, or schedule them to open and close at set times.
But, as you might assume from my first try, SwitchBot has quite a few flaws that can make you want to rip your curtains off completely.
Finicky Hardware
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After the pathetic first attempt to open my curtains, I tried to reassemble the SwitchBot. I placed one on the right curtain and one on the left. There is a kind of ratchet arm that goes over the curtain rod, with small wheels inside and fix it on the rod between the first and second curtain ring. (You can also get SwitchBots that work with U Rail and I Rail curtains.)
I have light ring curtains with a uniform rod, so there’s no reason why SwitchBot should have problems. Unfortunately, after playing a lot, I was out of luck. I contacted the company and received new models to test and I am pleased to say that it works much better.
However, even the new batch is far from perfect. For example, SwitchBots do not always open curtains as wide as I would with my hand. They also tend to leave a space between the curtains when closed. And I can’t imagine how they handle heavy curtains well, after seeing them struggling to fully open my small bedroom set.
Pair the robots with an application on your phone via Bluetooth and calibrate the open and closed positions. It’s a quick and easy process. Then you can tap a button in the app to open or close the curtains, although the app takes a few seconds to load and then a few more seconds for the SwitchBot to start moving. It’s not a long wait, but it’s faster to get up and do it manually.
The best way is to automatically program your curtains to open and close at your favorite times. There is also a light detection mode to trigger automatic opening when it identifies a certain level of illumination, but this feature is still in beta and didn’t work well for me.
You can use voice commands to control curtains with Alexa, Google Assistant, or Siri, but you must purchase and set up a SwitchBot Hub Mini ($ 39). I tested it with Alexa and Google Assistant, and Hub did the job, but I had to ask him to open or close each curtain separately.