My wife and kids were perplexed by my excitement when I gathered them by the window to reveal a mysterious new gadget. With all eyes on the curtains, I tapped a command on my phone. The room was full of expectation. After a painful 10-second delay, the left curtain jerked open. Seconds later, the right curtain tried to join, but it moved less than an inch and made a very obnoxious, high-pitched whine that lasted about 30 seconds.
Everyone burst out laughing.
Why would you need a robot that will automatically open your curtains anyway, they asked. “Need” is a bit strong, but the SwitchBot’s lure is automation. Wouldn’t it be nice to wake up to sunlight hitting your face instead of an alarm (or, in our house, a cat crying for breakfast)?
That’s the premise of this charming little gadget. It can be easily mounted on most types of curtain in minutes. Costing $ 99, or $ 189 for two (and you’ll need two for most curtains), it makes your tired old curtains smart. You can open and close them remotely from your phone using the SwitchBot app, or schedule to open and close them at set times.
But as you might guess from my first try, the SwitchBot has quite a few flaws that might make you want to rip your curtains all the way up.
Picky hardware
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After the pathetic first attempt to open my curtains, I tried putting the SwitchBot back. I placed one on the right curtain and one on the left. There is a kind of rattling arm that goes over the curtain rod, with wheels on the inside, that you clamp onto the rod between the first and second curtain rings. (You can also get SwitchBots that work with U Rail and I Rail curtains.)
I have lightweight ring-top curtains with a uniform rod, so there’s no reason the SwitchBot should have any issues. Unfortunately, after much fiddling, I was still out of luck. I contacted the company and received new models for testing, and I am happy to say that they work much better.
Still, even the new batch is far from perfect. For example, SwitchBots don’t always open the curtains as wide as I would by hand. They also tend to leave a gap between the curtains when they close. And I can’t imagine them doing well with heavy curtains after watching them struggle to fully open my tiny bedroom set.
You connect the bots to an app 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 on the app to open or close the curtains, although it will take a few seconds for the app to load and a few more seconds for the SwitchBot to start moving. It’s not too long of a wait, but it’s faster to just get up and do it by hand.
The better method is to have your curtains open and close automatically at the desired times. There is also a light detection mode to trigger auto-open when it identifies a certain lighting level, but this feature is still in beta and didn’t work well for me.
You can use voice commands to control the curtains with Alexa, Google Assistant, or Siri, but you’ll need to buy and set up a SwitchBot Hub Mini ($ 39). I tested it with Alexa and Google Assistant, and the Hub did the job, but had to ask it to open or close each curtain individually.