LOG-013 ·
My House Called Someone Else's Servers 14,000 Times Last Week
I logged every DNS query my smart home made for seven days. The thermostat is chatty, the vacuum is a gossip, and the garage door needs a foreign cloud to open.
- Words
- 667
- Est. read
- 2.9 min
- Confidence
- 0.90
- Topics
- smart-home, audit, privacy
My local DNS resolver logs every lookup on the network, which means I can measure something most homeowners cannot: how often my house talks to strangers. For the seven days ending 2026-06-21, I filtered the logs to only the devices with no keyboard attached (thermostat, cameras, vacuum, garage door, doorbell, two smart plugs, a washing machine with delusions of grandeur) and counted.
Fourteen thousand two hundred twelve outbound queries in one week. From appliances. That is a query every 43 seconds, around the clock, from machines whose jobs are, respectively: heat, watch, sweep, lift, ring, switch, and wash.
The leaderboard
| Device | Queries/week | Distinct domains | Cloud dependency for core function? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Robot vacuum | 4,880 | 11 | Partial (maps stored remotely) |
| Thermostat | 3,214 | 6 | No (schedules run locally) |
| Doorbell camera | 2,955 | 9 | Yes (video routes through vendor) |
| Garage door opener | 1,401 | 4 | Yes (app cannot reach it directly) |
| Washing machine | 1,118 | 7 | No (it is a washing machine) |
| Two smart plugs | 644 | 3 | Yes, before remediation |
The washing machine's 1,118 queries went to seven domains including two analytics providers. It washes clothes. The data it could conceivably need from the internet rounds to zero, and the data it emits about my household's occupancy patterns does not.
But the garage door is the entry that belongs in a museum. Pressing the button in the app sends a message to a cloud server (in another hemisphere, per the traceroute), which sends a message back to the opener, ten meters from my phone. Round trip measured: 1.9 seconds on a good day. When that vendor had an outage last year, thousands of people could not open their garages with their phones. The photons were traveling 26,000 km to move a door I can hit with a tennis ball from where I stand.
The remediation, measured
The goal is not to un-smart the house. Automation is genuinely valuable; I measure my heating savings at 11% since the thermostat learned our schedule. The goal is local control with optional cloud, which is precisely what most vendors decline to offer because your dependency is their subscription revenue.
Actions taken over two weekends (9.5 hours total):
Smart plugs: reflashed with open firmware. They now speak only to my home automation server. Queries/week: 644 to 0. Function lost: none. Function gained: they work during internet outages, which the originals did not, a fact I confirmed during the 31-hour backhoe incident of last year.
Vacuum and washing machine: firewalled. VLAN with no internet egress, controlled via local integrations. The vacuum sulked for a day (technical term: re-pairing) and then accepted local map storage. Queries/week for the pair: 5,998 to 0.
Thermostat: allowed, on a leash. Local API does the real work; vendor cloud gets weather data only. Queries/week: 3,214 to 210.
Doorbell and garage door: replaced. No firmware or firewall trick fixes a device whose architecture requires the vendor. The doorbell is now a camera that records to a drive in my closet. The garage door got a $34 local relay module. Combined cost: $263. Combined queries/week: 4,356 to 0. App-to-door latency: 1,900 ms to 140 ms. The tennis ball remains the fallback.
The scoreboard
House-wide appliance queries: 14,212/week before, 322/week after, a 97.7% reduction. Devices that stop working when the internet fails: 5 before, 0 after. Every automation now runs on a server in my office that would keep running if every vendor involved were vaporized. The cloud connections that remain are conveniences, demoted from dependencies.
The general finding, and it generalizes depressingly well: for most smart home gear, the cloud is not an architecture requirement. It is a business model wearing an architecture costume. The device in your house is fully capable of doing its job locally; it phones home because you are the product being metered.
Log your own DNS for a week. Confidence you will find at least one appliance making more than a thousand queries: 0.90. Confidence you will be angrier at the result than I was: lower. I had the advantage of expecting it.