It is tempting to believe that every new appliance in your house needs to be connected to the internet to be modern. Marketing teams love to tell us that a smart fridge or an app-enabled toothbrush adds a level of convenience we never knew we were missing. In reality, these features aren’t worth the hype and are usually just forced additions that send data to advertisers instead of helping.

Smart refrigerators are good at selling data

You’re giving your information right to the people selling you groceries

Smart refrigerators get zero practical benefit from an internet connection, and I know I’d regret buying one. Connecting a fridge to your network just to see a digital grocery list is a poor use of your bandwidth, especially since pen and paper or a note app on your phone have worked perfectly for decades.

Large kitchen appliances are metal boxes packed with motors, compressors, and thick insulation, and all that material bounces and absorbs wireless signals, to create dead zones in your house. Weak connections force the network chips to keep resending data, which bogs down your connection and slows down other devices.

Really, the most likely reason these became smart was to save money and collect data for the manufacturer. Moving controls to an app and relying on digital diagnostics lowers long-term service costs for the manufacturer, but it turns a standard kitchen appliance into a data-collection tool.

While you do have to input your groceries manually on many fridges, there are some that are built with tracking features that can log your groceries. Either way, companies then sell that information to data brokers, making more money from what should have been a one-time purchase.

Washing machines and dryers could be replaced by a dial

A buzzer is just as good as a notification

Similarly, the notifications a smart washing machine sends to your phone aren’t helpful, since you can just listen for the chime to know your laundry is done. If your washer and dryer could load themselves based on the smart app, that’s different, but we’ve had all-in-one washer-dryer combos long before they were smart. There are plenty of unnecessary smart devices, and this is one of them.

Washers and dryers are usually tucked away in closets or basements, which makes it harder for wireless signals to reach them. When they do work, washing machines can log how often you do laundry and make inferences about your household. Companies then sell that information to data brokers, making more money from what should have been a one-time purchase.

Smart ovens still need you to put items in

Not checking an oven before preheating is a fire hazard

While fridges, washers, and dryers are an obvious waste of your bandwidth, there’s a case for smart ovens. The idea for these is that you can use an app to start a preheat cycle or adjust temperatures. That is definitely convenient. Still, it feels more like it’s for the sake of convenience than for actually helping you.

It takes less than a minute to preheat your oven or adjust the temperature. When you need to check your food’s temperature or move things around, you have to walk over, anyway. Also, you never want to preheat your oven without checking to make sure what is inside or around it. It’s an easy way to accidentally start a fire.

Connecting a cooking appliance to the internet just adds more noise to your home network without changing how your food cooks.

Placing another wireless device in a kitchen full of metal surfaces just adds to the signal degradation.

Microwaves don’t need any kind of smart buttons

You still have to walk up to the microwave

Controlling a microwave from your phone makes no sense because you still have to walk into the kitchen, open the door, put in your food, and check that it’s cooking correctly. Once you’re standing in front of the machine, pressing a physical button is much faster than unlocking your phone, opening an app, and waiting for a cloud server to relay a command.

You should also consider that active microwaves generate heavy radio-frequency interference on the 2.4 GHz band, which drops network packets and disrupts nearby wireless gadgets.

A toothbrush definitely doesn’t need to be online

Keep your bathroom habits to yourself

While you could make a thin case for any of the above, it’s hard to make a good argument for a smart toothbrush. A toothbrush does one thing: it cleans your teeth. It doesn’t need an internet connection to do that. Your shower, water flosser, toilet, and many other things that get smart features attached don’t need to be online either.

Companies keep adding Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to these devices to track their customers’ habits through an app. The pattern is the same because advertisers want to know how much toothpaste, soap, toilet paper, or anything else you use. They want to know how often you use it and what kind of person they are selling to. That’s a pointless use of your bandwidth and just another device clogging up your home network.

You don’t need your gaming console competing with your toothbrush for bandwidth. Wasted bandwidth aside, putting Wi-Fi into small, cheap devices also brings security risks. These kinds of small, cheap devices are usually built with low-quality chips running old software that never gets updated. That makes them easy targets for hackers scanning networks for weak spots.

Not everything was meant to be smart

Besides the fact that these devices are security risks and useless, refrigerators and washing machines are built to last for decades, but they rely on digital services that vendors often abandon after just a few years. When a company stops supporting an app or cloud server, you’re left with an appliance that might be impossible to set up correctly. That makes it a permanent, unpatched security risk inside your house. It is much safer to leave these machines offline.