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Smart home automation - tip, tricks, advice?
Next week, I will be closing on my first ever home (hello Michigan tilderinos!). One of the projects I want to tackle and work on after I move in is setting up a smart home ecosystem that is sustainable long-term. I saw the open-source Home Assistant but I think I need to do more research on it and find compatible products. For now, my wishlist of projects are:
- Controllable lighting from my phone or computer
- Carbon Monoxide/Natural Gas detection
- Water leak and usage monitoring
- Thermostat
Are there any other use cases that you use home automation for? If you use Home Assistant (or used it in the past), what are some things I should consider? Any products that you bought in the past and regret now?
#1 rule of home automation: the basic stuff must work even when your internet is down.
Don't rely on IFTTT or any other cloud service for basic automation like lights or opening your curtains, however easy it might seem just to do clicketyclick on a web browser.
You should also make sure that the system comes online after a power outage and that a hardware failure can be recovered from. (No Raspberry Pis with fickle SD cards, the card will always fail at the worst moment).
HomeAssistant is great!
It's a framework that lets you handle a plethora of situations when it comes to automations and making your home smarter.
The tough problem when it comes to making your home smarter is picking which eco-system you want to invest in.
I try to avoid cloud-based IoT devices, which require some company's cloud and a working internet connection to function (things like Lifx or Kasa[1], especially given the recent change with Phillips Hue)
Local network based IoT devices are ok, like Shelly devices, but I try to avoid these as well, cause most of these devices still use 2.4GHz Wifi and you can very quickly have a ton of these devices straining your wifi router
(If you do go the IoT device route, I would suggest putting these devices on a separate VLAN, and only allow routes which will be needed for them to talk to HomeAssistant. Also, try to assign static IPs to your IoT devices in a specific range, which will be useful if you are logging traffic)
Zigbee is not bad but it uses 2.4GHz bandwidth as well, so there could be some interference with your 2.4GHz Wifi network
Z-Wave is a commercial protocol (so devices are a little more expensive as they need to pay extra for licensing and certification). It uses a bandwidth in the 900MHz range (i think).
Both ZWave and Zigbee also need a separate controller you need to get, and the devices build out a mesh network. This also stays totally local. HomeAssistant has good support for both of these.
At my home, I have:
I also have PoE cameras hooked into Frigate and that feeds into HomeAssistant.
Make sure your junction boxes have a neutral wire, if not make sure you get smart switches capable of working without a neutral wire (this is most likely going to restrict you to getting dimmer switches)
(Worthy mention, is the Lutron Caseta system (which uses a proprietary protocol) as well, this works well with HomeAssistant and does not need cloud access, you can control these devices locally. I use their dimmer switches in the few junctions boxes that do not have a neutral wire. They have been the most reliable dimmer switches in those junction boxes)
[1] I have a few older Kasa devices which I can control locally, via Rest API calls, but I am not sure if newer devices still allow this. I had heard Kasa was forcing all new devices to have to be controlled via the cloud. I could be wrong with that.
In total there's likely 100 devices on my network. Three quarters of those over Wi-Fi (across five TP-Link Omada wired access points), two quarters are smart home devices. Haven't had issues except for MyQ garage opener that keeps dropping/dies after few days. But wish I went with ZWave or something fully local.
I mostly have TP-Link Kasa light switches/dimmers/cameras/doorbell. Need to use their apps post firmware updates. They haven't forced you to switch over to their Tapo app, which is pretty horrible.
Eufy smart locks have their issues. False notifications about the door not being locked even though calibration is good. Wanted Schlage but the desired models were out of stock for months or over MSRP.
Eufy baby monitor and camera are great though! Better than Owlet.
Appliances WiFi features aren't that great. Have LG washer/heat pump dryer/refrigerator. Along with a GE dishwasher. Just useful for the notifications and reminders but can't start them remotely.
Honeywell T9 thermostat and their sensors have been great! Everyone was doing Nest but took a gamble on them and it's not bad. I have a sensor in every room including one above my baby's crib.
Use Govee water sensors which has its own hub. You can do without it if you have your own 900Mhz(?) receiver but I couldn't get it working. Ended up picking up random cars instead!
Hunter has some decent ceiling fans. Only issue was getting them on Wi-Fi but that was my fault as I had enabled WPA3 on my smart device network.
Existing home alarm was rewired to a Konnected Pro and use Smart things rather than Home assistant.
Do you have your home assistant tied to central station monitoring? If so, what provider do you use?
When you say "central station monitoring" I'm presuming you mean for a home security alarm/fire, where they have people who will receive signals of a break-in/fire and will go down a call sheet and attempt to reach you and then call the police/fire department if appropriate?
I also have a Home Assistant setup but I also have an separate home alarm system that was installed by professionals and is monitored by a central monitoring service. You can use them separately, and for many years, they were completely independent of each other. However, recently I started integrating my Home Assistant system with my alarm panel; it does not affect what the central monitoring service does or sees.
The advantages are that my Home Assistant can now watch my alarm panel and if it sees that I have armed the house, I must be away and it can adjust the thermostat and turn off all of the interior lights that may be on.
The alarm panel is a Vista by Ademco/Honeywell and is an extremely popular old school alarm system. Most alarm companies use these for their installations still.
Sorry, I am not sure what you mean by central station monitoring!
We have SimpliSafe (my wife wants to have a backup to all the critical stuff I have in HomeAssistant already), which is also tied into my HomeAssistant (the only automation I have on it is to automatically arm the system when we are away from Home). All our CO/Smoke monitors, Door/Window entry sensors are tied into it. I also have SimpliSafe flood sensors (as a backup to my Z-Wave sensors). After having a basement flooded in a previous house, I like to err more on the side of caution :)
If you're referring to weather monitoring, I just use the local NWS station to pull in weather forecasting into HomeAssistant (to control automations on my garden watering system, or set Thermostat temperature, also notify me if it's going to rain)
If you're referring to server monitoring. I have a zabbix server that monitors all my servers, network gear (router, switches, APs), UPS, etc. I have alerts configured to email me on warnings and send me a message/email me on critical issues. I also have all of HomeAssistant data fed into influxDB, and have a grafana dashboard, with data from there to quickly get a glance of stuff (energy usage, temp, humidity, water usage, etc), if I need to.
Are you running frigate on a separate machine or the same one you use for HomeAssistant? Or how is that setup?
I have frigate running on a separate server (with a ZFS array, with enough storage for storing 24x7 video from all the cameras for 60 days. I retain 24x7 recordings for 15 days, and motion-only clips for 30 days. I oversized the storage pool, in case I added additional cameras down the line. I have additional data backup strategy/setup across multiple servers as well, cause I selfhost a bunch of things :)
I also have a Coral TPU on that server that helps with frigate quite a bit.
ETA: HomeAssistant runs inside a VM on a proxmox cluster, which also hosts a bunch of other things (Nextcloud, bitwarden, jellyfin, mqqt, bunch of DBs, grafana, etc) . Frigate gets a separate server.
When I moved into my current place I decided to go big with home automation. Every single light is smart, a lot of the switches are smart, got a bunch of sensors, etc.
Everything I have is tightly integrated into Home Assistant running on a computer in the corner. My things are all wifi or Z-Wave; I hate my wifi smart bulbs I wish they were a zigbee or zwave mesh instead.
I live in Seattle so my thermostat most of the year is "do I open the windows or not"—so I haven't done much in that department. My air conditioner is a portable unit I had to buy myself, I use an IR blaster to control it.
Highlights
Per-circuit power tracking
The usefulness of this will vary depending on how your place is wired, but I bought a Emporia Vue 2 with all the probes, immediately reflashed it with ESPHome, and installed it in my breaker panel. It gives me circuit-by-circuit breakdowns of everything consuming power. My washer, dryer, and dishwasher all have their own circuits, so simple automations to detect when they are or are not drawing power and I can get notified when they finish running. My dryer has a separate vent for it, controlled by a smart switch, that turns on when the dryer is drawing power and stays on for a few minutes after it stops.
What I would do differently
Thanks for posting this, I have a question of my own if I may ask...
Does anyone know of a security camera which:
Doesn't need Wi-Fi
Has a long lasting rechargeable battery
Has an SD card slot
Doesn't require any sort of a subscription
Can work in the rain
and lastly, isnt too large.
I would like to get a security camera to set up in the corner of my backyard, to basically attach it to a tree. There is no WiFi signal there. There is now power line near by. Just to have it record non stop and then I can recharge it once every few weeks and take out the SD card when needed.
Does something like this exist?
The closest thing I can think of may be a wildlife camera with rechargeable batteries. I don't think they will record continuously and maintain battery but it will at least record when movement is detected. The one I bought my father even allowed you to sync via Bluetooth if you wanted.
I've been very pleased with the Reolink product line. I got the RLC-510WA. Cost about $70. No subscription. I would be surprised if it needs WiFi after the initial set it up--but best to double check. But I can vouch for the quality/value of their products
edit: yes they should work without wifi: https://support.reolink.com/hc/en-us/articles/360007170094-Can-Reolink-WiFi-cameras-work-without-WiFi-or-Internet-connection/
You're describing a trail camera. They don't usually record non-stop, but on motion though.
You can get models with 3G/4G modems too, but depending on where you live it might get really expensive. Over here you can get "IoT" SIM cards with very very low bandwidths for a few euros a month. Definitely not enough for streaming video, but enough to send a still image of a motion event in under 60 seconds.
I'd love to get one that records non stop and just deleted old videos at a certain point.
Last week, there was a car accident which caused damage to my backyard shortly after that hurricane/tropical storm that hit the east coast, and dealing with both drivers insurance has been a nightmare. I feel like if I had had a security camera, it would have been a done deal.
Lots of other people here with great advice. I can also strongly recommend Home Assistant. I wish I knew about it when I started with home automation because I would have chosen more local options.
For thermostat I can recommend the Ecobee line, I've had three now in different homes and been happy with them. But instead of using the cloud integration to connect them into Home Assistant, use the Homekit integration. That will get you fully local access and way faster updates and you don't actually need any Apple devices for it to work, Home Assistant can emulate a Homekit hub. I still use their cloud in case Home Assistant isn't running for some reason but I use it just as a backup.
Everything at our cabin is being set up to be local, so it's all zigbee (check out the Home Assistant Sky Connect for a zigbee/matter compatible dongle) or ESPHome. I'm trying to keep Wi-Fi devices down but that's more preference than requirement. Also any Hue compatible bulbs are zigbee and don't need any Hue bridge if you have a zigbee dongle, so that gives you a ton of options for smart bulbs.
Are you pretty tech-savvy/willing to tinker? Home Assistant is fantastic and has gotten far more accessible as time has progressed, but still requires a bit more effort than some of the alternatives. I would definitely consider it worthwhile, but it also depends on the user too :)
For lighting, I'm extremely partial to Inovelli and their light switches (bonus is they're local to you in Michigan). I initially was looking at bulbs, but the cost of replacing all my lights with something like Hue (which now is off the table for me given the forcing users to use their app) was just really high. It doesn't mean replacing all the switches is cheap either, but I don't think you can match Inovelli's features for the price point and their community is fantastic.
Re use cases, a lot of things are covered by what others have already said, but something I really like is using contact sensors on my doors that then turn on the lights when I open them at night. For example, coming home from the store or work when it's dark out, open the door and lights come on in case your hands are full, etc.
Has Inovelli sorted out all the supply chain issues they were having?
It also looks like they're pivoting hard to Zigbee instead of ZWave devices.
I have one of their Red-Series (ZWave) switch and it is excellent, but I was not been able to get my hands on more for over 2years, which was a frustrating experience. I kinda gave up and have not really looked into them since. (ended up going to Lutron Caseta for Dimmer switches, which have been excellent as well)
I feel like they're a small company (which I want to support) with a lot of growing pains and the pandemic was not kind to them with a lot of supply issues. They had a really good lead in terms of features and quality, 3-4 years ago, but I feel like the HA space is filling up pretty quick with competition.
I think they're in the clear for the immediate future at least. They're in stock with their new Red Series 2-1 switch and the new Blue 2-1, so you've got the choice of either Zwave or Zigbee today. They have a Zigbee Fan switch and I think the plan is to mirror that with a Zwave offering as well but I don't see it listed, so checking into that.
There is a lot on the upcoming product list and I'd add a few months to any expected timelines if you're interested in one of those just because something always comes up. However for the switches they've got out now, I'd feel very confident with them and I know they're trying to prioritize keeping inventory set.
I think the Zigbee choice was primarily because it was a lot easier to source Zigbee chips during the pandemic than it was with Zwave since there was only a single manufacturer for those. Zigbee is also a larger market, smart bulbs skew a lot more towards Zigbee than Zwave, etc. I started with Zwave and was concerned about wifi interference, but it hasn't been bad at all for me. Just have to set channels up so you don't overlap and you'll be ok.
That's good to hear!
Their new mmWave presence detection switch looks interesting, might pre-order that to play with. I've been playing around with the DFRobot mmWave sensor the last couple of months, so was excited to see Inovelli had a finalized product shipping soon with mmWave presence detection.
I just kind of went through this in my apartment. Home Assistant is really really good but expect to spend a loooot of time setting up, tweaking, and improving in there and prepare to be a bit frustrated at times. It’s incredibly powerful. You really can make anything do anything to anything.
I started with the default programming system which was ok but eventually I moved to node red and while I’m no expert I found it easier to setup and debug. Things have been surprisingly hands off.
I went with Lutron Cassetta switches and have had 0 problems. Most also don’t require a neutral wire but double check on the model you’re buying if you need that feature.
I have an Ecobee for the thermostat. There’s a model that doesn’t have as many smart features that was around $100.
I also went with a few smart plugs from https://cloudfree.shop.
I’m not doing anything crazy complicated or crazy with automation but here’s my list for inspiration:
As far as advice I’ll echo what everyone else is saying - stay away from WiFi and cloud required things.
If you have any questions or need some help feel free to reach out!