As a cybersecurity person, my first consideration would be to set up a separate VLAN to access your smart home devices and be very mindful which ones you allow to access the internet. Smart things are notorious for awful security holes.

Beyond that, I'd agree with other people here about starting small, and be prepared mentally and financially to replace stuff every 5ish years as they stop getting updates.

Just my two cents from a Google home user.

The most used smart devices for me are lights. Followed by music on smart speakers.

With that said, I would not recommend works with Google/Google nest products/Google home.

The linked article below outlines a lot of the general frustrations I have had with the ecosystem.

Here are few more specific gripes. To this day my original nest cameras are not fully integrated with the nest home app, while the newer Google nest camera is only in the home app with more limited features. I can see live streams of all cameras in the home app, but to do anything else you have to use the separate nest app for the older cameras. They have been claiming for years the older cameras will be fully integrated into the home app.

Now onto the home app it's self. They just lazily brought Gemini into the home app but now slapped a subscription pay wall around it and better features for the ecosystem. My existing nest subscription was automatically converted but I was already contemplating canceling it and switching to cameras with local storage.

In summary, I have been nothing but disappointed with the Google home ecosystem. Degrading performance over time and they have shown an acute lack of support for not that old of hardware. I would strongly recommend not building your smart home around this ecosystem.

https://www.kiplinger.com/personal-finance/home/google-smart-home-devices-are-glitching

I set up a separate 2.4GHz Wi-Fi network just for my smart home gear since most IoT devices work better on their own connection. I went with the Apple ecosystem over Google, and after a lot of trial and error, I’ve found a few brands I really like:

🏠 Aqara Home — aqara.com
Aqara stuff is solid and pretty affordable. Their devices run on Zigbee and Matter, so they play really well with Apple Home.

💡 Eve Home — evehome.com
Eve makes great quality products that feel premium, but they do cost a bit more. Still, they’re super reliable and integrate perfectly with Apple.

🪟 SwitchBot — switch-bot.com
For blinds, I use SwitchBot. They were the only ones I found that can automate regular tilt blinds with the hanging rod. Each blind has its own mini solar panel that keeps the battery charged, and it can also detect light levels to open or close automatically.

🔒 Level Lock — level.co
I’m a big fan of Level locks because they fit inside your existing lock, so your door still looks normal. They also have hotel-style key cards and support Apple Key, which lets me just tap my iPhone to unlock the door.

📹 Eufy — us.eufy.com
For outdoor cameras, Eufy is my go-to. They make solar-powered models that can track and follow people when they walk by—super handy.

🧩 Homebridge + Govee — us.govee.com
I use Homebridge for devices that don’t natively support Apple Home. For lighting, I went with Govee instead of Philips Hue. Govee doesn’t offer full HomeKit support for all their stuff, but they have a free API that works great with Homebridge for control in the background.

⚠️ Biggest lesson learned:
Avoid no-name Amazon smart devices. They might look like a good deal, but most of mine died after 3–6 months. If I could do it again, I’d spend a little more upfront on better brands

The newest game changer for me has been Matter. With Apple, my Apple TV serves as the hub for all my devices. The only annoying part of smart homes is ending up with a bunch of different hubs taking up outlet space. Matter really helps with that — it cuts down how many hubs you need and keeps your setup way cleaner.

✅ This post was written by me, reworded with assistance from ChatGPT, and finalized with my own edits and approval

Here's my advice for smartening your home:

DON'T.

Oh, you're ignoring my blunt, uninformative, unconstructive advice. How surprising. =) Okay, so while that is my real advice¹, if you're going to do it anyway, I'd lay down one supreme guiding principle:

• Never, ever, under any circumstances, allow a device whose software you do not 100% control to access the Internet.

I, personally, strengthen this a bit, because it makes my life easier (even though it makes shopping for devices harder): I don't purchase any device which is physically capable of connecting to the Internet. No risk of your lightbulbs getting hacked into a botnet if they can only speak Zigbee.

You can, in fact, set up a 100%-offline smart home with exclusively Zigbee or Z-Wave-based devices², and a hub that never feels the gentle shine of wifi or the soft click of ethernet. You'll need a lot of smart switches for this to work. However, most people would find this kind of dissatisfying (also configuring the hub without connecting it to an isolated LAN will probably prove impossible, which sets you up for "my commercial hub connected to its corporate overlords in the fifteen seconds it was online and now won't work without a permanent uplink"-style accidents), so in practice, you're going to be running HomeAssistant as your hub.

Now, I cannot emphasize this enough: HomeAssistant sucks to administer yourself. It's brittle, fiddly, likes to upgrade constantly and break every time it upgrades. I strongly discourage anyone from running hass. But it's still way way easier than rolling your own with MQTT or the like (especially if you're not up to doing a whole lot of programming just to get your lights to turn on), and it won't scan your local network, sell your data to advertisers, or rug-pull your hub in six months when the manufacturer runs out of money or pivots to some other sketchier business model.

In terms of setting it up: if you're going happy-path, my impression is that hass's tutorials are pretty accessible. You'll need some sort of connection to your non-wifi device network in order to control all your devices, which can't speak wifi; for Zigbee, you apparently want this one? I bought mine many years ago, and it's out of production and now considered obsolete. Should you go with Zigbee or Z-Wave (or something else)? I don't know! Zigbee will let you attach Philip Hue and Ikea devices to your network, but both protocols have their adherents.

Alright, devices! Your choice of radio protocol will guide your choice of devices. Just buy anything that doesn't speak wifi and does speak your radio protocol. You can google "<devicename> homassistant" for compatibility checks, but I've found support is pretty good. (Strictly speaking, many devices require device-specific "quirks" to work with homeassistant, but popular name-brand devices almost always have them and sketchy junk from alibaba or amazon is more standard-compliant.) Specifically, I have a bunch of Hue devices, but I wouldn't actually recommend them because Philips is anti-consumer. If I had to give a recommendation, it would probably be Ikea. You can get extremely good prices on weird-brand specials from Ebay or Amazon, but keep in mind: at least lightbulbs are plugged into 120V current and can be a definite fire hazard!

¹ I will explain more, down here in a footnote where it doesn't interfere with the bit. ;) Some of these are implied by the comments above, but IMO good reasons to avoid integrating "smart" devices in your home infrastructure include:

• Corporate devices will try to leverage you for additional revenue streams (e.g. selling your data to advertisers) and don't care at all about your uptime. We're talking about your lightbulbs here, so the ability of a third party which at best doesn't care about you to disrupt their functioning is a big deal. This isn't hypothetical! "Smart" device rug-pulls are so common they're basically memetic at this point.
• It's an expensive habit.
• It's a pain in the ass. If you don't love computer-touching, keeping your smart home network working smoothly is going to be incredibly painful.
• It's a security disaster if you don't carefully firewall everything from the Internet (and not great even if you don't). The "'S' in 'IoT' is for 'security'" joke… really isn't a joke.
• It makes your home infrastructure a lot more fragile! Even if you avoid corporate malfeasance or hackers, having a cryptographic radio protocol and a whole-ass computer in the path between your light switch and your lights is literally millions of more things that could realistically go wrong.

² The marketing and documentation for Matter, at the time anyone was talking about it, was so appallingly bad that I honestly cannot tell you if it's tunneled over IP or not. If it's not, you could use that too; but if it is, it's also verboten, and I personally am not fucking around with buying devices just to suss out their tech specs.

I would consider my home fairly smart but also very approachable. Some principles that I follow:

1. The home must work even if the Internet is down.
2. The home must work even if the hub has been unplugged.
3. Devices must not have arbitrary access to the Internet.

For my hub, I chose Hubitat. It can run local / no-internet; it isn't quite as heavy on the management as Home Assistant is, but it's very customizable if I want to write drivers or apps. I work primarily with Z-Wave devices, because they do not clog up my wifi and they tend to be a little more reliable in my experience than Zigbee devices (which share spectrum, but not traffic, with 2.4GHz wifi)

I have a number of devices but they generally fall into:

• Lights -- I use mainly Inovelli smart switches and Zooz plugs. The key is that all the switches work perfectly well if the hub does not exist. I don't want someone to come into my house and not know how to turn on a light. This is where most of the daily interaction with the house comes in. Very nice to be able to turn on lights as you enter a room, or tap a button to turn off everything in the house. I have some UX affordances that are consistent throughout the house: for example, double-tapping a light switch is used to turn on the closest floor or table lamp to that switch.
• Sensors -- I have leak detectors, motion sensors, humidity/temperature/air quality monitors, etc. These are passive devices that are mostly used to power automations that can be set up inside Hubitat. Some of them also report to dashboards. I have solar and use Enphase inverters, which can report generation. We also had mains CTs installed to monitor consumption, but I added some Emporia Vue monitors to allow me to watch individual branch circuits. You can do these yourself without an electrician.
• Climate -- Midea AC units, Ecobee wall thermostats, and Mitsubishi heat pumps. All are controlled by the Hubitat, but you can still walk over to anything and use it normally.
• Security -- Schlage smart locks (Z-Wave), and a Honeywell panel that has an Envisalink on it to allow it to talk to Hubitat. I can arm and disarm the panel, check zone status (is a door open?), etc. The locks have keypads and normally we just put in a code, but it's nice to be able to remotely lock/unlock when needed.

Then once you have devices, you need control. Hubitat has dashboards and a phone app, but I have it linked to Google and mainly use the Google Home app and some Nest Minis / Nest Hubs to interact with things like lights and AC. This is also better for wife-acceptance as it's a "single pane of glass" for everything.

After that it's mainly just putting in the time for what you want to accomplish with your house. I'd definitely start with light switches (rather than bulbs) and just get comfortable with the ecosystem. And once the hub is in place, any new devices are incremental, so you can expand over time.

I run Home Assistant at home. I run it from my x86 PC that acts as server for other services. You can get dedicated HA device thoigh and maybe you should if you don't already have some kind of server running. Or maybe even if you have.

I bought Zigbee USB gate made by/for Home Assistant (called Skyconnect but I think they renamed it since - it's the same thing though). This acts as the first Zigbee access point in your network (kinda server, hub, host, whatever you call it) and you will connect new devices through this tonyour Home Assistant.

Then I got one of each these Zigbee devices: smart plug, thermometer and button. I got to know how HA runs, how you can do stuff based on inputs (be it temperature, button press or smart plug button press). Since then I have like 8 smart plugs, 4 thermometers another button, wifi speaker for doorbell and music, I have added my Kodi RPi4s to HA, all the phones in house, afded RPi4/that can control boiler for the house, pool pump (through temperature sensors, openweathermap and smart plug), RGB LED bulbs and other stuff.

You just have to start Home Assistant and start tinkering. Friend of mine did just that, he didn't buy any hardware and still managed to make it useful by scraping API of local.public transport and sensors from phone to make a route tomhome for him with calculated ETA. Since then he bought thermostazic valves for radiators, window sensors and other stuff and started automating the heating.

I did the same but I don't have central heating, so I made it work based on temperatures in rooms.

The options seem.to be endless, you can really make it whatever you want. The first useful thing I did was turn off bathroom radiator after one hour (for towel drying) - you pressed the button on smart plug, it turned on and HA kept time reference and turned it off after 1/hour elapsed. Easy and very useful.

Nowadays it automatically controls pool pump in the summer so it runs on summer days (I have solars connected to the hose) and cooling overnight if the temperature is too high (circulating through said panels in the night) and also running the pump if temperature outside drops near freezing (to prevent burstung the panels by running warmer water from pool through them) although this anti-freeze is there only for the end of season before I drain the system.

And HA also works as thermostat for the house boiler with multiple input temperatures.

Inhave door and window sensors but they are not in any automation right now, I just have them.

I have just thrown this out of my head. Feel free to ask anything.

EDIT: Oh, I have also Valetudo robot vacuum that integrated into HA (based on their own manual).

EDIT2: I also have 24x 1Gbit Mikrotik CRS-326 switch with router (I use it as a router) and I'm working towards having everything ethernet-able to be connected via cable.

I have already run around 400 meters of Cat5e cable, UBNT Tough cable or whatnot, and I have chosen this cable and standard over Cat6 or newer due to this cable having great shielding and seems really tough compared to Cat6 cable at the same price. Cat5e shpuld be able to run 10Gbit up to 45 meters or slower on longer distance, which is also what I wanted for the future.

For wifi I finally bought Ubiquiti Unifi APs, I have two indoor U6-Lite and one U6 Mesh outside. They are great devices! If you go for Ubiquiti, I would by their router Unifi Cloud Gateway Ultra, which I will likely be buying in near futurew leaving my Mikrotik as switch only. I like the idea of Ubiquiti one-router-manages-all (VLAN, RADIUS server, APs, VPN...). The Ubiquiti software for APs (you have to run one on your own or have their router) is free and great, wifi works flawlessly and is plenty fast for me. I should have bought them long time ago!

But Inwould go small steps, especially if you don't have really much spare time and quite high budget. I spent like 1000€ on my networking stuff (whoa, I didn't think that!), around 700€ on my server (some used parts, new PSU and new HDDs) and a few hundreds € on Home Assistant things. Say 2000€ total. And too much time.

I am also in the process of smartifying my home. Haven't installed stuff yet but have done some research. I'm interested in hearing everyone tips!

As for #2: Zigbee devices forms a mesh network, making them somewhat resilient to outage and independant of your router.

1. I would start small. Some of the things like monitoring your home electricity usage will be expensive and it might be redundant if your energy provider already provides graphs of your usage on their website. I've found that even small "dumb" devices like motion/light sensitive nightlights can be a big quality of life boost. Anything that is a simple state machine will be a lot more reliable and less frustrating than something that connects to a network.

   Even smart lights can be unresponsive and annoying. It's not a matter of name brand either--if anything I've had more luck with random Chinese companies than GE.

2. I haven't noticed this so I wouldn't be too worried. But most devices will want to connect at 2.4Ghz and it helps to have everything on the same network. If you're worried about home network security you could double NAT your other devices or set up a VLAN or something

#4. A few quick disconnected statements: Home Assistant is overkill and can be a big time sink; choose an ecosystem like Google Home or Apple HomeKit to build around if you want things to be easy to setup. I haven't had good luck with Zwave or Zigbee. Reolink is pretty good for security cameras.

Every single smart-home has some kind of hub buy-in. This is because most of these smart homes are basically a mesh network of some kind. I use an Apple HomeKit setup because I'm already in the Apple ecosystem, and it now gives me Matter (an open standard) compatibility, giving me a lot more options. Apple doesn't directly make most of the products that I use day to day, and for a long time having a HomeKit felt very limiting because most products preferred not to go through Apple's standards testing.

I use five different brands of products that are actually in my system: Meross, Nano, Tapo by TP-Link, Kasa by TP-Link, and Linkind. I've spent close to a thousand dollars on this network, but it's been over the course of about four years, and some of that has been replacing lights that have gone bad (about half of my Nano Leaf bulbs have been replaced by Linkind, and I've got close to a dozen standing by to replace the rest as they wear out.) Only the Linkind are completely controlled by and updated by the Home app. The rest have their own apps installed on my phone, and I periodically poll for firmware updates. When updates DO happen, the Meross and TP-Link stuff updates without hassle, but it took me 3 separate 45-minute sessions over 2 weeks to get the Nano Leafs to update last time, because they update strictly over Bluetooth, which means they're slow, they're likely to fail, and I have to have my phone nearby to them. But they also hardly ever update, which is fine.

Some things to note with the Apple ecosystem especially:

• You HAVE to have a border router. This means one of your various items in the home is basically going to wind up being the central brain of your network, and others are going to support it. In my home, the Apple TVs act as main routers, with the HomePod minis scattered throughout. You have to have an iPhone for customized scripting and some other deeper level stuff, but I think you can get away with not having one if you just have basic stuff like scene-based stuff and maybe time-based automations. But if you want to get fancy with things happening automatically when you leave/arrive and you want to control your automations away from from home, you need an iPhone. I don't think an iPad even with 5G mobile data will cut it.
• Your requests are local. For reasons I don't understand, everyone else seems to run the request out to an internet server, then runs them back to the house. If all of your stuff is on the same network in a HomeKit home, it just directly communicates on the local network via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth (if the item has Bluetooth; not a requirement).
• While your TVs can use 5GHz Wi-Fi, your HomePods and probably all of your other stuff uses 2.4GHz. It's best if you have a dedicated 2.4GHz antenna on your home's Wi-Fi router, as a blended network with automatic feature switching isn't great. What is nice is that the HomePods not long ago had internal sensors that were already built into them but not yet activated turned on by an Apple update. Now I can get the temperature and humidity in my rooms and have my automated systems react accordingly (like if my humidity gets up over a certain percentage, run my fans, etc.)
• There's a pecking order of how useful an Apple item is at controlling anything on the network. The iPhone is king, the Mac and iPads and the HomePod minis are tied for second, and the Apple TVs and my Apple Watch are honorable mentions (the Watch is basically worthless if the iPhone isn't in your pocket, and at least up through TVOS 18 the Siri functionality through the remote button was basically useless.)

I started with mostly difficult to access lights, like stand lamps I keep in the corner behind furniture, and bias lighting under my cabinets that has a switch that's blocked by an appliance. But as I got along and discovered "scenes" in my Home app, I got more and more ideas and replaced more and more lights and now I cannot think of a single light in my home that's not smart. Either I used existing fixtures and put smart bulbs in there, or in the case of a few of my desk lamps, bought lamps that were purpose-build.

Next came the smart switches, which in the hotter days I keep attached to fans that I can call out by name so that I can get air circulating through my home quickly. In the winter, some of them get swapped out for very low-wattage space heaters (400W) to heat extremely small areas like my desk, or the foot of my bed.

The last thing I have added into my network is a small camera that watches my porch so that I'm not surprised by Amazon sneak-dropping packages, or my groceries getting dropped and the app never alerting me so $200 worth of food rots in the hot midday sun while I'm sitting 20ft and 2 rooms away, blissfully unaware because nobody knocked and I never got a notification. The most annoying thing about it is that for anything other than looking at the current live view, I have to use TP-Link's app. That means if I want to reorient the camera with tilt/pan/rotate, if I want to view footage from previous events, if I want to talk through the camera to the other room, if I want to set up boundary crossing triggers, any of the camera's more advanced features, I'm required to swap over to the app.

If I were to start adding in other smart things, like other sensors, a lot of brands won't incorporate directly into HomeKit, but have routers of their own that can do it, which is kind of annoying but not a deal-breaker. IKEA has a whole line of smart stuff I've considered, but truthfully the only thing they have that truly makes me think their nearly $100 buy-in for the router alone is their automated window blinds.

The only two types of add-on I'm at all interested in currently are motion sensors for the bathrooms to have them turn the lights on automatically to about 1%, because right now every motion-activated dumb solution I've looked for has ended up being so bright that I might as well have turned the lights on. And the other thing is buttons that run scenes, which would allow me to run some of my scenes without having to speak This is useful for when it's late at night and I don't want to be talking back and forth with Siri while others in the house are trying to sleep.

I'm sure there's a lot I've skipped over, such as some of the cons and headaches of running this system. but if you have any questions feel free to ask!

I am just getting started with my smart home functionality too. I opted to go for HomeKit for the privacy and offline functionality. I think it's ridiculous that ecosystems exist that do not work if your internet goes down. The only argument is that you don't need to buy a hub device, which is silly when you're buying $20 light bulbs, $30 switches, and $500+ shades (well in my case). It's not a cheap project.

I have an ethernet Apple TV as the Home Hub, and it also acts as my Thread Border Router. I am trying to only buy Matter over Thread devices, but have a couple Matter over Wifi light bulbs. I have an Eve smart plug that is MoT and does a good job of expanding Thread range to my MoT roller shade in our primary bedroom.

I have an Unraid server that I might run HomeAssistant on at some point. I think going down that route is powerful, but from my understanding, not simple. I think that's edging into "Home Labbing is my hobby". At least for my basic house functions, I don't want to worry about it. My server is also far from robust.

My device list is currently:

• AppleTV 4K (Ethernet HomeKit Hub and Thread Border Router)
• 2x LIFX RGB bulbs (Matter over WiFi)
• 1x Eve Smart Plug (Matter over Thread)
• 1x SmartWings Roller Shade (Matter over Thread)
• 1x Ecobee Thermostat (HomeKit over Wifi)

I am trying to stick with Matter, partially to support the open standard, partially to cover-my-butt in the event I want to change ecosystem. I think Thread mesh networks is a cool idea, and I like that the devices are not directly connected to my WiFi network. I am always skeptical of IoT device security. I think having them on a separate protocol and 100% offline is a good reduction/diversification in the risk area. (until of course we get Thread-based malware lol)

I am somewhat happy with the feature support from the HomeKit ecosystem. There are some features like "Dim over time" that you can't do without some HomeAssistant hack. It seems to do the basics well though, so overall happy with the state so far.

I keep my smart stuff extremely simple on purpose, because I have lately felt a lot less enticed by "smart" products. However I do use some smart bulbs, and am considering if there's any other smart stuff I'd be okay with incorporating. Maybe some sensors or other things.

I have recently swapped to using HomeAssistant on my Unraid server so I can self-host and get away from using any cloud services and no connected microphones like Alexa or Google. I personally only use web/app control and no voice so my setup is very simple. I also don't need access outside of my home network. So keep in mind that my use case and setup is very tailored to my needs.

What I love is that when it's local it's super fast to respond, and it's been way more reliable in actually performing the actions/scenes I request. Live editing of scenes / live preview is awesome too. My small smarthome setup has never been as good as it is now, and for this specific setup I would never go back to any big corporate services, especially since they were both (Alexa and GoogleHome) WAY more unreliable for me

Ensure your internet backbone is strong. Hardwired Ethernet, if possible, is superior over wi-fi options. I dropped cash to get a Ubiquiti Dream Machine, their access points, doorbells, and cameras when I first bought my home. Only the router and APs I found absolutely essential.

I’ve had Hue bulbs in a previous apartment, and they’re a good low-effort smart home introduction, though I do find that they can be a bit slow to turn on, though that may just be Siri and how terrible it is. I’m trying to move onto Lutron switches here over time, as they don’t rely on WiFi and are more resilient. There are new bulbs out there that you can manually switch to different brightness/color as you like, so although that’s not a smart option, if it’s something you’re interested in you could always use it with a Lutron switch.

Home Assistant is amazing. Grab an old PC or a Raspberry Pi, put HA on it and then just check that each device you buy works with Home Assistant. Most do.

I had no plan when Smarting my home and have just vaguely been getting more and more smart devices as and when. I'm 95% sure my smart heating system (per-room radiator control/scheduling) has saved me more than it cost to buy. I know scripting my various power-hungry devices to run at cheap power times has.

1- Do you have any recommendations of where I should start? Like for example, light switches first, then smart plugs, etc.

Switches first IMO. Plugs are worth it if you have lamps and/or as extenders for whichever network. Having the ability to use lights "as normal" is a benefit over bulbs and you don't have to worry about someone turning the switch off and suddenly those bulbs are just off instead of controlled by your automation. Also most switches you can program to do things on a double press, etc. which gives you more manual control options. Single up - main light, double up - lamp, triple up - everything, that kind of thing.

2- If I should take into consideration the number of devices. Could they potentially clog my router or my wifi AP's if they get too many? If yes, is there a way to prevent this?

I have zigbee and z-wave networks along with my wifi one. It means a greater diversity of devices but with Home Assistant coordinating everything, how they connect to HA is a much smaller detail and allows me to use anything. Z-wave can be a complication apparently for some people because it uses overlapping frequencies with wifi, but I haven't noticed any issues.

4- Do you have any tips, advice or warnings in general? Like problems that you know that I'll run into later, or things that you don't think are worth smartifying, etc (whatever you want to say, give it to me, I'll appreciate anything)

I originally centralized around Google Home and became dissatisfied with the customizability. It can work pretty well for a lot but you generally have to get it talking to SmartThings and/or some other hub and then you lose the centralized aspect of it, and it requires an internet connection for a lot. Maybe it's gotten better since I switched to Home Assistant but I really like that HA is completely local.

I have a home server but I put HA on a Raspberry pi 5 for redundancy. I don't want a storage array issue or my dealing with dockers or whatever to make my lights not work. I'm using HA Container in a docker instead of the HA OS so I can also have pihole on that pi, using it 'just' for HA seems like overkill to me. But I'm also getting annoyed not having access to Add-Ons occasionally so that might change. You can install them manually, most of the time there's even instructions, but it's just overall a much more involved process than clicking a button.

I would definitely prefer zigbee/z-wave/matter devices over Wifi devices. If nothing else they use dramatically less power. I have zigbee motion detectors that have been running for years off a coin cell battery.

MQTT is well worth setting up, it's a backend communication server / protocol that other stuff can hook into and then be read by Home Assistant. IIRC it's the preferred / recommended middleman for zigbee stuff anyway, but it also gives an easy connection point for web based tools, etc.

I am strategically upgrading to mmWave detectors (basically small scale radar instead of the more passive detectors) that need to be wired because they have gotten more affordable and for stuff like the bathroom they provide more granularity / capability. It can see through my shower curtain so I don't have to guess based off a timer if someone is still in there for example. I think they're neat and worth getting in specific rooms, but the cheaper sensors are probably the primary ones you want.

I’m another mostly happy home assistant user.

I started with lights, that’s still 90% of my system. So much stuff out there is smart for no apparent reason. My very favorite setup is to have the lights shut off when the tv starts playing, then if the tv stops and movement is detected, the lights come back on.

All of my lights can still be controlled if the pi/server goes down. Smart bulbs usually come on when you turn on the switch unless you change that.

Things I wish I knew when starting:

• Each type of service needs its own antenna. Zigbee and Z Wave antennas can interfere with each other, I put one on a 10 foot shielded extension to stop this.
• Zigbee works on the 2.4GHz band. Interference can happen between it and other devices on the same band, like baby monitors and cordless phones. Here is a Zigbee setup guide which covers that.
• If you have any switch/lightbulb pairings, get them both on Zigbee or Z Wave. You should be able to pair them such that they’ll keep working together even if the system goes down and it’ll cut down on delay time. I use pairings like this for my 50 year old ceiling fan lights.
• Some of the wired light switches require a neutral wire. If your house is older, you probably need one that doesn’t need that extra wire (positive, negative, neutral, ground).
• Upgrading the Zigbee and Z wave plugins breaks their network sometimes. Once I had to completely rebuild it, the backup I had done didn’t have whatever information it had lost.
• The home assistant community is fantastic. Most of the plugins are created by folks who wanted that functionality themself, those creators will often answer questions in the community forum. The base documentation is also very good.

My advice:

• Set up a pihole if you don’t already have one. When you set up a new device, keep an eye on the logs. Block communication you don’t like. If something breaks as a result, unblock one thing at a time until it works. My Roku tv tries to send logs home REALLY often, I shut that down.
• WiFi smart devices will use up your available ip addresses fast on a consumer grade router.
• If you use Zigbee, make sure routers (which expand your mesh) are either not used as routers or will stay where you put them. I move smart plugs around seasonally and was mystified when my bedroom light switch was suddenly no longer connected. Turned out it had been connected to that base.
• Try to avoid products that make home assistant log into an app or api to work whenever possible. Companies have been messing with api access, at least one took it away completely (Chamberlain).
• Only run updates when you have time to troubleshoot. A restart often fixes update issues.

Lots of good advice, so just a quick list of the smart things we have and how we like them:

• Keypad locks - we have kwikset because they also have the smartkey system so you can easily rekey all the non-smart locks the same, and change them if you want to. 10/10. We rarely use the zwave to open them (just give people codes), but it is nice to be able to monitor them.
• Water sensors - in the basement around the water heater and washer.
• Main water shutoff - a servo that can actuate a quarter-turn ball valve on the main line into the house, so that I can remotely turn off the water if the leak detectors trip, then come home to sort it out. Even 20 minutes with a busted washer supply line is a Long Time.
• Garage door controller - use linear's zwave model controller wired directly into our existing garage door opener. There are lots of smart garage door openers, but when I set mine up, most had their own app and didn't integrate.
• Smart switches - just a fee to be able to out automation s on outside lights (turn on at dusk, turn off at midnight)
• Zwave combination smoke and CO detectors - nice to be able to monitor them, though it seems like they do occasionally go off for no reason.
• Ecobee smart thermostat - I don't think we get much out of it besides being lazy and adjusting the temp without walking into the hallway. The room sensors don't really seem to make a difference to how it controls the temp. But also when I started WFH in the pandemic, we stopped having a period of time when no one was home. If I go back to an office job, it night be different.

Everything is on an Abode hub that I pay 200/year for monitoring and automation. They used to be a great company, no subscription required, then they got bought and the enshittification set in. I would not recommend them now. We have them mainly because it Just Works and I don't have the time to set up and maintain an HA system. Though it is on my someday list to do.