What's your smart home setup?
Does anyone else here have a smart home setup?
I've been building mine over the 7 or 8 years now in fits and starts. At first, it was smart lights in an apartment and then grew to include smart door locks. I bought a house and it now remotes, motion/door sensors, light switches, and more.
After trying all of the platforms you can think of (Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Homekit, Homekit + Homebridge, Home Assistant, and more), I settled on Home Assistant earlier this year. As I've bought stuff over the years, I've tried to get things that support more than just one platform to avoid being too locked in to one ecosystem. Apple's Home platform is nice, but I can't use it if I want to switch to an Android phone.
Like many of us, I've had some free time during the pandemic, so I put some work into getting Home Assistant up and running. It's definitely not for the average consumer. It requires quite a bit of manual editing of code to get it working perfectly but I've spent the past few months learning how to customize it and get things working just how I want them.
I've also been working toward replacing the few components that rely on cloud services with equivalents that can work locally, so I'm not beholden to a cloud service that could disappear eventually.
I also started automating more and more things:
- I added a Zigbee controller and a bunch of motion sensors to automatically turn lights on and off as people enter/leave rooms.
- Turn on the lights for my dogs if no one is home at dusk.
- A very nice bedtime routine that turns off all the lights in the house, turns on the bedroom TV, arms the security system and then turns on the bedroom lights and slowly fades them out over the next half hour. That last one has been great for helping me get to sleep.
- My favorite is an NFC tag hidden under the living room coffee table that I can scan. It turns on the TV and receiver, switches to the correct inputs and turns on the light strips I have around the living room. If my wife isn't home, it also turns off all the other lights in the house.
I'd love to hear what other people have been doing.
I stumbled through almost as many smart home setups as you did, and also ended up with HomeAssistant. I started with Smartthings and a few zigbee devices, switched to Hue for lights, had google home as a front end, homekit as a front end with homebridge to connect stuff, direct bluetooth homekit devices, and a few other permutations.
Home Assistant is a perfect back end for my home. I don’t really use it for anything except debugging and connecting to a front end (Google Home or HomeKit). The primary reason is that the apps only support 1 homekit instance at a time. I have my parents home on home assistant as well. Both homekit and google home support multiple homes, along with dynamic switching between the homes. The developers are seemingly ignoring a years old GitHub issue of people asking for this feature or some workaround (Even just uploading a second app with a different identifier to the app store would work for 99% of people who need this feature). Anyway, this is my only real problem with homeassistant.
I have HA running as a VM on my synology, and running on a raspberry pi 3 at my parents house. Both now have a conbee2 stick for zigbee devices. My parents get the devices that I rotate out (mostly because I like playing with shiny new things). I pay for Nabu Casa for my parents instance to easily fix it for them when I am away and connect it to google home. (That is another frustration. Nabu casa only works with 1 homeassistant instance. If you want multiple, you need entirely different logins and subscriptions.)
In terms of smart devices, my house has only philips hue lights, some sonoff zigbee smart outlets, an aqara button, hue dimmer, and a few door sensors. These together make a fairly reliable zigbee network. My parents house has a bunch of sengled zigbee bulbs, sengled zigbee outlets, a few sonoff zigbee outlets, some tasmota wifi light strips, and some wemo wifi switches and outlets. The wemo stuff are the only devices I bought specifically for my parents. Costco had 2 packages, each with 1 wemo outlet and 1 wemo in-wall switch, for $5. That was too good of a price to pass up. They have been super reliable. I was actually expecting them to be much worse, since they are wifi devices. Speaking of unreliable, it seems that all of the sengled devices, both outlets and light bulbs are zigbee end devices, not routers, despite them being constantly powered. Their support says they made this decision since people sometimes turn off smart bulbs completely, and having routers drop off the network is bad. This doesn’t explain why the smart outlets are not repeaters. My parent’s zigbee network had no repeaters, so every device was trying to talk directly to the ConBee. Once I figured this out, I added a few of my extra sonoff zigbee outlets. Some replaced existing useful outlets, and some are just hanging out of the wall with nothing plugged in, just to strengthen the zigbee network. Now, their zigbee network is actually reliable.
Most of my automations are just boring <button pushed> <turn on light> type things. I only really have 2 that do something interesting. At my house, we have a pantry with a light. With a door sensor, the light turns on automatically when needed, and off when closed. At my parents house, I use a motion sensor to turn on the dining room lights with motion. My mom did not think smart devices were worth it, but she loves this automation now. When it stops working, I always hear about it quickly.
So far, home assistant is the best thing that has ever happened to home automation, in my opinion. It is what smartthings wanted to be: wide device support and ease of setup, along with what I thought smartthings should be: Really good reliability, local connections to everything that could possibly have a local connection, and easy automations without things like webcore. I gave my sister an account in home assistant, and I can actually trust her to not break anything. With smartthings, things break by looking at them too hard. She is now proficient at setting up her own automations.
I went with Apple's Home because we've got a lot of Apple stuff, so it just made sense. I didn't really do much with it though, unfortunately. I bought a few smart plugs and used it to toggle my window AC units on/off based on a schedule. For example, our upstairs is just 2 bedrooms that don't get used between 8 am and 8pm, so I set them up to turn on/off an before/after that time slot. Set the downstairs to do the same with a different schedule.
Ended up being a little convenient, but since different days require different AC settings and the plugs were just an on/off thing, it didn't really save many trips to the AC units. Then somehow my plugs got disconnected from the iPad I ran things from and I just never bothered to set things back up.
I'd like to try it again with the heaters this winter though. Maybe try some other smart equipment.
I started with Mozilla's Webthings gateway, which unfortunately doesn't have much support but had potential. But then I moved to Home Assistant and it's been great. I live in an apartment so I can't get too crazy with installing/modifying things. But what I have now is...
It's pretty simple stuff, but it adds some convenience at little cost to privacy/security.
I honestly don't feel like I can trust any smart home technology.
It feels like anything labeled with "Smart" is a leased object at best, and a ticking time bomb at worst. If it can connect to the internet in any way, then it's probably the latter.
The only things that I would be comfortable making "Smart" are things that won't be expensive if they break down, and that's generally limited to things like lights and curtains. But at the same time, I don't see enough benefit to adding automation to them. modern lights are so energy efficient that if I somehow forget to turn them off during the day it would cost less to just keep them on than to automate them.
Maybe if I had working central AC I would consider a smart thermostat (certainly not a Nest), but someone's always at the house so it wouldn't really need to switch on and off at all.