It seems that there are a lot of things to consider before even buying the first smart device. How would you start when you would start over?
Are there any good beginner guides that helped you?
Important points for me are
- privacy (everything should be local, no Alexa-Karens in my home)
- use of open source/free software
- a good variety of smart things I can use (I don’t want to be tied Apple-like to only one company)
Is there a golden way to build a smart home with these factors in mind?
Okay!
Like everyone else “locally” managed devices are 1000x better, faster, more reliable, and less intrusive.
So I’d skip the cheap wifi devices and go straight to matter/thread as that new stuff is a better idea. It’s still in its infancy soooo tough call, for now I’m going “zig bee” and “zwave “ for new devices, but I hope to switch to “matter/thread” someday.
I hate the wall warts, but they’re useful in some places, it’s all about the light switches. When you replace them, everything still works the way you expect and you can automate on top. You don’t want things to “not work” the way people would normally expect them to, so smart bulbs and smart or remoted ceiling fans are a no-go for me.
The system is mostly novelty until you get to the third iteration.
First stage is just “Hey I can attach this to my phone and that’s cool”
Second stage is “voice automation and routines”. This stage you start to automate cool things so that it works more efficiently and the house can have some cool automation that makes things a little easier and allows for “hey siri” parlour tricks.
Third stage is where it gets fun but requires some thought and stability on your system. Now you’re into presence location and motion. I’m just at the beginning of this one now. This is where you start to forget that light switches exist. You no longer ask the voice assistant for almost anything because the lux and presence sensor in your kitchen knows that if there’s not enough light and you’re in the kitchen, the lights should just be on. The motion sensor on your “under cabinet” lighting knows that you’re working at the counter and it should just be on.
Stage 3 is the sweet spot because it just exists and makes sense and you find yourself forgetting that light switches exist into something breaks.
I found that I hate battery motion sensors.
That was a learning for me.
Most people don’t quite get there…. They allow the voice assistants to do some little work for them and then it just gets annoying because the day to day life hasn’t changed enough to warrant the effort that was put into it.
Being able to just forget that light switches are a thing is marvellous and you don’t really feel it until you’re at a friends house and mildly annoyed that the lights need to be touched.
…. And then you realize how little you’ve had to think about stupidities in your day to day because from a functional perspective, they no longer exist.
It’s about putting in the extra effort in the final steps and that’s hard to desire once the parkour tricks work.
I started with a bunch of cloud connected expensive wifi devices that would have all sorts of issues on the consumer crap wifi router I had at the time.
The amount of money I spent on those devices would have been much, much better spent on something non IP based like zigbee or zwave devices with a hardwired hub.
These days I finally have a more pro grade network setup that handles all the Wi-Fi IOT devices I have just fine, but it could have been so, so much simpler.
I always had the high end network, and I still hate them.
Wemo devices randomly stop working, tplink devices don’t give you access to all of the controls/data, myQ just decided to shit the bed, Tuya intermittently shits the bed, all the management apps and their separate credentials are a fucking pain, the integrations are painful and numerous and my zigbee/zwave just keep trucking along.
I started with a bunch of Tuya devices that are almost all flashed over to tasmota etc. by now.
What really got me to actually start with home assistant though, is the exterior blinds controllers I bought. They kept losing wifi after a few days until I rebooted them, but they were hardwired, so every day I would have to turn off a circuit in my house with everything connected to it.
I flashed them with openbeken OTA and now they almost always work and, even if they didnt, they have already rebooted and are working again.