Hello there!
I just bought my first apartment and I would like to make as much as possible smart and connectable to Home Assistant. I have to redo the whole apartment (electricity, walls, etc) so drilling some extra holes is not a problem ;)
I just have a few questions where I can't really find a good answer to it. I hope you guys can help me :)
First of all, I have a few criteria:
- Everything should be local only (so no 3rd party cloud or accounts)
- Selfhosting is possible (I have a Proxmox server running Home Assistant in a VM)
- It doesn't have to be of the shelf hardware (DIY is fine, if it works as expected).
- I prefer FOSS over proprietary software/hardware (I know that FOSS hardware is difficult to find). If proprietary see point 1 & 2.
- Zigbee/Zwave > ethernet > wifi
- Available in Europe
What I'm struggling with:
- Lighting: What is the best solution for smart lighting? I already have a few Philips Hue bulbs and switches, now with the account restrictions they have I was thinking of buying a Sonoff Zigbee USB dongle off AliExpress instead of using the Hue Hub. Are there any better solutions like Shelly maybe or something else? For LED Strips I was thinking of using WLED on an ESP32
- Smart blinds, I already found some smart blinds (Like the one from Ikea) but they all work on batteries. As I have to redo the whole apartment I would like to have something that I don't have to charge every few months.
- Smart plugs: Maybe any in-wall/out-wall outlet that has the capability to see electricity usage that you recommend?
- Audio: I would like to have some multi-room audio as I really like to listen to music. I have 4 rooms that I want to control the music in. I was thinking to buy 4 old Sonos Connect AMPs Gen 1 from eBay, than I saw that they are not compatible with streaming music from my Navidrome (subsonic server) using HA. Is this true? Also I found a promising project called Snapcast, is it good?
Sorry for the long post, thank you so much for your time! If you have some tips and tricks you want to share that will be kind of you :)
I'm a very much beginner on this and I'm just upgrading an old(ish, latest big remodel is from 90-91) house, so for me it's important to have an solution which can extend on the existing wiring. I have couple of HeatIt Z-DIM2 dimmers and couple switches from TechniSat (altough these are pretty much impossible to get from Finland which would be nice for warranty and such). The best part for me is that you'll still have the actual light switch, and on my case even the same rockers and covers from old ones, so you can either rely on automations with movement and light sensors and you still have the option to interact with lights by physically pushing buttons and turning knobs.
I also recently switched one of our floor heating thermostats to z-wave one (HeatIt Z-TRM3) with the same principle. It functions just the same than old one, so you can interact with it physically and then there's the option to run as complex automations as you wish on the background. Personally I don't like to rely only on (local) server and interface on my phone/tablet, since it's often more convenient just to push a switch on a wall than open my phone and find an app on it (but the option to control stuff via app is nice).
Z-Wave has european store (shop.zwave.eu) and I'm pretty happy doing business with them. Couple of B-stock (customer returns and things like that) got RMA'd but beyond that they've been pretty reliable and warranties seem to work. Zigbee is something I'm planning to add, but for me they're not a priority as there's a lot to do for optimizing electricity consumption with existing hardware.
For DIY side of things I have couple of ESP32 based chinese knockoffs I'm planning to use with DHT22 sensors and potentially some LED strips, but that's somewhere in the future. I also tinkered a bit with MySensors (mysensors.org) but NRF24L01+ transreceivers I got from ebay (dirt cheap, less than 1€ each) are apparently some counterfeits or factory rejects, as I didn't get them to work reliably at all even from one end of the desk to another. Specially from ebay the price point of those is really tempting to add a ton of sensors to the system, but in my experience cheaping out on these is just a waste of money. I'm not that experienced with electronics tho, so maybe someone more experienced can give a more educated answer on these.
For smart plugs I have two POPE700397 to plug in random things. I got them to control car engine/indoor heaters and for that they've been really nice. I just need to work with home assistant addons a bit to get the scedule management to work properly with a smart phone. The stock timer on HA is a pain in the rear to manage with a touch screen, with keyboard and mouse it works just fine, but I don't want to open a computer whenever I need to adjust times for those.
Hey, thanks for your detailed comment :) That Z-Wave thermostat looks really clean. I'll try to order those. I agree with you, you should always have a simple physical button to control something instead of only relying on an app on your smartphone.
I didn't knew about the Z-Wave store, looks that they have good prices. I see you can only buy as B2B? Not that this is an issue for me.
MySensors looks really fun, I might order some parts to tinker with :)
Hm… I've also purchased everything from them as B2B, but I'm pretty sure you can checkout without retail login, just add stuff to the cart and checkout with paypal.