Smart Home automations - anybody using?

[OneMoreFarang]

Just now, KannikaP said:

If you did not try any alternatives, how do you know that you would not like say Tuya better?

 

Maybe I would like something else better.

What I do mostly before I buy something is that I do a little research on the internet. What's available? What to people write about it? Forums, Videos, etc.

When I did this Omada looked good to me. So, I bought the basic parts and tried it. And I liked it. And then I bought some additional parts, and until now all works fine.

Is it the best for small network managements? I don't know. But it works good enough for me and until now I never missed a feature which I had to look up if it is available with another product.

 

And the same principle applies for me to Home Assistant. I looked at alternatives before I bought anything. And then I bought the basics and tried this and that. It always takes time to get used to any new system. I spend the time, and it does what I want.

 

Maybe at some stage I will change to something else than Omada and/or something else than Home Assistant. My cabling is easily accessible so if I have to change something that is no problem for me.

But currently all works fine with above, so I have no reason to look for any better alternative.

 

 

[KannikaP]

3 hours ago, OneMoreFarang said:

 

Maybe I would like something else better.

What I do mostly before I buy something is that I do a little research on the internet. What's available? What to people write about it? Forums, Videos, etc.

When I did this Omada looked good to me. So, I bought the basic parts and tried it. And I liked it. And then I bought some additional parts, and until now all works fine.

Is it the best for small network managements? I don't know. But it works good enough for me and until now I never missed a feature which I had to look up if it is available with another product.

 

And the same principle applies for me to Home Assistant. I looked at alternatives before I bought anything. And then I bought the basics and tried this and that. It always takes time to get used to any new system. I spend the time, and it does what I want.

 

Maybe at some stage I will change to something else than Omada and/or something else than Home Assistant. My cabling is easily accessible so if I have to change something that is no problem for me.

But currently all works fine with above, so I have no reason to look for any better alternative.

 

 

For me to control my Home Devices, no cabling is need, nothing to buy, except the actual devices of course. Tuya syncs with Google Home and my Amazon Firestick so easily.

Maybe your situation is more complicated than mine.

[OneMoreFarang]

12 minutes ago, KannikaP said:

For me to control my Home Devices, no cabling is need, nothing to buy, except the actual devices of course. Tuya syncs with Google Home and my Amazon Firestick so easily.

Maybe your situation is more complicated than mine.

 

Light needs cables.

In the moment I use lots of LED strips with 24V and LED controllers.

Years ago, I would probably have used 5V. Maybe in the future it makes sense to use 48V, or whatever.

 

There are many levels of home automation, from the change of one or a few light bulbs to everything.

My condominium is ready for "everything". Will I need all my empty pipes which allow low voltage power cables, LAN cables and control cables everywhere? Probably not. But now I use already some of them and I have almost unlimited possibilities. I like that - and I like to play around with things like that.

[KannikaP]

15 minutes ago, OneMoreFarang said:

Light needs cables.

I simply replaced the old ones with new 220v bulbs, using the old aluminium surrounds. Now all I see is the bottom of the globe.

[Bandersnatch]

I have various wifi smart plugs that give me energy usage data in the Tuya App, but as I am transitioning to Home Assistant I am moving from WiFi to Zigbee, so I needed a Zigbee Hub.

 

A couple videos I have just uploaded:

 

 

 

 

[OneMoreFarang]

23 minutes ago, Bandersnatch said:

but as I am transitioning to Home Assistant I am moving from WiFi to Zigbee, so I needed a Zigbee Hub.

Can you please explain that part.

I used Home Assistant and until now all my devices use WiFi.

[Bandersnatch]

16 minutes ago, OneMoreFarang said:

Can you please explain that part.

I used Home Assistant and until now all my devices use WiFi.

 

Likewise all my devices use WiFi, however my WiFi smart plugs are shown as unsupported for energy monitoring. I can still use them to schedule when they are on, but I get no power monitoring. A discussion on GitHub said that zigbee works for power monitoring and it does.

 

[clokwise]

29 minutes ago, Bandersnatch said:

I have various wifi smart plugs that give me energy usage data in the Tuya App, but as I am transitioning to Home Assistant I am moving from WiFi to Zigbee, so I needed a Zigbee Hub.

 

FWIW, my home is Zigbee, Z-wave, HomeKit, and Matter free. 100% WiFi, with at least 40 various devices now. I know a lot of people swear by Zigbee, but the advantages it offers are minor, at least for my home. Any hardware I need is available in a WiFi version. Worst case for me - I'm quite fine with WiFi sensors that take 2 seconds to go online whenever they are triggered.

 

These technologies also all require additional hardware which I knew was just going to complicate things further down the line. Also, some of these protocols, such as Zigbee, can be vendor specific - there is constantly a lot of discussion online about which zigbee router works with which devices and which it doesn't. No thanks. My objective was to make home automation simpler, not get more technical - that's just gonna make a bigger beast to tackle when things go wrong later.

 

I had a Matter LED strip controller, so I installed a Matter software router. The controller was buggy as hell, so I dumped it and installed a much cheaper Tuya Wifi version - works perfectly. I have a HomeKit Yale lock. Had to move a HomePod speaker close enough to the door to get the lock to go online. It worked 95% of the time, but with a 2 to 3 second lag. That 5% tho....grrrr. Made a $3 ESP32 bluetooth proxy which covers the entire house and now the lock is super responsive and uptime is 100%.

[clokwise]

5 minutes ago, Bandersnatch said:

 

Likewise all my devices use WiFi, however my WiFi smart plugs are shown as unsupported for energy monitoring. I can still use them to schedule when they are on, but I get no power monitoring. A discussion on GitHub said that zigbee works for power monitoring and it does.

 

 

I have WiFi smart plugs with energy monitoring sensors. They work fine, though I don't care about energy monitoring my devices. The trick is to use LocalTuya, not the default Tuya integration.

 

 

Edited 1 hour ago by clokwise

[Bandersnatch]

2 minutes ago, clokwise said:

 

FWIW, my home is Zigbee, Z-wave, HomeKit, and Matter free. 100% WiFi, with at least 40 various devices now. I know a lot of people swear by Zigbee, but the advantages it offers are minor, at least for my home. Any hardware I need is available in a WiFi version. Worst case for me - I'm quite fine with WiFi sensors that take 2 seconds to go online whenever they are triggered.

 

These technologies also all require additional hardware which I knew was just going to complicate things further down the line. Also, some of these protocols, such as Zigbee, can be vendor specific - there is constantly a lot of discussion online about which zigbee router works with which devices and which it doesn't. No thanks. My objective was to make home automation simpler, not get more technical - that's just gonna make a bigger beast to tackle when things go wrong later.

 

I had a Matter LED strip controller, so I installed a Matter software router. The controller was buggy as hell, so I dumped it and installed a much cheaper Tuya Wifi version - works perfectly. I have a HomeKit Yale lock. Had to move a HomePod speaker close enough to the door to get the lock to go online. It worked 95% of the time, but with a 2 to 3 second lag. That 5% tho....grrrr. Made a $3 ESP32 bluetooth proxy which covers the entire house and now the lock is super responsive and uptime is 100%.

 

What power monitoring do you do in HA?

 

You might have seen in the video that I have a Tuya WiFi biometric door lock in my Mechanical Room it works great.

[OneMoreFarang]

16 minutes ago, Bandersnatch said:

 

Likewise all my devices use WiFi, however my WiFi smart plugs are shown as unsupported for energy monitoring. I can still use them to schedule when they are on, but I get no power monitoring. A discussion on GitHub said that zigbee works for power monitoring and it does.

 

 

That's interesting.

I have several Shelly devices which are connected per WiFi and they allow power monitoring.

Energy Metering - Shop - Shelly

Until now I saw that they show power usage information, but I didn't actually use that data until now.

 

 

[Bandersnatch]

22 minutes ago, OneMoreFarang said:

That's interesting.

I have several Shelly devices which are connected per WiFi and they allow power monitoring.

Energy Metering - Shop - Shelly

Until now I saw that they show power usage information, but I didn't actually use that data until now.

 

After our discussion a few weeks ago about Shelly, I purchased a Shelly 1pm mini

 

 

They really are really small. 

 

 

I will test it in one of my sockets maybe for my induction hob and if it's successful I will purchase more.

 

Shelly make a version for breaker boxes, in fact it's the one HA recommends but they are a bit expensive