PLANNING OUT MY NEXT SMART HOME UPGRADES

Part 2 of Accidental Smart Home Week
In my last post, I had a look at different energy monitoring solutions that would work with Home Assistants new Energy tab. I thought I’d continue the smart home theme this week by exploring how I can upgrade our smart home past the smart bulbs and smart plugs we have already. I’ll be looking at a variety of solutions that would be great for us now but also in the future too, for when we own our own home, so consider this research for an ongoing long term project.

Light Switches
Do you know what the most frustrating thing is about having a Smart Home? It is the people who live in it. There is nothing worse than going to turn a light on from the comfort of your seat to find that someone, usually Mrs Jim, has turned the light off at the switch on her way out of the room. I’m 75% she does it on purpose. So to stop this from happening in the future the first thing on my list is going to be Light switches… and that’s where the trouble starts too.

Here in the UK, most homes have their lighting circuits wired with a single live wire (common) providing power to the switch and then a wire from the switch to the light fixture and then the neutral is taken from the output of the light back to your fuse board/consumer unit. This is a bit of a nightmare when it comes to actually find smart switches as almost all of them require a neutral wire at the switch.

There are a number of ways around this problem though. The first being completely rewiring of your home making sure to have a live and neutral wire at each switch. This option is only really viable if your house already need a rewire or you are renovating your home.

The next is to move some wire around in the ceiling rose (the thing your light dangles from – check the image to the left for a standard wiring diagram) so that your smart light switch has a permanent live and neutral feed and doing the same for your light fixture. I’m pretty sure this is at least frowned upon but from a technical standpoint, this would work perfectly so long as you had a smart bulb in your fixture. It’s a bit of a pain in the backside if you rent though as you will need to remember to swap these back when you replace the switch with the original one when you move out.

There’s an even easier way though. You can now get Smart Switches that don’t need a neutral wire… Did you just hear all of the UK’s smart home enthusiasts celebrating? I know I did. These switches come in two main flavours Wifi & Zigbee whilst neither of them has to worry about power limits as they will be wired into mains power, the wifi modules will send traffic over your existing wifi network.

This might not be a problem if you have dedicated hardware for your Smart Home Wifi but if like me you only have one wireless hub having all these smart home devices connecting to your WiFi will really slow your wireless network down. So in this instance, I’ll be going with the Zigbee switches.

I found this Lonsonho 3 gang switch on the Blakadder Zigbee Database that’ll connect to home assistant with the help of a USB Zigbee interface with the help of the Zigbee Home Automation plugin. I’m still looking for something similar but with rotary nobs on the front so lights can be easily dimmed but without making something myself somehow I think I am stuck for the moment.

Heating
The next thing on my list is a way to control the heating in the flat. but rather than just having one thermostat I would like to be able to control each room individually to keep the gas bill as low as possible.

Having looked at a vair few options I finally settled on the Netatmo Smart Thermostat and Smart Radiator Valves. Whilst they are a little more expensive than other options such a tado I don’t pay any ongoing fees to use some of the features.

These thermostats work with Apple’s HomeKit and also have a Home Assistant integration (though it does use the cloud) so setup should be relatively simple especially as they have instructions for most types of radiator installation and accord to the boiler checker these are compatible with our boiler.

Smart Blinds
We are very lucky to have massive windows in our flat but that does come with a couple of downsides. The first being that it can get a little cold in the winter as due to the building being grade 2 listed it’s almost impossible to get double glazing. The second being that it can get ruddy bright.

To solve at least the second problem (and hopefully a bit of the first problem too) I’m heading to one of my favourites shops… Ikea.

Not long ago Ikea introduced their Fyrtur range of Smart Blinds. They come in a variety of sizes (though they can’t be cut down to size) and they also have two variants, one that lets some light through and their blackout blinds. As both of us suffer from migraines from time to time I’ll be going with the blackout versions.

These blinds work with Apple’s HomeKit natively but can also be controlled via Zigbee too so I can have them directly via Home Assistant.

Smart Speakers
We are always watching something on the TV or have music on when we are doing something so Smart Speakers are a must. For these were are back off to Ikea to pick up a bunch of their Symfonsisk speakers.

They come in three designs a thin bookshelf speaker, a table lamp and a picture frame that you can’t change the picture on.

The speakers are made in partnership with Sonos so the sound quality is fantastic but unlike the Sonos speakers, the price is actually reasonable. They also work alongside other Sonos speakers and will work as rear speakers in a surround sound setup… I’m a bit annoyed that you can pair four of the Symfonisk speakers together to get surround sound but I get Sonos have still got to make money somewhere.

Personally, we’ll be going with 2 bookshelf speakers in each room (except the bathroom where they’ll only be one). As much as I like the idea of the lamps Mrs Jim thinks they look horrible and the picture frames would be great but the designs aren’t to our liking

Smart Lock
Next on my list of cool things for my house… I mean smart home choice is a Smart Lock. This is going to need a bit of work I’ve come to realise.

First things first you need a certain lock type, especially if you don’t want one that looks like a 2 years old melted lego project. In the UK the easiest compatible lock type to get your hands on is the Euro Style Cylinder type. So I’ll need one of those to replace the mortice style lock. The great thing about this style is that rather than having to change the whole thing when we move out I can just change the barrel 😁

Then it’s onto the Smart Lock itself and whilst we don’t have August Smart Locks over here in the UK we do Have Yale (whose parent company Assa Abloy owns August). They have recently released the Yale Linus Smart Lock.

It’s not the cheapest smart lock by any stretch especially as you’ll need to buy an adjustable cylinder so it’ll work with your Euro Cylinder Lock and then the Yale Connect Hub too.

Motion, Windows & Door Sensors
Lastly, for now, and the thing I almost always forget but that makes a real difference when it comes to automation is the motion window and door sensors.

For these, I’ve gone with Aqara’s Zigbee Motion & Luminance sensor and their Door & Window Sensor. Partly because they use next to no power from the battery but mostly because they are relatively cheap.

I plan to put d&W sensors on each of our windows and all three doors we have to go through to get out of the flat. I’ll be putting the Motion and luminance sensors in each room too though the hall one will probably get the most use detecting motion over night when we go to the loo (or to raid the fridge) when I’ll use it to put the light so on low so we can see where we are going. The others (especially the living room) will mainly be used to get the brightness of a room so if it gets a bit dark the lamps will come on.

That’s about everything that I’m looking into at the moment but I’m sure more will catch my eye as we go forward, for example, whilst researching I came across various little buttons that may come in handy next to the bed to set the bed time or good night scenes.

Let me know if you think I’ve missed something? Have you found a random smart device that you think I may find interesting? Let me know in the comments below and I’ll be sure to look them up.