What I’d like to do with our smart home
We Have Smart Lights! So… What’s Next?
So for a while now I have been swapping out all of the lights in our home for smart bulbs. I originally started with Philips Hue Bulbs, then a few from Tesco and some smart sockets that I’ve flashed with ESP Home to put on the lamps that I haven’t swapped out or can’t swap out such as the fish tank light.
Now though I want to do more and I want to make things simpler. I’m constantly being bugged by Mrs Jim that something isn’t working for some unknown reason or one of the bulbs on the chandelier has decided it’s going to stay on. 9 times out of 10 it’s usually my fault as I’ve changed the programming on Home Assistant to try something out and forgot to change it back but on the odd occasion that isn’t my fault, it’s quite frustrating to have to fiddle for half on hour to figure out why said bulb on the chandelier hasn’t turned off when we’ve settled into bed for the night.
So I thought I’d share my plan with you all, as It might give you an idea or two or you might have a solution for me (leave a comment below if you have one)
I’m Ditching Home Assistant
I know, I’ve been on about Home Assistant for a while now and it truly is an amazing piece of software but I only use it as an interface to go between my non HomeKit stuff and HomeKit. I’ve got a few routines on there but they can easily be set up on the Home App.
I’m planning to replace Home Kit with Zemismarts HomeKit Zigbee Hub. There are a boatload of Zigbee products produced by Zemismart that are relatively cheap and have amazing reviews that work with this hub and it won’t be a complete ball ache every time I want to add something new. Plus it means that I can use the Raspberry Pi that I’m currently running it on for other things.
Smart Bulbs
I may have not long finished getting all my bulbs changed over to smart bulbs but they are a mish-mash of different brands and technologies. Some only do warm white while others can cover the whole spectrum of colour (though those bulbs are really dim if they are not on white or warm white) So It’s time to change them all over to a single brand with a single protocol.
The protocol is an easy pick as the Zemismart hub is Zigbee based. Now comes the fun part. Finding Zigbee bulbs that work with the Tuya App that can then pass these to the hub and then onto HomeKit.
The Manufacture is someone I’ve been keeping an eye on for a fair while, to be honest, and it still might be a surprise to some of you. It’s Ikea! Over the last few years, they have been releasing a range of smart devices for ridiculously cheap prices. So when it comes to lighting I’ll be going with their E27 and E14 bulbs. Both are £15 each and cover the full spectrum of colours. In total it’ll cost me £285 which is a heck of a lot cheaper than if I’d gone with Philips Hue (£759)
And to control them I’ll be getting my hands on 10 Zemismart battery-powered 4 Gang Remote Switches (£164.70 for the lot) Some I’ll use to replace the current switches and wiring the switch wire behind the current switches permanently live. Others I’ll be popping on each side of the bed and on my desk.
Sensors
The next thing I really want to do is start adding sensors to our smart home. Nothing drastic just window and door sensors and PIR motion sensors so I can create some basic routines when we leave the house or when someone goes to the loo in the middle of the night.
Again Zemismart comes to the rescue. They have some really cheap Zigbee sensors. First off the door and window sensors. These will come in especially handy as we have three escape artists (that identify as cats) so it would be convenient to know if we have left one of the doors open especially if that door leads to a room where the cats aren’t allowed into. Zemismarts Door and Window sensors £11.65 each so for the 6 doors we have and another 6 for the windows. That comes to a total of £139.80
Next up are the PIR sensors this one is nice and easy as we can set them to detect motion either between certain times so that the hall and bathroom lights come on for example or to only trigger when we are not at home and send us a notification to check if someone has broken in. They are only £12.26 each that’s £85.82 for the whole flat.
Lastly, I’d like some temperature and humidity sensors in all of the rooms, especially with the little one on the way. We can then set an automation that if it’s too warm the heaters will be turned off and a fan turned on. Or if it is too cold turn the fan of and turn the heating on. Zemismart happens to have some of these with an easy to read LCD display for just £15.84 each or £95.04 for the whole flat.
Smart Heating
One thing I almost forgot to include in this list was Smart Heating. I honestly thought I already had until I reread it.
It’s great having heat and humidity sensors everywhere but it would be even better if you could get those sensors to do something, like turning the heating on or off for example.
That’s where Netatmo’s Smart Thermostat & radiator valves come in. For a total of £519.97, we could have each radiator in our flat individually controlled so we are not wasting gas by heating up the whole flat.
The other great thing we can do is if we notice that a window or door is open we can get HomeKit to turn off the radiator to save even more money. There’s no point heating a room when all the heat is going to literally go out of the window.
Smart Locks
Of course, If I’m going to make everything else smart I’m going to make the front door to our flat smart, and Zemismart has just the tool for the job.
This smart lock is meant for internal doors, which is great for us because even getting to our front door feels like getting into a bank vault with the multiple doors we need to get through.
The Zemismart Zigbee Smart door lock is great as it has multiple ways to open the door from PIN code and fingerprint to a card or physical key as well as through the Home app.
have to admit I was a bit bummed out when I found out it was for internal doors only and the reason for this is that it only works on the type of door latch you have on your living room door. A bit of a downside but as I mention in our flat that shouldn’t be too much of a worry (please don’t test that theory for me) and as it’s just £79.12 you wouldn’t really expect it to hold up on a main external door.
Smart Plugs & Sockets
We currently have 4 smart plugs that I picked up on Amazon for £20 (a deal that’s no longer available) and because they are built on tuyas older hardware I have been able to instal Home Accesorry Achrcitech Firmware that treats them as HomeKit native devices. This has helped me move away from my reliance on Home Assistant.
Unfortunately, in the UK there is only one supplier of HomeKit smart sockets and that’s LightwaveRF as they are the only supply for an Apple-only protocol I bet you can guess the downside to these sockets… price! Each socket costs £60 each direct from their website and that doesn’t include the hub that is sold separately (another £125)
So for the 12 double sockets in our flat + the hub, we’d be looking at £845! I think that we’ll be putting those cheap smart plugs on the things that really need them until a cheaper option comes along. Especially as we don’t own the property and if we moved to a bigger home, at least that’s the plan, then we’re probably going to end up doubling that price… at least
Smart Speakers
Well in an Apple HomKit home there really is only one smart Speak we can go for… the HomePod Mini.
I know they are on the expensive side and Siri isn’t up there with Alexa and Google Home when it comes to intelligence but the benefits are tremendous.
Not only can you pair these like other speakers but by pairing them you get Apple’s Spatial Audio through some technical wizardry. Along with that you can easily use Airdrop so set any audio on your iPhone or iPad to the HomePod, be that calls music, audiobooks or podcasts
Don’t get me wrong if apple still produced the OG HomePod they’d be on this list as the audio is fantastic but as it isn’t these will do. I was originally toying with the idea of putting a pair of Ikea’s Symfonisk speakers in each room with a HomePod mini as a voice assistant but when you consider the HomePods minis are £89 each it’s really not worth it when you look at the benefits of pairing them. So to put 2 in every room (except the bathroom which gets one – if I can figure out the power situation) that comes to a total of £801. Not bad for whole-home audio with intercom, calling and texting.
Smart Doorbell & Cameras
Last on my list for the day is a doorbell. We’ve currently got a Ring doorbell which isn’t bad but, as the parent company is Amazon, it has no support for HomeKit. We’ve also given the blink doorbell ago which suffers from the same issue and had a few more connectivity issues.
So whilst researching for this post I went on the hunt for a native HomeKit doorbell. I tell you now there are not many in the UK and the only one that sounds reliable is Netatmo’s Smart Video doorbell, I’ve heard mixed reviews on the Robin Smart Video Doorbell and the Logitech Circle Video Doorbell isn’t available in the UK.
The one downside to the Netatmo Smart doorbell is that it doesn’t support HomeKit Secure Video out of the box but it should be coming in a future update (Netatmo are pretty good at keeping their promises). I suppose the other downside is the price as it’s defiantly not as cheap as the £40 blink wired doorbell as the Netatmo Doorbell goes for an eye-watering £270!
Now there’s no point have a smart doorbell if you don’t have a camera or two for Mrs Jim to see what’s happening in the front and back garden as part of her missing to be a one-woman neighbourhood watch. Eufy has just the solution with the eufyCam 2C Pro pack. It comes with 2 2K outdoor cameras, the ‘HomeBase 2’ for recording your video feeds onto, a bunch of smart features and of course it’s all HomeKit compatible. You get all of this for £300 from the eufy website.
I’ve managed to almost full kit out my home with Smart gear. I know there’s more stuff out there, I really want a Smart Vacuum, but as the cost of this post is already at £3585.45 let’s leave that for another day.
Overall I’m pretty happy with my choices. Sure some of it isn’t as cheap as I’d hoped but with these being HomeKit native products I wasn’t expecting everything to be as dirt cheap as the Zemismart products, I am really looking forward to seeing what else they come out with. I’m already planning the expansion to the post and including the smart vac, smart blinds, smart curtains and a bunch of other stuff I’m sure Mrs Jim would tell me to put back on the shelf if she saw them
So what do you guys think? are there better Homekit Products out there? are there cheaper versions? What should I include in the next part of this list? Let me know in the comments below.
