Am i making smart choices during house renovation?

Hardware
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Hi HA community — long-time reader, first-time poster. Renovating my Irish home and would love advice.

~1 year HA experience. Happy with ZigBee, curious about Z-Wave, less keen on Matter. Unifi + TrueNAS homelab; running plenty of Cat 6a during the full rewiring.

Goals: local-only, WAF-friendly, budget-conscious (build costs are painful already!).

Planned so far:

  • Viessmann heat pump + UFH — cloud polling :disappointed_face: any workaround?
  • Ideal Clima fan coils - local HACs integration with ESP32
  • Sigenergy solar — local modbus HACs integration.
  • Vent-Axia MVHR — HACs integration looks promising
  • Zooz switches + dumb dimmable LEDs — gotchas?
  • LED counter strips in kitchen/bathroom - Ikea?
  • Presence sensors (battery, not PoE?) for lighting automation
  • Smart lock (leaning Unifi)
  • SmartWings blinds — best value/local option?
  • Motorised Velux
  • Unifi doorbell/cameras (or Reolink to save money?)
  • Alarmo vs traditional alarm? (Might have to tell insurance we don’t have one)

Open questions:

  1. Worth a Shelly Pro EM at the fuse box, or is solar inverter/smart meter data enough?
  2. Smart plugs / outlets — one for washer notifications, maybe more for vampire loads. Worth it?

Thanks for reading!

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  1. if you do have real time smart meter data (and solar) already available, Shelly EM likely doesn’t offer you any additional benefits.
  2. be aware of smart plug current ratings, especially for non resistive loads.
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Get decent dumb LED strips & pair them with a zigbee LED controller (I like BTF Lighting). Don’t bother with RGB - the novelty will wear off after a month (ask me how I know). Get the CT version which allows you to transition from Warm to Cool White - that’s much handier in a kitchen.

Not many battery MMwave sensors to choose from. It’s either the Aqara FP300 or the Zemismart ZPS-Z1. I have the FP300 and while it’s battery is still reporting 100% after 9 months, the latest firmware updates have nerfed it so that it no longer reports presence reliably on mmwave while at the same time firing false triggers on the PIR.

For PoE, the only one I’m aware of is the Everything Presence Pro, but don’t have direct experience with it.

Traditional alarm with a konnected.io board? That way you get the smarts without sacrificing insurance coverage.

Worth it for washer/dishwasher notifications (obviously get power monitoring plugs). Not so much for vampire loads. A smart plug is a vampire load in and of itself, so depending on what device you’re monitoring, you might be wasting more energy than you’re saving.

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I’d recommend having a look at openenergymonitor.org. these guys really know what they’re doing. You can have a energy monitor that monitors 6, 12 or 18 circuits. What I really like about it is that it is very accurate. Also look into their heat pump monitors.

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True, but smart plugs are also useful for extending ZigBee range so you may be able to combine with appliances you want to monitor.

@homeopathyAssistant

I’m very interested in this topic as you are a little ahead of me so thanks for posting.

For power monitoring if you are able to use the Hildebrand Glow CAD, it can be setup to work locally.

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Opening topic like this without saying where is your house located might lead to confusion.
Also, decide if you want to go with all certified devices or not. This is international forum…
And post if you are re-doing the whole electric wiring from zero.

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Pretty sure that’s covered in the opening paragraph.

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I agree, my mistake.

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try to see if your model has a modbus port or if the wifi GW has port 502 TCP exposed.

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Good point. I hear modbus is pretty hot right now :wink: Man, i love home assistant. May Nabu Casa forever be protected from Big Tech aquisition.

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Mention of my Ireland location was easily missed. To your other query I also said

so luckily in a good position for lots of PoE, although i still need to get the appropriate Unifi switch.

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Thank you both, had not heard of these. As Karosm pointed out I might be able to get the energy monitoring and control needed with the solar/battery, the Sigenergy Gateway looks to provide this but I haven’t fully researched.

Good shout, will investigate. Thank you also for sharing your mmWave experiences.

Very much appreciate everyone’s comments and suggestions thus far, this is super helpful.

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Jibril here, I run EnergyMe. We’re a startup building open source energy monitoring hardware, now shipping EnergyMe Home to over 20 countries with close to 100 units already installed.

You can see photos, 3D renders and more on energyme.net, and the full open source design on GitHub. Since you’re rewiring anyway, it’s a good moment to plan a slot for circuit level monitoring rather than retrofitting later.

It covers up to 16 circuits from one board, works fully locally, and has a Home Assistant integration.

We’re also launching a portal for those who want remote monitoring, cost analysis, CO2 emissions, appliance recognition and solar/battery sizing advice, entirely optional.

Happy to help with wiring or clamp placement questions!

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On the Zooz switches — you asked for gotchas, and the real one isn’t the switches, it’s what they lock in.

My advice: wire it as a star. Every lighting circuit, every switch drop, every sensor position home run back to the board. In-wall modules do the opposite — the switching lives at the wall, and the board can never take over.

Do the star and the board becomes the only thing you ever have to touch again. Plain impulse relays to start with, so the house behaves completely normally from day one with no controller at all. After that you can put in literally anything: a DIY ESPHome setup, a commercial system including KNX, an industrial PLC — Siemens, whatever — or swap between them in ten or twenty years. All of it is a board job, never a rewire.

Since you’re pulling Cat 6a anyway, pull it so one cable can carry both bus and power: RS-485 on one pair, common on a second, 24 V doubled on the other two. That suits a field-bus device, PoE or a plain sensor without deciding today. Separate conduit from the 230 V, and land them at the board rather than daisy-chaining room to room.

Run one to every position where you’d otherwise fit a battery sensor too. ShadowFist’s FP300 is the case in point — degraded by a firmware update, and still needs batteries changed in a ceiling.

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Really appreciate the insight. So would dumb dimmable LEDs, dumb momentary push button switches and a Shelly Pro Dimmer 1PM per circuit be advisable?

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I’m in Ireland and did a whole house renovation recently. I went for a fully wired KNX solution - expensive but worth it for the reliability. But at least try to avoid battery powered devices, having to change them will quickly become a chore and a source of complaints from family when devices stop working.
Make sure your consumer unit has plenty of free space to allow for future expansion. I installed 5V and 12V Meanwell DIN rail PSUs and ran cable throughout the house to power devices such as MMWave sensors.
Heat pump is a Mitusubishi EcoDan - great integration with an ESP32 installed internally. MVHR is Vent-Axia - I just use multi-channel relay to switch modes, need to look at HACS solution.
Blinds are Somfy 240V motors wired to KNX blind controller - they just work!
Huawei solar array with batteries - very good integration for this, but I would go with SigEnergy now.
I have a lot of LED strip lighting wired to QuinLED controllers. I used recessed profiles in the ceilings for background lighting - I get lots of comments on this. 240V dimmable LED spots everywhere for main lighting.
Try to wire up as many of your devices as possible, you will only get one chance to easily run cables, so do it now.
Best of luck with the project, it can be stressful!

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Thank you for the detailed response, very much appreciated. I like the idea of future proofing using KNX. I hadn’t heard of it before the replies to this thread. It appears more geared toward commercial applications, was there a substantial cost for installation and compatible equipment (such as mmwave sensors)? Do you recommend any suppliers you used in Ireland during the reno? What dimmer switches did you end up using?

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For the viessmann heatpump, take a look at GitHub - open3e/open3e: connects E3 (Vitocal, Vitodens, VX3/Vitocharge etc) controller through CAN or DoIP via local access · GitHub. Haven’t tried it myself yet, but planning to, because even though the vicare integration is getting better, it’s cloud bound and so doomed to be shutdown sooner or later.

I’m also seconding KNX for base functionality. According to my electrician, a “dumb” installation is not really much cheaper than a KNX one, because you can go for touch or multi-button switches instead of having 2-5 switch arrays hanging at every door for light/blinds/room thermostats. And you can always remap the functions of your KNX switches, with dumb switches you’re stuck with what you planned.

As for dimmer switches, you have those integrated into the room controller, for example on my busch+jaeger tenton I can freely map functions to buttons, like pre-defined light switching, scenes, dimming, blinds, thermostat setttings.

I went with KNX for light, heating and blinds, integrated in HA via the great KNX integration, so my logic lives in HA, but the basic functions will still work even if I die an nobody can be bothered to take over.

Basically, I made sure to have 5-wire light cabling, so that I have at least one line switched by the light actor and one permanent line for my zigbee lights. So pressing the button on the light switch turns on the black wire, the state change is detected by HA and HA then turns on my zigbee light. Re-wiring the light fixture to use the black wire instead of the brown will make it switchable without HA.

I still have to prepare a project version which has thermostat controls enabled locally, because I ran out of buttons for other comfort functions (like controlling my 5 blinds and 4 lights from every corner of the combined living space), but that’s something for a later stage. And if you go with touch switches, the number of functions is nearly infinite. I’m just old-school and like tactile buttons.

I wouldn’t write off battery sensors for non-essential stuff though. Zigbee door/window contacts (with vibration, those without don’t report the battery correctly, at least not via z2m) running on CR2032 and hygrometers running on CR2040 last about a year on a single cell, so I’m not seeing it as much of a chore. The installation effort (and cost) for a fully wired KNX version is much higher, and KNX-RF sensors are more expensive than the tuya zigbee stuff, but that’s another option if you want to go full KNX. Bonus is that you can add them as you go instead of having to plan it beforehand (and inevitably forget something).

Definitely run CAT6e cables to each room at least, maybe even a dual line here and there. I currently regret not putting more than one LAN socket into my living room.

Since you use unifi, make sure to run enough cables for hotspots. Depending on your wall materials at least one per floor. Unifi has a planning tool for that in the UDM web portal where you can draw your floor plan and specify wall materials and thickness, then position your AP on it and see if you get enough coverage or any blind spots.

As @Dmitrydr says, make sure all your cables run back to a single room, no weird daisy-chaining.

And don’t skimp on sockets, at least 2 in each corner of a room. Having to buy and hide power strips is a pain and won’t save you much in the end.

Oh and about KNX programming: buying the ETS Home programming software is much cheaper than asking your electrician to do the programming. Providing you’re willing to learn how KNX works, but it’s not really that hard and there are enough guides on youtube to walk you through. As an example, just creating a base project structure would have cost me around 500€, that’s already more than the ETS6 Home license which is available with a discount regularly. The only con to programming KNX yourself is having mutual blaming sessions with the electrician when something doesn’t work. (“Your programming is wrong!” “No, your wiring is wrong!” yada yada yada)

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No problem, I know how painful home renovation can be. We started off with intending to replace the heating system and windows. What we ended up with was a shell of a house, with every pipe, cable, window, door and ceiling removed!

I originally had a mixed Z-Wave/HomematicIP/ESPHome setup and, while it worked reasonably well, it was not consistent. Automations such as lighting would respond instantly some days, and on others there would be enough of a delay, that you would be reaching for the light switch. This was at least partly due to the concrete block construction of the house - including upper floors and internal walls. Not good for signal strength.
Secondly, was the battery issues - every week there seemed to be a device needing a battery replaced. And when it’s a Z-Wave door lock that won’t open or a TRV that won’t heat a room, my family was not impressed.

So, wireless and battery operation were out.My research led me to KNX, which seemed to tick all the boxes. It’s a fully wired system, and there seemed to be a lot of manufacturers supporting it. Most importantly there was a Home Assistant integration supporting it.

Installing KNX has completely solved those problems. Response is immediate, and it works every time.

While KNX can and is often used in commercial applications, it is popular for home use in mainland Europe and in the UK. There are a number of installers in Ireland, a quick search will find them. Also, you can buy the devices and install them yourself. I decided to do it myself, as I had almost a year before construction started to plan everything out..

However, there is a steep learning curve with this technology. Some of the downsides are:

Cost: The biggest barrier to entry is the requirement to buy the configuration software - ETS. I bought the Pro version, which costs €1,000, but is often on discount for around €700. You can get the Home version for €350 plus VAT, which allows up to 64 devices, sufficient for most home projects.
The devices themselves can be expensive, but if you just go with wall mounted switches with KNX input actuators behind the switch, it keeps the price down. Fancy wall mounted multi-function devices can be very expensive.
Wiring: KNX uses a two pair twisted pair cable that can be connected in a star or point-to-point configuration. This replaces all the cables that would normally go to your light switches, thermostats, etc. The switching/dimming is done by KNX actuators back at the consumer unit, so your electrician has to run say, each light on/off cable to the actuator instead of the wall mounted light switch.
This is a huge change, so you need to have your electrician on-board with this. Also, greatly increases the number of wires terminating in your consumer unit, so you really need a specialised unit that allows for this.
Bear in mind that if you are selling the house in the future, this might put some people off, as it would be impossible to revert to traditional wiring without major work. Also, if you get someone to do the installation for you, make sure you get a copy of the project file, so that it can be reconfigured in the future.

OK, that’s more than enough from me for the moment! Let me know if you have any questions. If you want, I can give you an outline of what else I did with the renovation, and what I would change now after 18 months.

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Since you’re already getting a PoE switch I’d run a cable to wherever you might want a wall tablet later. You can power it with a PoE splitter, it’s much cleaner than a wall charger.