Australia: Building a house - what should I install 2025?

Hardware
1

Hi folks, I’m building a new house in 2025/2026. What should I plan to install inside the walls, beyond cat6 runs? What should I do for light switches? Any power considerations? PoE is nice, but it’s not common on ESP boards.

Some context:
I’m a long time HA and esphome user. My current house has a mix of the following cobbled together over time:

  • ESP8266/32 sensors using wifi (unifi AP network)
  • A handful of Shelly wifi switches behind wall-mounted momentary light switch
  • Many zigbee sensors/lights using zigbee2mqtt
  • A few linux/rpi servers for multi-room audio and NAS movie streaming stuffs (not so relevant on this forum)

Thanks

2

Everything should have a manual switch which will work even if HA isn’t. The house should be fully functional as a “dumb” building.

1 Like
3

Even better than just cable runs, consider conduit in the walls between floors and rooms, for maximum flexibility at any point down the road. Use it for cat6, door/window sensors for an alarm system, audio/speaker cables, and anything else you can.

4

It depends a lot on how much time an work you want to put into it.

A lot of the new home automation system I have seen just run 24vdc to everything. Lights, switches etc. Once you have 24v you can run LEDs for lights or screens/switches for control. Everything would have an esp32 running ESPhome in it.

A more simple option is to run 220v to everything and use esp32 bases switches.

Wifi is so good these days you don’t need much CAT6. Just enough for a few PoE Ubiquiti access points.

I really like the idea of 24vdc. That is what I would do.

5

I Would all so run cat 6 to each window. so you can pump 12 v to each and contrl blinds

6

Agree. I have Sunreacher zigbee dimmers or breakers behind every light switch (Clipsal Saturn push buttons). Every light can be controlled manually or through HA via z2mqtt.

1 Like
7

Thanks everyone for your thoughts.

I think nothing too outlandish - a bunch of cat6 to all major living spaces, and rely on wifi for the rest.

I’ll look into the 24VDC with the electrician, but it’s probably easier to either just use 240v with transformers where necessary, or PoE

8

I don’t kknow Australia electrical codes, but in the US, anything below 70V is “low voltage” and not regulated by code, except that line voltage and low voltage cannot be in the same outlet or switch box. (Some municipalities have added low voltage codes to their local codes).

If your codes don’t mention low-voltage wiring, then that means you don’t need permits, inspections or a licensed electrician to install it.