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