I am in the process of building a house and I plan for it to have a lot of smart solutions in it. It promises to be really quite a project based on Home Assistant. Very many total independent circuits. I wanted to advise you on a couple of issues.
The project would involve the creation of a sizable control cabinet, in which there would be controllers. From this cabinet, cables would spread throughout the house. Very many cables. For example, having two light sources in one room, a separate cable would be run to each. As well as to the outlets, which I would divide into category A,B and C (but about that later).
The snag is that such a solution is a considerable cost of wiring, plus a mass of security devices and controllers, which also cost their own, especially today when everything is expensive and sometimes difficult to access.
Preliminary assumptions:
At the outset, I assumed a few rules.
1 - Try to control everything from one place, which would be prepared for a large number of cables as well as thermally (for example, the possibility of setting up air conditioning if the room gets warm).
2 - Solutions based on own server instead of cloud. For various reasons. Today a particular cloud exists, and tomorrow it may not. Over the past few months I’ve had more than once a problem with various devices where you have to reset the app several times each, and sometimes even that doesn’t help. This is certainly no comfort in use. More mundanely - possible lack of internet for a shorter or longer period, but still. And, of course, the backup. You can have in reserve an additional server where quite quickly you can connect it and upload a copy from the previous one (redundancy).
3 - Rely on cable rather than BLE or WIFI wherever you can. And also not have to worry about replacing batteries in detectors.
4 - Monitor what you can(and what is practical). Electricity, water, etc.
Observe and become more efficient in consumption.
The result of the above was
Control devices:
I am not proficient in this market and the only ones I know are Sonoff and Shelly. Such, too, so the devices I took under consideration. Especially cool seems the new Pro series where there is a place for a LAN cable, and that makes me happy. 4PM Pro - great because it’s 4 channels and has power monitoring. Price-wise per channel comes out the most favorable so much that according to the brochure with 16A per channel with regular load on all you have to watch out, because the maximum current already drops to 10A, so certainly for lighting will be ok. For places where more consumption is planned in the outlet I will probably rely on 1 or 2 PM Pro.
Can these devices be completely disconnected from the cloud/internet completely so that, for example, via MQTT, they communicate only on the internal network to the home assistant and store all measurement parameters, etc. for years? Or do you know of any other worthy ones both with and without energy monitoring functions.
Can you recommend something for three phases? Power from 2-3kW (some pump) through 9kW(some stove) to even 22kW(car charger). Shelly 3em can act as a monitor, but I have not seen a device with a relay.
Also, is there an off-the-shelf solution for controlling RGB LED strips with adjustable colors and intensity? To also be compatible with HA.
Switches
As in any home you need switches. According to my assumptions, I would not like to rely on wireless solutions, which I can still afford while being under construction. It also seems to make little sense to run 230V cables traditionally to the switches, so I was thinking about some kind of universal low-voltage bus of 5V or 12V as two states are enough. I was thinking of distributing, for example, a twisted-pair cable, from which individual wires could be used to connect switches. The question is how to sensibly pair it with HA due to the huge number. We are talking about at least dozens of inputs. Also, I was thinking of ordinary reed switches, which would work on the same principle and give a signal on opening/closing doors and windows. Are there any modules from which you can get such a number of inputs? As a fallback, I was thinking of creating some multiplexer that could transmit the pin number to the control unit, only that I have not been in contact with this side and I do not know how complicated it is, for example, to create this thing and it is seen by HA (for example, via MQTT)? The same then would consider, for example, to detect whether it is one short or maybe two presses to distinguish between actions (however, this seems to me still can be forgiven in favor of only being 0 and 1 information).
Distribution of power
In the introduction I mentioned categorizing outlets into A,B,C.
It is my idea to categorize (power) to the device according to its characteristics especially with regard to power backup.
Suppose we have a refrigerator, a TV with a high-power home theater set, an Access Point from the Internet in a particular part of the house, a pump at the fountain, a car charger. We also have some kind of larger UPS or smaller generator at our disposal. Depending on our needs and capabilities, we can determine that, for example, the refrigerator and the outlets into which we usually plug cell phone chargers will be in Group A, which is powered always having a UPS available as well. To B I can plug in devices that, for example, will be turned off automatically for the night (access points, TV, etc.). To C devices for which I do not foresee energy backup, but exclusive power supply from the mains such as a car charger or a fountain pump - no one would want such devices to inadvertently discharge their supply at a moment’s notice. Such initial concepts were formed at the stage of the first plans to extend the electrical system around the house, but at the time of using such advanced flexible solutions, such divisions take on a rather virtual or ideal character, since such outlets can be configured at will and, for example, block the groups in question during a power outage. Maybe in the discussion will fall some more cool thoughts on this issue ?
For me this is over complicated.
As electricity goes leds, tv, phone chargers, refrigerators, computers routers consume barely nothing. You are looking less than 1 kwh daily per device that consume the most electricity.
The only thing in my house on the cloud is Alexa. Everything else is in my basement. (HA server, MQTT broker, NAS server).
Your house will outlive you. Don’t make it impossible to sell because few buyers will even want a smart house, and even fewer will have the ability to maintain a Home Assistant system.
For my point of view smart devices In your house are there so you can run your house energy more efficiently.
You can fine tune your gas or electric heater based on temp in rooms compared to outdoor, you can use a fingerbot to turn a dishwasher or washing machine when electricity is cheaper, you can turn off you lights when noone needs it but…
You can’t expect F1 car to do what it does the best and consume fuel as it’s Toyota aygo.
It is true that some devices consume a small amount of energy. I didn’t want to elaborate in every direction because the post would come out too long, but here it is also about the possibility of control and automation where even power measurement would not make much sense for circuits with lower consumption.
With these APs, it’s more about turning off wireless devices at night and whenever possible and reducing EMFs.
I’m going in the same direction. How long have you owned this solution? Do you experience any problems that something, for example, crashes and requires a reboot?
I hope that the house will outlive me, but just in this matter I think the other way. Technology is moving forward and a lot is changing where just such flexible solutions make it easier to implement something new. You have somewhere to plug in. Why do popular solutions go mainly to BLE and wireless? Because you encounter a lot of resistance in implementation when you encounter the need to drill into walls and create troughs for wiring. That’s why it’s so easy to install light bulbs that already have wifi or detectors that you stick on a surface and replace the batteries once every year or two.
If someone does not want to use such solutions they can always simplify the installation and use more traditional solutions. The issue is only, for example, such switches that will not be adapted to 230V, but to low voltages for control.
However, I am creating a house with myself, my family in mind, wanting to have what I lacked so far in previous places of residence.
I don’t really understand what HDMI is for? Could you please elaborate on this topic?
As for the cable itself, even cat 5e should be sufficient. I run fiber optic cables to my computers (I weld them myself so it’s worth it to me).
However, there is a significant difference in our concepts. I gave the Internet cable as a medium for installations with low voltage and low current to conduct impulses from analog ordinary buttons. I would not want to create separate electronics in each room to collect pulses. Running the cable seems (at least yet) reasonably inexpensive and there is always a spare, since one cable is a possibility for up to 7 independent signals (the eighth is voltage or ground for the others).
I also have a good understanding of what a VLAN is and definitely why it should be separate from, say, a regular home network.
If your last sentence refers to the energy consumption of the system itself (devices, etc.) then you are probably quite right, as I wonder about the fixed maintenance costs.
I haven’t yet had my hands on any of the devices mentioned above, but in the specifications the consumption is given as <4W. Just what does that mean. If we assume that it will practically non-stop draw a similar value, then with quite a number of devices + a server to control the rest and annually it can already be a sizable sum looking at the fact that the days of relatively cheap energy are behind us(at least for the next long years). The situation changes taking into account the installation of PV, but this again assuming that you will have a backup that will also sustain at night / winter.
Poppycock.
You will get more radiation exposure taking a brief walk in the sunshine than you will ever get from all of the wireless devices in your house.
Probably three years. In that time I had to restart the host (an Intel NUC) once.
Hey there, you’ve put a lot of detail in your post and I think you might find this thread useful when considering wiring etc.
I would suggest that the wires will outlast any other component in your smart home so if going wired, it is definitely worth planning. I am not sure which wired solutions are fully open source, and TBH I think that might me at odds with your other design goals … for what benefit? I went fully wired about 15 years ago using proprietary controls (www.idratek.com if interested. The support and quality of the hardware and software is excellent.) While the benefits of wired are reliability, low power consumption and simplicity (no VLAN) be under no illusion that the installation effort is significant. You can DIY it but it will impact your life. If you bring in trades to help you they may well struggle with anything too novel, or they will be a pro installer outfit and will be familiar with one set of technology more than something else … prob not an open source one. However you organise your cables, make sure it complies with the regulations where your live.
Finally I’d recommend splitting your control locations eg 1 per floor at least. I have 2 big ones (node0 ,1) and 2 small ones eg for heating (eg each radiator is wired with a centralised transformer supplying 24V via a relays to each rad). It will save a lot of cable and make it easier to manage.
The biggest consumer of energy is without any doubt heating/cooling follow by a hot water thank. Everything else is migifull. And smart home can’t do that.
To reduce heat or cooling expenses you will have to build an expensive house. You need at least double glazing windows, thick walls made from brick even thicker insulation and this is just a begging.
The concept of passive house was inventited in Germany in the 30s. Last century. But it never got in mainstream usage due to hughe expenses.
There is no smart home in the world that can cut your living cost to a bare minimum. If you think that this is possible with smart house than I think you are on the wrong track.
Different methods of building houses can but those methods are so expensive that nearly a century ago no one use them.
I completely agree that to minimise energy usage then take a Fabric First approach with insulation and reducing air leakage while allowing the house to breathe. I would not be so down about passive House, it is inspirational even if unaffordable for most. When renovating we added loads of insulation which the builders thought was mad inspired by UK code for sustainable homes inspired by PH.
I think smart controls can help reduce costs, my system has different set points for occupied and unoccupied rooms so I only heat what is needed. Every window will have a sensor that will inhibit heating when open. So our 100yr old large house has a significantly less than average heat bill.
