Hello HA community,
My first post and I’m looking for a lot of feedback and input.
Situation:
I am completely renovating an apartment. It’s a 2-bedroom apartment at the Belgian coast, that will be used by my family and me, but that will also be rented for periods of minimum 2 weeks. Obviously, I want to incorporate a healthy amount of home automation. This is a clean slate: I’m in planning stage but need to finalise in a week or two. Budget: if the investment makes sense and is reasonable, I’ll do it. I have already decided to go with Home assistant :-).
Personal Home Automation experience:
One large house with FIbaro/ZWave, which, quite honestly, has been and somewhat continues to be a pile of frustrations.
One small installation with OpenHab on a Ras Pi B3+: again, some frustrations since it’s ‘marketed’ as a solution that requires nu linux/technical skills, but reality was far from that and it proves to have unreliable elements. However, coming from ZWave, I was thrilled to see how easy it was to add IP based switches and plugs. So the more open nature is really an asset.
My biggest question:
For my first installation I decided for Fibaro and ZWave some 5 years ago. Back then that seemed to be the best solution. After 5 years, I have come to discover that ZWave is not as reliable as I would have hoped: nodes die, nodes go offline and need to be woken up manually, and most important: if for whatever reason, I want to change the central controller, I will have to first unpair and then pair the entire range of ZWave modules again to a new ZWave controller. As far as I know there is no way to avoid that? Given that I have over 150 modules, you can imagine the nightmare scenario this poses… I chose to call that "Controller lock-in".
Zigbee? No experience but I’m assuming the similar controller lock-in situation applies…
And then comes the wave of Wifi/ethernet modules that started to appear en masse lately (Sonof, Wemo, TP-Link and all the Chinese options that are flooding the market…). They seem cheaper, they use a protocol I’m familiar with and that I can more easily manage in my LAN with MAC/IP, etc… Most important: there’s no controller lock-in. The flip side: it’s Wifi, so there is an unreliability factor as well as a security risk.
Hence my question to the experts here: what do you recommend? Should I go with Zigbee or Zwave again? Or is it advisable to go to IP/Wifi based modules?
By the way: I know this was already discussed on the internet and somewhat here on this forum, but I wanted an UpToDate set of opinions from the HA enthusiasts and experts here.
Next Question: A call for inspiration and ideas:
I have a pretty good idea of what I would like to create as a setup, but outsider ideas are more than welcome. Here’s my current thinking:
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All light points are controlled, many dimmable
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LED strip light accents
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Multi-Room audio. Not stuck on any particular brand, but I’m currently an Alexa user and would like some Alexa control over the audio, as well as Echo’s here and there for voice control of music/HA.
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Door video camera
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Connected door lock that allows me to activate/deactivate temporary access codes (and log code usage by for example cleaning staff) for tenants who rent for a few weeks.
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Alarm system integrated with HA to be able to remotely activate and deactivate.
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Heating control that allows me to control the apartment heating remotely.
Any other suggestions? Recommended solutions/equipment/modules/ do’s and don’ts?
Sorry for the long post, really looking forward to your thoughts!
Thank you,
AP