Personally, I would run CAT 5E cable and not CAT6 cable. The CAT6 cable is much more bulky and a bit more difficult to deal with. You can run gigabit ethernet drops over CAT5 cable, while CAT6 cable can support 10G Ethernet, which is likely overkill for most wallplate drops vs. interconnects to servers or network device trunking.
I’ve done both, and most recently figured I’d “upgrade” to CAT6 cable for some new cable runs, and I now regret that decision (and buying a whole box of cable… and new/different connectors.)
I recommend that you make a thoughtful, deliberate choice here, and not just choose the “latest and greatest” without really thinking of the implications. For example, the reduction in crosstalk in CAT6 cable comes from structures in the cable that manage the physical separation of the 4 pairs of wire from each other. If you manage to crimp the cable while pulling it through holes drilled in wall studs, you might render that mechanism moot if you “kink” the cable too badly or in too many places. Something to think about.
You need to be careful when running any low voltage wire. Sure, cat6 is a little more delicate than cat5e, but that doesn’t mean you can rip cat5e through kinks and around bends. Cat6 is marginally more expensive than cat5e. Limiting yourself to gigabit when that might be all you need now when you could easily upgrade to 10G to marginally future-proof something that isn’t easily replaced is silly.
Having pulled a few thousand feet of wire while wiring a couple of the houses I’ve lived in over time, the mechanical practicalities really do matter. The size of the CAT6 cable is noticeably larger than CAT5e and this means more or larger holes in wall studs. It also poses a challenge in cable management and bulk termination in a wire closet or whatever location(s) you pull cable back to. If you really do end up commited to CAT6 cable, then you should seriously consider more than one distribution point to offset the additional labor and termination complexity.
In my builds, I pull all the CAT5 runs to 110 punch blocks for higher density termination. I can successfully cross-connect gigabit ethernet on the 110 blocks; maybe not actually “legal” but it works.
I would also consider how many devices need in excess of a gigabit/sec of bandwidth? Sure, you might have some aggregation points where more is needed. But that’s probably media servers and similar, and you’d need to consider what residential media server can sustain more than 120 Mbytes/second? And if that really is a bottleneck, you could do channel bonding to get get 1,2,3, or 4 Gbit/sec to a high bandwidth traffic source/sink.
Moving to 10Gb/s ethernet is still beyond commodity pricing these days, much less 40G (and now, 25G which is scaled-up 10G) Ethernet MACs. I use this stuff all the time at $WORK in our data center builds where we uplink a whole rack of servers with 4x40G, moving to 2x100G in some cases. So yeah, this stuff is out there, but you need some moderately expensive hardware on the other end of the wire to source/sink these more intense bandwidth.
Go find some CAT5e cable and CAT6 cable and imagine what bundles of each feels like before you make your decision.
What’s very common in Europe is to use knx.
Switch are not physically connected to bulb or device, but are all connected to a central control that then switch the light or the associated device.
There is also some component to link knx to hass.
I’m in the same boat – planning and spec’ing things for a new house. I’m having a hard time deciding what switches to use. I certainly wouldn’t want to replace 30+ switches a few years from now.
The building would like to install Leviton devices, which seem to be available in Z-Wave, WiFi, and possibly ZigBee though they call it Lumina RF and it’s not clear that it is completely compatible.
I would really stay away from wireless for a permanent installation, some wire going to a central location let you be much more flexible. You can use any standard switch, so when you want to change in 10 years, you wont have to find some old Z-Wave stock ^^
I think that’s good solution for development or small project, to control a whole house, I would look for something more reliable than a raspberry. It’s unlikely it will run for 10/20 years without problem/sd card corruption.
And one bug per year (with a few hours downtime) is more than enough to make the rest of your house hate your installation ^^
Why dont go for Xiaomi Switches? Then you can controll them via HA and via the physical button.
And some WiFi smart plug for window lamps, that you can controll via HA and the button on the smart plug.
Motion sensors/ door senors you can use Xiaomi, sure you need to change battery sometimes but thats not a super big problem.
their new product line does not include raspi but another processing power basically you could use nodered & hass control everything with wired connections.
You still need a server where hass needs to run, so if your server fails…
That’s exactly the point, you need something that run without hass too. Like Knx where you simply define “this switch -> this relay”.
So if hass fail, you can still use the switch to control your house.
And the rest of the time (hass not failing) you can control your relay/pool the switch and relay status, through hass.
Like @Daniel_Gronlund says, the XiaoMi switch are well conceive for that purpose, because they let you turn the light on/off even if the server/connection is lost.
From what I understand about the neuron is that their is a rpi inside so you can run everything you want. So if we run Hass on it we can use or standard switches as inputs and or lights with the relays as output. So when internet is down it still functions. Only downside is that if the rpi crashes nothing works.
I’ve read they are going to offer a new product in 2018 q2
@touliloup XiaoMi switch is nice but then i have change all my switches which is expensive i want something i can reuse my old switches
The Railduino looks interesting, that would be a nice alternative to my own MQTT/Relais setup.
The only thing I’m wondering is, does it support PoE? I noticed it consists of an optional ethernet shield, I’ll have to do more research on that…
@Sennevds It’s a little costly, but I’d go 100% Insteon (with an ISY controller); been using them for years, and they work wonderfully. In the past 10 years, none of my wall switches have ever failed, or needed any user interaction (configuration changes, etc). Plus, they work via wired and wireless connections (non-wifi) and communicate with each other to form a mesh network, a lot like zwave, just more reliable in my opinion. Anyways that’s my two cents.
