Just bought the green home assist for my new house. What would u do before u started if u had the chance? What thermostats would u use? I have cat 5 cable ran through out the house so what cameras should I use and what door bell camera. Thanks ahead of time for answers
A little searching in the forum should give you what you’re looking for. Here are a couple of threads that might be helpful:
Looking for perfect light solutions! - Configuration - Home Assistant Community
The most useful sensors? - Hardware - Home Assistant Community
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Welcome!
I’ll focus on the thermostat question. In my climate, heating is a critical function. I actually had “smart” thermostats before I started with HA. Normally, I’d want everything controlled by HA to be totally local - no dependencies on the vendor’s cloud. But I’ve kept my old thermostats.
Let me explain. As good as HA is, it is still in active development. It can and does fail, from hardware issues, breaking changes, and my own bumbling and tinkering. I can control my thermostats from HA when it’s working, but a problem with HA will not keep them from functioning.
Of course if heating or cooling isn’t critical in your climate, then temperature sensors, relays and other devices controlled by HA are all you need to maintain your inside environment.
Another personal choice I’ve made is to keep my security camera system separate from HA. I think of these functions as unrelated.
I have an old NVR which manages my cameras quite well, without impacting HA’s performance or, again, being subject to frequent changes. Just looking at this month’s HA update thread, I’m glad all those video stream related problems don’t apply to me.
Admittedly, I need to upgrade my camera system. There are all kinds of newer capabilities which that would bring me. But the easiest and most reliable path forward for me would be to update the NVR software with one of the new, open-source apps which will give me that new functionality without impacting my HA system.
To summarize, I like to think I use HA for what it does best, and also look for best-in-class solutions for my HVAC and camera systems. And if done right, I can still access these other systems through HA.
Is it cat 5 cables or cat 5e cables?
The difference is big.
Cat 5 can only run 100mbit/s, while cat 5e and higher can run 1000mbit/s.
Cat 5e is actually not an approved standard, but the organisation behind that standard was extremely slow to develop the cat 6 standard, so cat 5e became the de facto standard for 1000mbit/s cables.
For the camera part: Reolink has a nice integration and good features