Relatively new to HA. My partner and I have looked at a house that we are going to renovate. Have thought of building a good stable network with cables. But then it comes to making the house smart. The idea is to use shelly for lights etc. But I’m a bit into running a tablet to be able to control everything. Among other things,
I want to be able to control music in the house on it, the plan is Sonos ceiling speakers, but they are very expensive, so it may need to find another solution. But what is required to be able to control spotify on a tablet, to be able to choose where it should be played? Are there any good “get started” guides on light and smart dashboard?
What I want to control overall is: #Music on different devices. #Lamps #the heat #see temperatures
Get notified if the doorbell ring
Any more smart thing i sholde think about when donig the renovate so i get the house cover:)
I’ve done a lot of renovation, and I have plenty of thoughts and ideas. You may not like them though. Here goes…
Way back when, I wired my house for Ethernet. Coax. Yeah, that never got used. Likewise cable TV and wired phones. So first and foremost, if you’re going to wire anything, run conduit and make it easy to pull new stuff when technology changes.
Along the same lines, consider that home automation/monitoring is like any other technology. Whatever you put in will be obsolete in 18 months. HA gets updated several times per month. Whatever you do today will be of no value at all to a potential buyer down the road, and may even make your house look dated, reducing the value rather than enhancing it.
The good news is there’s lots of technology you can use without hard-wiring it into your home. Use wireless devices and devices which work with standard electrical fixtures and fittings wherever possible.
I would advise to have a lot of USB plugs , ethernet POE, fiber may be.
For sound, there are many solutions even in DIY outside expensive Sonos. You can control via HA of course or via voice or via what you want in fact
About temperature , presence detection PIE or mwave , others sensors , they just need USB power most of the time.
Lights: I use Hue Philips (but need Ethenet cable) everywhere or other hybrid stuff. I would not put any switch if I need to renovate a house but still having power for some uses-cases (displays, table dashboard, nspanel etc) hue motion sensor is giving also temperature. But there are other solution in DIY with mwave and all you want which is interesiting also
the heat … yes it’s possible
Consider ledstrip is some hidden place (you don’t see the ledstrip but only the light)
Try to go also into a matter compatible device as this will be the new reference.
That is a good idee to use USB,
I think i will bulid like a tech cabient, that will have HA server, Ethenet rack, amplifier, and what ells i can come up white.
Lights/ switch i am think about using shelly.
I allso want to sett up a good energy so i can see what things coast.
I have seen that this: Shelly Pro 1PM so maybe goind to use them insed of the reguler “puck” then i can have it all in the same and near the tech cabin and Ethenet rack.
The goal is to have a tablet to controll the house, that can be attatch to wall but allso take it to the kitche to swap song.
presence detection are somting i will use i think on some places.
The big quseitn is i sholde run some 5V / 12V wire to some place IF i whant to add someging later and get the power for it.
r ledstrip is some hidden place what be asswon like in the celling and make a patter of it
About placement of some devices like HA in a cabinet , yes but keep in mind wifi, zigbee range.
If you put a dongle in the middle of the house or wifi , it will be better then put them in the garage far away from where network range is needed.
Be careful on voltage drop with 5V or 12V.
Now you can think with what is exist today … difficult to know about new tech but good idea to have open space for cables and future change.
SnapCast on a raspi 0W is a perfect solution for synced sound on active speakers and it works better than Sonos when you use more than 2 speakers in a room.
Depending on what you mean by “renovate”, I’d echo what others have said.
Conduit, conduit, conduit.
I’m slowly gutting every room of my house and as I do, I run conduit to all device boxes, switch boxes, window frames, door frames, roof soffits, appliances, and anywhere else I think I might ever need access to cable. All conduits per “room” or “area” lead to a central box with DIN rails onto which automation stuff is mounted. That box then has a main conduit down to the basement.
Virtually everything is ethernet, while WiFi is used for temporary stuff or things that may move around.
That is a good advice, i will have zigbee so that i need to think of when router it all up, so i can gett singel all over, maybe use extender on Ethernet? if that exist:S
Thats true… the tech is allways going fast in develoopment
For zigbee, device that are plugged on electricity, not on battery are for most of them like a repeater. I have for instance 3 ikea repeaters (purely gateways) and 4 blitzwolf plugs (energy monitor btw) which give good help on the zigbeee doogle.
With SnapCast you run the server on some device, maybe on the HA server if you run supervised install, and then you have clients on like RPi 0W connected to active speakers.
This setup scale with no issues.
You can have a a RPi 0W per speaker or per speaker set or per amplifier, if you have an amplifier connected.
I have mostly RPi connected to speaker set, but in one place I have an Onkyo amplifier with multi zone speaker setup.
