Savant Conversion

Hi all. I’m finally fed up with Savant. I’ve spent over $80,000.00 for this setup and hardware and it’s only been 7 years and the system is outdated and poor, and the installer/maintainer was so unresponsive that I had to drop them and other candidates told me my system was “too complicated” to take over.

So I really would like to dump it all and take it over in HA. Anyone have experience with this successfully? Could I make the Mac mini Savant host become the HA host ? ( already have a HA Yellow on order ). The system basically has hundreds of light switches, a video/audio distribution, and Alexa or Google Home voice control. Other things like cameras, doorbell, thermostats are non-Savant brands. And the network would need to be redone as they did not set up any VLANs.

I know this may be complicated but any advice, guides would be much appreciated.

I’m a relatively new Savant dealer. I work a lot with HA.

Can you DM me, I can help you with your setup?

Are you able to get Savant switches working with HA?

all due respect to savant (not much due), and savant dealers (more due, especially for the bravery)…

i also nuked a 5 year old savant system that i inherited when buying a house. i tried to fix it myself but savant was too much of a closed box. when trying to get a dealer to fix it, the dealers all said they’d only replace the whole system.

i know the 80k sunk cost is hard to swallow, but it is indeed sunk cost… if you plan to stay there for a while the forward cost may be better. i don’t regret pulling it out of my house.

sorry i’m of little help making your current system work, but i thought i’d share some hindsight with someone who was in a very similar situation (except the lighting and shades were lutron).

regardless, good luck to you!

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Our company’s style of working is to use KNX for all devices (actuators, keypads etc), and server is the only hardware we use from Savant. Both Savant and HA can co-exist and work with KNX.

Since HA UI is more customizable, we offer tablets with HA UI in common areas. And Savant server for remote access.

Currently, we offer HA in our low to mid-end markets. Once our HA portfolio / testing is complete, we plan to offer HA as a standalone server even for high-end villas.

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My humble suggestion would be change the backend to KNX sir, I’m not sure of your current setup.

Savant is a good system from a server perspective. I’ll be more than happy to help you in this regard.

can you clarify what you mean by them being good from a server perspective? don’t understand that…

Definitely pulling it out of my house, for the principle of it at the very least. I hate it due to my experiences with it, and mainly it’s the business model and inadequate service from the “maintainers.”

I’ve already started the process. I can do all the lighting and automation myself as I learn as I go.

My 2 limitations so far are:

  1. I needed someone to help rip out the old networking hardware and help me install a Ubiquiti system but none of the folks I’ve found so far will do that as they all want to install their own hardware they get kickbacks from I’m sure.

  2. I’m not sure how to accomplish the same audio/video distribution currently employed in the Savant setup once I move it to HA.

I appreciate the reply!

a number of us have ubiquiti. me included. it’s not too hard to setup. i’ve done it in several homes now. if you need help, they have a good community on their site and also some of us can help you as well, especially w/ integration to ha. speaking of… i recently converted the controller to run in home assistant, which is pretty cool… worth looking at if you haven’t tried it.

the video/audio distribution is more complicated and i think it’s a lot of personal preference. for me, i went with sonos because i like the audio distribution. my family has always hated the video distribution, so we went with a streaming stick… which has worked out well… especially since homeassistant connects to them all.

I think setting it up the software side will not be bad. It’s the hardware side…there are a million Cat6 cables going to the current router/switch and I’m not convinced they are well labeled for me to be able to tell what is what.