I have a friend with several rental units and I’m hoping to create a Home Assistant setup that works for him. The idea is, he wants to install Z-Wave water leak sensors and smoke detectors in the homes and have them connect to a device that can forward sensor information to a cloud hosted Home Assistant instance (which would aggregate sensor data from all of his rental homes). The one restriction he’s given me is that he does not want to depend on the renter’s WiFi network and prefers to have everything going over it’s own LTE connection.
Is there anyone out there that has done something like this or are there any guides out there that I’ve missed?
As a secondary (less favorable) option, I’d be open to deploying a Home Assistant instance for each rental home, but I feel like managing that can become a lot more difficult over time.
I bought a GL-iNet Spitz GL-X750C4 and a Z-Wave dongle originally, and was thinking it would be possible to setup Zwave2MQTT to forward sensor data to a cloud hosted Home Assistant instance, but I’m having a little trouble getting that going.
Doing this with the Home Assistant images would require that you use some form of LTE router. If you want something self contained then you’d need to go with something like the Docker (or venv) installs.
Personally, what I’d do (and YMMV) is set up a centrally located MQTT and VPN server. Configure the remote devices with a VPN client that auto-connects to the VPN server, and the Z2M system publishes to the broker’s IP address on the VPN. That’s pretty easy to do with PiVPN and Wireguard.
I currently utilize SmartThings hubs in two locations (Home / Work) and have each of these integrated with a single Home Assistant instance. With built-in ZWave / Zigbee it’s worked really well for me to date. FWIW I also leverage a Kasa / TP-Link add-on to manage their wifi outlets via SmartThings as well (which integrates to HA via the same SmartThing integration)
You’d have to figure out how to get the LTE connection setup clearly. Guessing some kind of Verizon/Sprint/whatever carrier device?
Just a little precaution.
Make sure it’s legal before you start doing anything.
I’m quite sure if that was here, it would only be legal if the renter agreed with it.
So before you spend all that money, make sure it’s legal and that the renters are okay with it if it’s borderline.
@Tinkerer setting up a VPN is exactly how I was going to do this, and using OpenWRT on the GL-iNet GL-X750 has that built-in. I’ve also gotten OpenZWave installed on it and recognizing my USB dongle. The only step I can’t seem to figure out is how to install Zwave2MQTT on the GL-X750 or get the devices sending data to my cloud HA instance. Am I overthinking this? I’ve never really needed to work with MQTT before, what is the Z2M system you’re talking about?
@Hellis81 Thank you for that! He is already aware and is including a provision in their lease so they’re aware.
@Markus99 The idea of getting an off-the-shelf device would be great, but I haven’t been able to find one that really satisfies everything I was looking for, which is why I was trying the
Well, that’s a pretty big step That’ll depend on whether OpenWRT can run it. Google suggests you’ve got some work ahead. A Raspberry/Orange Pi of some form would likely be a lot simpler.
That’ll depend on whether OpenWRT can run it. Google suggests