What should my setup be for a new build home?

Hardware
1

Hi all,

I’m new to Home Assistant and also in this forum, I did check the protocol but if I am not doing something via protocol, apologies in advance and I would love to hear what I should do differently.
I am currently building a new home entirely under my own management. In this home, I would like to lay a foundation with Home Assistant.
I’ve been reading blogs, forums and checking video’s for a while now and trying to determine the best basic setup for my specific situation. Because of that I have a few questions on different topics, hopefully you guys with experience can help me! Just for your information, I have little/no knowledge of programming.

  1. Are there any basic design things that you recommend to include already during the construction of my house?
  2. Home network setup: Thinking of going for a router/firewall (any good arguments for which of the two to go?), switch (normal ports + POE ports), Access points, having Cat6 cabling. Obviously I still need to figure out what specific hardware I’m going for but any comments on the basic setup?
  3. Home Assistant setup: By now I have purchased a mini PC and SkyConnect, is it best to start installing HAOS on this mini PC or go straight for Proxmox or something similar? (As I understand it, installing HAOS directly is more reliable, perhaps for inexperienced users, than via a VM) Right now I don’t know what I would need to run multiple VMs on my mini PC for. In the end I would like to integrate roughly the following things in Home Assistant: Smart relays, temperature/motion/door sensors, probably energy management (heat pump, solar panels).
  4. Camera system: I would like a Reolink doorbell and 2 or 3 cameras, all POE. I want to use these for simple observation so not specifically if Uncle Rick had walked by. With this, would it suffice to purely install a Reolink NVR or is it almost mandatory to also install Frigate or something similar with this?
  5. Relay switches: I would like to use traditional light switches but turn these into smart switches and in addition I would also like smart outlets by using smart relays. In doing so I also want to be able to monitor energy usage for some of these, I have a Neutral wire available. So far the Shelly 1PM seems the most suitable to me (just thought I’d better use a device that didn’t go via wifi but haven’t found any better alternatives). What is your advice in this?
  6. I think Aqara FP2 sensors are interesting but don’t like them needing a power socket, are there/will there be variants on battery or should I better foresee power sockets?
  7. Any other important attention points you would bring to me?

Sorry in advance if things are not clear and thanks for the feedback. I hope you guys can help me!

2

  1. Cabling, especially network cabling. Wireless devices are fine, but it is a finite spectrum that is used, so moving so e devices to cables free of bandwidth for wireless devices and also give better connections for the cables ones. High bandwidth devices should especially go on cables, like TVs, streaming boxes, NAS and computers to mention a few.

  2. Use stand alone APs here, so the router can be placed where it makes sense and the APs where they provide the best coverage. It also makes it easier to exchange the parts then, when new standard becomes important.
    Again cabling APs instead of using wireless mesh is better.

  3. Home assistant can quite easily be backup on one hardware and restored on another, so how you start is not really important.
    A mini PC is probably overkill to just run Home Assistant, so proxmox will eventually be installed anyway. Maybe for frigate, maybe for a media server or something else.

  4. These presence sensors scan every second 24/7, so a battery would die fast. Accept the sockets or go for other similar products, like Presence One maybe.