Which products to buy in New Zealand?

Hardware
1

Hi everyone, I’m interesting in home automation, but I’m struggling to figure out what products I should buy in New Zealand. I’ve set up Home Assistant in the past, but haven’t used it for a little while. I want to get more serious about it and finally figure out a good set of products that work well together.

Here’s what I currently have in my house:

  • Xiaomi ClearGrass air quality monitor
    • Bought while I was in Malaysia. Uses the Qingping+ app. Completely walled off ecosystem, seems to be unsupported now. Doesn’t seem to integrate with any other products (not even my Xiaomi air purifier.)
  • Xiaomi air purifier 3H
    • Controlled via Mi Home app. Don’t know if I can get this to work with any other products (or home assistant)
  • Smanos K2 DIY home alarm kit (supports Z-wave)
    • Uses the smanos home app
    • The alarm functionality works really well. I have a schedule set up to turn on “home mode” every night and turn it off in the morning, so if anyone opens our front door or balcony then the alarm goes off.
    • List of accessories: 3x Water sensors (laundry and 2 bathrooms), 2x magnetic door sensors, 2x motion sensors, indoor siren, outdoor siren, RFID reader and keypad (arm/disarm alarm). Also a “UFO camera” monitoring the living room
    • apparently the smanos company went bankrupt and it’s unclear how long they will support these products
    • everything works great for now, but I don’t know if I will be able to get anything set up in Home Assistant. Also it doesn’t support HomeKit.
  • D-link DSP-W118 Wi-Fi power adapter
    • uses “mydlink” app to control it and set schedules
    • I’m currently just using this with a small heater. It’s on a schedule to keep my office warm during the day. My idea was to get a temperature sensor (maybe DIY with a raspberry pi), and control the heater to keep the room at a certain temperature throughout the day. (Plus automatically turn it off while we are out of the house.) Same for the bedroom at night.
  • I also have a Wi-Fi plug I bought from Xiaomi, but I couldn’t even get a simple schedule to work with this one. Will probably throw it away

My wife and I both use iPhones and MacBooks, so we’re also in the Apple ecosystem and wouldn’t mind something that works with HomeKit, but Home Assistant would be great.

Goals:

  • Have air temperature sensors in bedroom, office, and living room. Control heaters and a heat pumps to keep room at a comfortable temperature (with schedules.) Save energy when we are not at home. (We don’t usually have central heating or thermostats in New Zealand, which I don’t understand. So I have to DIY something.)
  • I saw a home automation thing a while ago that could control heat pumps and air conditioners using IR signals. Do any of these work with Home Assistant?
  • maintain good air quality with purifiers, automatically open a window when CO2 gets too high, etc.
  • Home security. (Covered by smanos system currently.) I don’t actually care too much if this is a completely different system that doesn’t touch Home Assistant, but of course it would be nice if everything worked together.
  • Open and close curtains automatically in office, bedroom, and kitchen (these all have a roller where you pull on the string to open/close)
  • Turn on Breville Barista Express coffee machine in the morning to warm it up before we get up. This machine has a little power button you need to press, so it can’t be done with a power adapter. I saw an ad for a little device that you can stick on things and it would press buttons, so I wonder if that would work. Something like switch bot.
  • Some automation for lighting would be nice as well. Maybe some schedules or presence detection stuff. Seems easy to do with Philips Hue products though.

I’m very interested in Eve products. Their air quality sensor looks great and easy to set up for the heater/heat pump automations. Are they a good company to go with for most of the products? What would you suggest? (My budget is up to $10k, and I’m happy to sell/throw away anything and start from scratch.) Thanks for your help!

(P.S. sorry for lack of links, I was only allowed to post 2 links as a new user)

2

A fairly long but relevant forum post dedicated to certified hardware stuff for AU/NZ

Australia - Electrically Certified Hardware - Hardware - Home Assistant Community (home-assistant.io)

2 Likes
3

Thanks @aidbish! There was a good comment about Brilliant smart plugs, which can be flashed to the esphome firmware using tuya-convert. There’s a reseller in New Zealand called PB Tech which stocks a lot of Brilliant products, so I might go with those. They’re only $34.99 for a single plug, and $45 for a double plug, and $79 for a whole powerboard with 4 outlets. It’s just a bit scary to buy some of these without any experience in esphome and tuya-convert, so hopefully I can figure out the supported models.

Following up on my post:

I’ve set up Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi 4, and it’s amazing! I was really surprised that it could detect and control my TV and stereo over wifi. (I thought I would need an IR controller.)

I got my Xiaomi Air purifier and Wifi plug set up and working together, so now I’m able to control the temperature in my office, which is pretty awesome!

Screen Shot 2021-07-16 at 11.29.41 AM
Screen Shot 2021-07-16 at 11.29.41 AM3052×1474 357 KB

I also signed up for the cloud version and set up the apps on our phones for presence detection, so I’m starting to set up some cool automations:

Screen Shot 2021-07-16 at 11.30.43 AM
Screen Shot 2021-07-16 at 11.30.43 AM966×976 66.6 KB

I’ve ordered an Aeotec Z-Wave USB Z-Stick from a NZ supplier. This uses the NZ Z-Wave frequency (921.4 MHz) so hopefully I can plug this into the Raspberry Pi and get it to talk to my Smanos K2 hub and accessories. It would be nice to have everything working together (especially motion detectors and door sensors, which could be used for both the alarm and home automation stuff.)

After I get the Z-Wave USB Stick, I could also look into some Z-Wave smart plugs. But I think I prefer Wi-Fi, because I get the feeling that Wi-Fi can be bit faster than Z-Wave (near instant vs. 2-3 seconds.) My Xiaomi wifi smart plug is almost instant when I toggle it on and off.

I’ve ordered the switch bot and a switch bot hub. I’m just going to try out the switch to press the power button on our coffee machine. I’m also going to set up the hub in the living room and use the IR feature on the hub to control our heat pump.

I also ordered some Xiaomi Mi Home Temperature & Humidity Monitors. I like that they just use Bluetooth low energy, and the Raspberry Pi already has bluetooth support, so they should work out of the box. Apparently the battery will last for a year if I just poll them once every ~10 minutes. I’m going to set these up in the bedroom, office, living room, and set up some automations to control the temperature, and hopefully save money on our power bills. (e.g. turn everything off when we’re away, only turn them on at certain times during the day.)

Unfortunately I can’t do much about the lighting in our house. We live in an apartment which has these weird directional LED light fixtures, so they don’t use a standard fitting. We’re going to be moving at the end of the year anyway, so I’ll do it in our new house. I’m also really interested in room presence detection, but I’ll do that later as well.

4

Welcome to HA, yes it can frustrate the pants of you sometimes (as can all software) but for something that can be really complex and you can modify to your needs, it really does work.
Word of warning, and i cant stress this enough
Before any updates, make backup and probably do it again just to make sure, read the release notes thoroughly (you may have to expand items to see the extra info) before you attempt to update and then even after reading and if your still slightly unsure if they affect you, pop up a post on here beforehand just to make sure.
this will help minimise those frustrations

2 Likes
5

omg yes new zealander here

6

noticed this was dead

1 Like