Smart Home

A smart home simplifies your life by automating some of the most regular tasks in your day to day home life. I can't say this enough but almost nobody NEEDS a smart home (apart from maybe the disabled), but they are super handy. Essentially though Smart homes are a hobby. They are becoming increasingly accessible and far cheaper to set up. We really use our Smart home for two purposes:

• Security

  • We have security cameras, which along with motion sensors in every room provide a good basis for security. For obvious reasons I won't explain online exactly how all our home security system works but rest assured that our house is full of deterrents to stop unwelcome guests.

  • The addition of a smart controller on our garage door is also super handy. It warns me if the door is left open and allows me close it from wherever I may be. No more worrying if you go away for a few days.

• Convenience

  • The main reason for a smart home though is convenience.

    • Lights that turn on when you walk in a room, Lights that turn off automatically in empty rooms, Dimmer lights at night than in the day basically lots of lights controls.

    • Curtains that open and close on a timer or by voice.

    • Lots of other tricks that make day to day life a bit easier.

Every smart home needs a brain. This is essentially something that can talk to everything, understand its STATE (e.g. The light is on or off), and change those states based on inputs from sensors or predefined rules.

The brain of our house is made by a company called Hubitat. There are various alternative but I selected Hubitat because it allows for local control. This means that the rules are stored on the box in my house and are actioned there. An alternative to this would be something like Samsung Smartthings that I used previous. For Samsung ST's you always need to be connected to the internet as the actions go via the Samsung cloud. As our system is local, a motion sensor can cause a light to turn on even if there is no active internet connection this can be handy in outages but can also be made far more secure.

Another alternative is called Home Automation which is very flexible but is slightly harder to use. For beginners Smart Things is by far the easiest to set up, with Hubitat somewhere in the middle and Home Automation being more Nerd Genius friendly.

I pair our Hubitat with the Google Home App to add voice control. Amazon Alexa is probably ahead in terms of Smart Home versus Google Home but as I work for Google we were always likely to go that way.

Getting things to play nicely together is getting easier but it is not always straight forward. Later I will create some how to guides.

Our home network is all about getting the internet that comes to our house, to all the parts of our property that we want to get online from as effortlessly and effectively as possible. If we just had the one box that comes from the ISP (internet service provider) some rooms would have little or no internet.

There are two main ways to get internet around a building, a wired network or a mesh network.

Mesh networks are gaining in popularity and are very easy to set up. Essentially you set up a number of devices in your house that all talk to each other. They spread the internet where they are places and relay information from one to another back to the source of your internet when they can't get a signal back to the source directly.

The alternative is that you have a wired network. This is where you run physical cables throughout your home and then they all lead back to one central place. Had we not had been doing such extensive renovations (including totally rewiring our house for electricity) I would likely have opted for a mesh network but since we had the opportunity to run cables we did. This allows us to connect to fast reliable internet in every room including the garage. (I even took work video calls from the greenhouse during our home renovations)

All our wires (Cat6a) lead back to a cupboard in our hall. I use a number of Ubiquity products to run our network and this was the first network I ever set up. We have access points for WiFi in the Living Room, Sunroom, Office, Hall & Garage. Our security cameras, gateway (prevents hacking) and switch (directs traffic) are all Ubiquity devices.

Check back later for a guide to setting up a home network.

#1: Motion Sensor Lights

Motion sensor lights had to be number 1 because its the automation we use the most and we don't ever really need to think about. Our home has a long hallway with little natural night and having the lights come on as you walk down it and turn off when you are no longer there is just effortless. No rows over who left the light on. Simple. The lights also behave differently dependent on the time of day, so no glaring bright lights in the middle of the night.

#2: Smart Vacuum Cleaner

We bought an iRobot i7+ that we named Ted. Ted vacuums three times a week and has significantly helps with my dust allergies. The iRobot 7+ is expensive but includes lots of great features such as a self emptying base station, we can ask him via Google Home to vacuum a particular room or area, we can set no go areas and overall he does an excellent job. For the most part we don't need to think about him a lot and he just does his own thing.

#3: Lights under the bed

I put a smart LED strip under our bed. This means that if I go to bed after Nishta I can enter the room and the light turns on under the bed. I can get ready for bed without a bright light waking Nishta up. Genius!. Now if I could just learn to be quiet!

#4: RFID Tags (Tap your phone to action things)

Tapping your phone to pay for things is becoming increasing popular but you can utilise that same technology in your smart home. I am still experimenting with this but I have two automations set up so far. The first is a tag that is attached to my piano that when I tap it opens my piano learning app. The second is a tag on each of our bedside tables that when you tap it turns off every light in the house. Simple and handy. Next up I want to set up a tag guests can tap to get connected to our WiFi network without having to fiddle with passwords. I'll let you know how I get on.

#5: Smart Garage Door

I mentioned this above but we a smart garage door. Eventually I will have it open the door as our car approaches and close shortly later but for now I use it just to know if the door is opened or closed. This is handy and reduces any paranoia about whether the garage is open. It also technically allows us to let delivery people into the garage if we are not home but I am not sure I ever see myself doing that.

#6: Smart Curtains

We use SwitchBots curtain robots to open and close our living room curtains. The biggest appeal for me is that they are solar powered as I generally try and avoid battery powered devices. As our house is easy to look into from the road smart curtains give us some extra privacy. Could I open and close them by hand, of course I could, will I emmmm no cause I can have fancy toys do it. Yay! Smart Home nerdiness.