Where I was
I live in an old house. Not old like built last century, but old "was built before the Civil War" old. The walls are not structured how you would think, the duct work is not how you would think, the electrical is not how you would think, the plumbing is mostly how you would think. Suffice it to say, everything in the house is an addon. Even the bathroom, because most houses just had an outhouse and not a toilet inside back then.
I, an Elder Millennial(tm) am into all things home automation. I was sold on a future of curtains opening at dawn, lights coming on as you walk into the room, and yelling "COMPUTER" every time you want to do something or have a questions. StarTrek sold me this future and I want it.
And now I can, kind of, have it.
First Tastes
In 2019 I got a new window AC unit that used WiFi to allow me to do home automation stuff. Turn it on and off remotely, set up a schedule, it was great. Well, mostly, I had to install an app on my phone and create a login but that wasn't terrible.
In 2020 I needed to replace another window AC unit. I went to the big box store and to buy one just like that one I had so I could hook both up to the app it'll be great I told myself. This is when the narrator tells you, the audience, it, in fact, was not great.
The big box store no longer carried that brand of window unit so I had to get another brand, with it's own app, and it's own login. So now I had two apps to control two AC units and I was grumpy.
In 2021 one of our indoor cats was chilling on an enclosed porch of our and managed to claw a hole big enough for them to escape. Everyone in the family was distraught so we put of the cat's favorite food and left the porch door open to try and lure the cat back. After some 2 hours of nervously checking and rechecking to see if the cat had returned I decided to leverage technology and order some Wyze cameras that my friend said were cheap and effective for this sort of thing.
Cheap and effective they are! I got the cameras, set them up on my WiFi, created yet another account, and then sat there with the camera on one screen while I waited for the feline to return. Good news is that my cat did return home! Dirtier than he were when he left, a little lighters, but none the worse for wear.
I did have two cameras that needed 3rd party account and internet access to be able to be used. Which really started me thinking, am I going to need a new account for every smart thing I buy? Does everything have to go through my wonky WiFi?
Privacy
I can be a little paranoid. This mostly trickles into my digital life where I avoid signing up for new services, I run my own chat server for friends, I run an extremely tough browser plugin that requires me to manually whitelist all 3rd party links/references. So privacy was something important for me in this. I really dislike that someone could have remote access to all the things that run my home. So any solution would have to be "offline".
There is also the issue of if the internet goes down, which happens bi-weekly for my small town, I would suddenly be cut off from the means of all the automation that I would have come to depend upon!
Wifi
Because my house is _long_ and _old_ I need to consider a lot when getting into home automation. most of all WiFi is ... inconsistent. The walls are basically solid wood slabs with lathe and plaster on top. The Wifi router that is on the second floor constantly loses connection with the tv directly below it (one day I will just run a cable to it, one day). So I could pepper my home with WiFi routers/repeaters or maybe go another route.
Another consideration here is that most WiFi home automation solutions are cloud only solutions. Again with my privacy concerns and internet issues.
Zigbee/Z-Wave
Googling for local only home automation turned up both of these technologies. Both are quite similar, with the main differences being the frequency band used, Zigbee uses one close to the WiFi bands (868 MHz, 902-928 MHz, and 2.4 GHz), and Z-Wave using one more out of band from WiFi (908.42 MHz), and the approval process for the devices. Z-Wave requires that all devices get certified by them which limits how many devices are out in the ecosystem but with a high quality. Whereas Zigbee is very wild wild west. Caveat Emptor being the main moto there, who knows what you'll get!
The lack of devices and variety in the Z-Wave ecosystem turned me more towards Zigbee being my way forward. But how? Do I need special hardware? A router?
Home Assistant
In my searches for a router/controller for all of my future home automation I came across Home Assistant. A friend of mine uses this already for what he does and his experiments seemed to be successful. Digging deeper I found the Home Assistant Yellow as a bit of hardware that promised to do everything I wanted from this. I didn't want to run yet another server on hardware that I've built and such. Give me hardware I can plug into the wall and get going!
The big down side for this was that, for me, the wait was almost a year to get one! This was during the chip shortage during the pandemic so it was understandable. I threw in my money and waited. While waiting I went onto consider all the things I wanted to automate in my ancient home.
Standing Lights
I have more than a few standing lamps that are scattered around the house. They are all hard to get to. They're off in corners, along the walls, behind chairs. Any time I want to turn one on I have climb over furniture. If I want to turn on all the lights in the room I have to walk around the whole room, it'd be great to have just one button, or phone app, to turn them all on at once, or one at a time!
At first I looked into smart bulbs, but these seem to require you to leave the light on the entire time and cede control to the bulb itself. It does feel strange to make the bulb itself smart and not the lamp. I am a bit old, but bulbs to me are a disposable thing. Why make a consumable smart? Do I have to buy all new floor lamps? How do you make an existing lamp smart?
Outlets
Smart outlets looked to be the way to go. I could replace the outlets! Wait, let's not get ahead of myself, why not just get one of the plugs that are smart, plug the lamp into that and then leave the lamp "on" and use the plug to turn it on and off. SOnOff has a bunch of cheapish smart outlets that double as repeaters, this kills two birds with on stone! I can increase the coverage of the signal in my home and control my lamps!
So how do I turn my lights on and off now?
Switches and Apps
SOnOff, you'll see them pop up a lot here, makes these cute physical buttons to trigger events in the Home Assistant system. Like turning outlets, and therefore my lamps, on and off!
Home Assistant also has an app that you can use to do the same thing.
This covers my Standing lamps that plug into the wall and how to operate them. But what about the, vanishingly, few lights that I have that actually have switches?
Switch Lights
Here is a conundrum, or so I thought! SOnOff, seriously is there something they don't make that works for me?, makes these inline switches that I can wire into my lights and then I can control them from the app or from those physical buttons, or the actual physical switch!
The installation of these were not that difficult. I have some experience with home wiring so if you've every wired up an outlet or a light switch before these are pretty simple. The only downside is that when you turn the light on, or off, it doesn't physically cause the switch to flip too. At first this was a little irritating but no more so than the one light switch I have at the bottom, and top, of my stairs. Anyone who's had a light on a 3 way switch knows this irritation.
Sensors
One problem I have with the old house is pipes freezing. I found these Aqara, SOnOff has them as well, Temperature and Humidity sensors that I have placed in the basement to alert me to freezing temperatures in various places in my basement. When it gets too cold I know which faucet
Putting it all together
Adding any given device to the network is pretty simple. You set the device to a pairing mode and then open the app, go down to the devices and have it search for the device. Once the router finds the new device you set the names, what zones it belongs to and then any other further automations you want to setup.
I don't have much in the way of automations beyond turning stuff off after a certain time at night. When I start to get into more varied devices I was planning on doing more.
The Future
I'd like to hook in a lot more devices into my network. My garage door, the fancy litter robot I have, and my AC units would be ones where I'll go towards next. Past that I'd like to work with things like automated window shades, power monitoring, and other alerts.
Thanks for reading this, if you have any questions you can email me at zehaeva and I'll get back to you.