Get started with your smart home
Every tech-savvy homeowner dreams of a smart home. Start with a solid plan to avoid frequent redoing and maximize efficiency!
Like many, I have travelled along the smart home path. Found a few things I liked. Made some mistakes. And then trashed the whole thing and started fresh. If you’re into smart homes in general or are thinking about taking the first steps along that path, keep reading as I’m sure you’ll find valuable information.
Which network protocol to use
The first thing you should consider when you’re starting a smart home is the protocols you’ll be using. The protocol is nothing but the method the devices will use to communicate with each other.
Wi-Fi
Likely the most common protocol for smart homes and arguably the one most people are familiar with. Chances are, you’re looking at a Wi-Fi enabled device right now while reading this article. That’s actually one of the selling points, you might already have a Wi-Fi network at home and a router to manage it.
It’s ideal for cameras as they can deal with high volumes of data, but it consumes more power than other protocols. Another selling point is the long range, especially the 2.4 GHz band. Devices can be relatively far from your router and they still connect fine.
Bluetooth
An alternative to Wi-Fi, and also very popular, is Bluetooth, which consumes far less energy, especially BLE devices. It’s commonly used in wearables, headphones and computer peripherals. The reason being the range is too short for other long distance applications.
A common pitfall of Bluetooth speakers, for instance, is losing connection with a phone when you move away for a minute.
Z-Wave
Now we’re getting into real home automation territory. Z-Wave was developed to become a reliable alternative to existing protocols in home automation scenarios. Having a better range than Bluetooth, but not quite like Wi-Fi, it promises low power consumption with a trick up its sleeve: a mesh!
Wi-Fi, for instance, expects any device to talk directly to a router—let’s make this example simple and ignore that Wi-Fi can itself work in a mesh, but not quite like this one. In database lingo, this would be a connection of 1-to-many. Meaning, 1 device can talk to many others.
Z-Wave, on the other hand, allows for devices to connect with each other, effectively extending its range. This means that devices don’t need to connect directly to a router and can instead tell other devices to send a “message” for them to the router.
Zigbee
Around the same time that Z-Wave was born, Zigbee was introduced. Similar goals and similar approaches. But there are some key differences that set these two apart.
First, the range is drastically extended compared to Z-Wave, quite similar to Wi-Fi, actually. Because, just like Wi-Fi, it uses the 2.4 GHz frequency, unlike Z-Wave.
It also functions as a mesh network like explained above. But the amount of devices the network supports is drastically increased. Zigbee supports thousands of devices in the same network. While Z-Wave can only support around 200 devices.
Another key difference is the fact that pretty much anyone can produce Zigbee devices. The protocol is sometimes loosely implemented in some devices, which may make them behave a bit oddly.
On the other hand, Z-Wave devices must be certified, which naturally increases the cost of manufacturing, making devices more expensive for the end user—that’s you.
Thread
The new kid from the block. Released around 2014 with the primary goal to provide secure and reliable solution to connect various devices in the same network.
Thread is slowly getting more and more attention from both manufacturers and tech-savvy homeowners, partially due to Matter, a communication standard built on top of Thread that should allow an easy communication channel between devices from multiple brands.
If you’re thinking way into the future, this is the way to go. I personally don’t have any Matter or Thread device at home.
Which devices you should avoid
This is all very much subjective, but the hard truth is that the devices that behave better are usually ones manufactured by well known brands. Again, your experience may vary.
For me personally, I used a lot of white label devices in the past that worked well for about a year and then all of a sudden started dying one after the other. There was absolutely nothing I could do to make them work again. They would reconnect, they would appear to work for about 5 minutes, and then drop out of the network again.
I would personally avoid Wi-Fi devices if there are viable alternatives. With phones, computers, tablets, watches, TVs, washing machines, fridges and so on, your home network might have plenty to work for already. Of course security cameras will need Wi-Fi, unless you go for something like POE cameras. But there are certainly alternatives to Wi-Fi bulbs or plugs, for example.
Being a bit more specific, I would avoid anything that relies on the Tuya network. These can go by many different names. I personally used the Smart Life app, but there are others that are just a reskin of the Tuya app and obviously rely on the Tuya platform. From my experience it’s very unstable.
Something else I would avoid are non-local devices. Meaning, if a device can’t be controlled locally (in your home network) using their API, run from it. That means the devices will need internet access to function.
Think about it: why does a bulb need internet access?
It shouldn’t! It should just need local network access to communicate with other devices. Should not need external access. External access means an extra door potencial attackers can use to get into your local network. Not cool. Not cool at all!
You may ask: Pedro, but then how do I toggle a light when I’m away from home?
I’m glad you asked! The answer is down below: Home Assistant.
How I started
As mentioned above, I started my smart home journey with the Tuya platform, using the Smart Life app. Can’t recommend it, let’s be clear on that.
At the time I didn’t know where to start or where to look. I just wanted to avoid manually turning lights on at night and off when going to bed. I had a few lights spread through the house. Some lights in the bedroom and some more in the living room. That’s the perfect opportunity to bring some smartness into our house—I thought.
So instead of going the bulb-route, I went the plug-route.
This means that instead of replacing my existing and well-functioning light bulbs and LED strips with smart ones, I connected them to smart plugs. Specifically, some white label Wi-Fi smart plugs that worked with the Tuya platform. I’m sure you can still find some of these on Amazon.
With these in place I could not only toggle the lights on a set schedule, I could also now toggle them remotely, from anywhere!
As great as this may be, eventually, I needed something else. Something a bit more far fetched, some would say.
At the time, we also had a few Eufy cameras around the house—can’t recommend them either. These cameras send notifications when movement is detected and when they’re set in a specific mode. But they can also sound an alarm when they detect movement in another mode—when we’re away, for instance.
The sad part is that we needed to manually set the mode on and off when we’re leaving or arriving home—the Eufy app does have a geolocation feature but it never reliably worked for us, for some reason.
So how can I automate this away mode? The Eufy app doesn’t talk to the Smart Life app… Nor does it expose modes or has triggers in place that could be leveraged by third party apps, like the iOS Shortcuts app. It’s basically a closed system, one of the reasons why I can’t recommend it now.
Enter Home Assistant.
Home Assistant
It’s an open source home automation platform focused on privacy which enables local control of your smart devices. The best part? It acts as a sort of translator between multiple closed platforms.
Sounds just like what I needed, so I gave it a try.
I bought a Raspberry Pi, installed Home Assistant on it and started tinkering. I knew this wouldn’t be a quick afternoon thing, but oh boy, was I underestimating the amount of time I would need to set everything up.
Remember the smart plugs I mentioned above? Yeah, the Tuya ones. They were compatible with Home Assistant through an integration called Local Tuya. It takes multiple steps to configure just 1 plug and it could just disconnect and disappear from Home Assistant at any time. My experience was far from great with this integration.
The Eufy app is also not officially integrated into Home Assistant. It works by simulating that Home Assistant is just another user of your Eufy home. It doesn’t always work, unfortunately, and there are some features that aren’t available through Home Assistant.
But even with these and many other curve balls, the system was working, somehow!
I was able to set it up in such a way that when none of us was home, the Eufy cameras would be in “away” mode. And when either of us arrived, they would switch to “home” mode. Great!
Now regarding the lights—or the smart plugs connected to them—I quickly realized that having a fixed schedule to turn them on or off wasn’t working all the time.
Things like cloudy days, daylight saving time, or even smog/smoke can throw off a schedule. What’s actually needed is a lux sensor! A sensor that will tell you the amount of light it’s getting. This way you can tell that when it’s below a threshold, the lights go on. Doesn’t matter if it’s 20:00, cloudy, rainy, winter or there’s smoke from wildfires outside. When it’s dark, lights go on. It’s that simple!
The setup was getting more and more complex.
But before I could even introduce more layers of complexity I had one of my worst experiences with Home Assistant. You see, back when I started, the common suggestion was to start with a small computer like the Pi, and an SD card.
The issue is, SD cards weren’t really made for the kind of extensive writing and reading that Home Assistant does. So I quickly burned through the SD card and was getting all sorts of random errors that wouldn’t allow for the simple setup I had to function properly.
Unfortunately you can still find plenty of people online going through the same issues nowadays.
The hardware you pick, matters!
I spent a long time wondering whether I should invest more into a smart platform of some kind or just assume it’s not “production-ready” yet and use something old school like dumb relays, motion sensors connected directly to lights and stuff like that.
Turns out I was investing in a house of cards in the first place. My personal setup was bound to give me issues down the road. I was lucky they happened so early, actually. Otherwise I would have invested more time and devices into it, only to find out the issue were the devices in the first place.
A couple of years later I went back to Home Assistant. This time, I decided I would not be using the Pi, but rather a virtual machine running HAOS. In my case, I decided to take advantage of my underutilized Synology NAS resources and installed the VM in there. The CPU has plenty of power for it. The disk space is obviously not an issue. The only thing I had to upgrade was the memory.
Synology themselves don’t officially support this, but you can add a 16 GB memory stick to your NAS, making it a 20 GB NAS. Not bad!
Here’s the guide I followed for the DS920+.
Then, instead of Wi-Fi devices, I went with Zigbee. I was going to need a Zigbee stick and searched a lot for comparisons and reviews about them.
There are basically two types: USB ones or Ethernet ones.
I went with an Ethernet one, for speed. It’s the SMLIGHT SLZB-06 and I currently have around 70 devices connected to it through ZHA. I’m quite happy with it!
All my Tuya smart plugs got trashed and replaced with IKEA ones.
Yes! Besides furniture and meat balls, IKEA also produces great Zigbee devices!
The IKEA smart plugs are great because they also act as routers, making your Zigbee mesh network more robust, allowing for battery devices to connect more reliably. They even make some smart plugs with power metering, which I’m also using to log energy consumption from appliances like coffee machine, air fryer, dish washer, etc.
You can find more Zigbee devices in this list.
Quick summary
Let’s quickly recap everything I mentioned above so you have a nice compiled list to get away with:
- Get a future-proof device to install Home Assistant on;
- Avoid SD cards—it’s going to die quickly;
- Avoid Wi-Fi devices—will weaken your home network;
- Opt for mesh network protocols such as Zigbee or Zwave—allows for robust networks;
- Get a community-tested Zigbee stick—such as the SLZB-06;
- Spread some mains-powered devices acting as routers throughout the house—will make a great mesh network to start with;
- Look up Zigbee compatible devices in the list;
This should allow you to get started on your first smart home setup.
If, or when, you need help with Home Assistant, feel free to reach out to r/homeassistant on Reddit or the official community.
