Home Security and Smart Home

LMSC
1: Did you have to consult or advise the council as the work involves replacing the electrical wires by ethernet cables (PoE)?

• No, I didn’t consult or advise the council. I didn’t see anything that would require this. It was part of an extension, so building control visited the property and didn’t make any comment. It was all signed off by the electrician though.
  2: How did it impact building control ?
• As above it didn’t
  3: Did you get a certificate from an electrician that all ok ?
• Yes, I got a certificate for all the wiring changes. Probably the most important is that you can’t mix low voltage and high voltage. So when you put a smart switch in that runs on 24v you can’t have 240v in the same switch plate.
  4: Did you advise or speak to the insurance about these changes ?
• No, I don’t see why it’s any of their business. There’s no additional risk for them. The only reason I would tell them is if you use the home automation as an alarm system and have declared that you have an alarm system, in case they don’t recognise it.

In terms of usability people quickly figure it out, and the only complexity is due to some switches having multiple functions. For example a single switch in the open plan area controls electric blinds, the living/dining lights and the kitchen lights. This is the main reason we got it to be honest. We can have a system like loxone and a single switch, or go traditional and have 1 switch and two dimmers for the 3 lighting circuits in the kitchen, 3 dimmers for the lighting in the living area and another 4 switches to control the blinds. Operating a bank of 10 controls would take even more explaining.

Mostly it just operates in the background. Blinds open and close based on sunset/sunrise and time. Some lights also come on automatically based on the time or sunset. I have some PIDs so some lights work based on them. Heating learns the dynamics of the room and knows the weather forecast, so it will only heat as much as needed to be the temperature you want when you want it.

From an energy management perspective they can help depending on how they’re setup. There’s certainly a lot of potential benefits, but they need to be setup. Here are some ideas:

• You can integrate an energy meter, and this lets you manage flow. For example you can set appliances on smart sockets (or interfaced depending on the device), assign their power usage and priority, and then if you have solar power you could set the system to run items only when you have surplus power. I’m sure if you had a variable rate electricity supply it would be possible to bring this information in too to manage the energy use.
• If you have PID sensors then you can use presence detection to turn off lights when people aren’t aren’t in a room
• window sensors can be configured so that if a window is open the heating in that room doesn’t run so you don’t waste heat (you can get controllable valves to have individual room control). I have a temperature sensor on the flue of the woodburner, so when the fire is running the heating is deactivated.
• if you had openable windows it could control ventilation to give free cooling
• auto shading can be used to block out the sun when it’s very hot, reducing the need for cooling (if you had air con)

You can also help protect the house. In addition to using all the sensors as an alarm. Temperature sensors can be set to indicate fire and send alerts or alarms. Water sensors can trigger alarms, or even could be linked to shut off the mains water if you had a valve there, reducing the risk of water damage.

Partly it’s a change in mindset. There are plenty of things in life where we use an expert. We’re used to paying to get cars serviced annually, or boilers serviced. If you think of it that way then it’s not really that extravagant. I enjoy the programming and setting it up, but I could have just paid for that and used everything as is.

LMSC

Devices were chosen with local access in mind. Everything, except Siri or Alexa control is local. Runs on a Mac mini and doesn’t need internet. I have remote access via vpn, the company that provides the software (is a secure setup) and Apple (figure of someone hacks Apple to get to my network I’m pretty screwed anyway). I don’t have devices that require internet accounts for access or storage, or no Ring doorbell.

Heating is Heatmiser. Yes there is an internet account but my Mac controls the hub locally. Alarm is Texecom that has local access to the control panel. Cameras are all controlled by Mac and record to NAS. Don’t believe sonos needs internet to be controlled but as 99% of my listening is streamed that doesn’t really matter. Denon amp and TVs are all local, as is harmony remote. I also have a mesh of raspberry pie that can detect key ring tags and phones to show which room they are in and make them beep.

Almost all devices have manual override. All lights do. However still some issues with automated lighting. I rarely touch a switch so in some rooms where there are 4, I forget which does which. Then if kids want to turn lights off, the house sees motion and if it’s dark turns them on. You can all Alexa to turn them off and then motion is deactivated for am hour but she doesn’t understand 3 year olds thankfully.

Actually, my irrigation is internet and standalone. I was tempted to get it integrated but couldn’t see why. I’ve based the build on not requiring the internet and each being solid standalone devices. I couldn’t really see the need to integrate the irrigation plus I liked the sensors the Netro has.

Like you I have mainly beds irrigated, and one pop up sprinkler but need to add more this spring. Water pressure is a problem, but at least I understand flow and pressure better than hardness and alkalinity!

I must say that I’m disappointed by the pace at which home automation is evolving. I built what was considered at smart home over 20 years ago (Crestron AV distribution with some of the first HDTV devices on the market, alarm, lights and other controls over X10, IR receivers and serial interfaces). Looking at it recently, functionality and reliability are still iffy by my standards (at least based on what I read and on my experience with Zigbee devices. IP protocols only offer limited benefits over RS232 but many devices are buggy, poorly documented and with too many constraints). I can see the merit of some cheap and limited solutions (Zigbee using Ikea lights), but am not convinced by the more costly proprietary solutions I’ve seen or played with.

LMSC No problem, always happy to give my perspective, but I fully recognise that what’s right for me may not be true for you.

LMSC I was worried about a future where there are no more switches. Lot easier for builders not to put light switches etc in.

LMSC No worries. My electrician on the whole house rewire (as part of major renovation) quoted £10k for a whole house Loxone. I didn’t have the budget at the time, to do it in one go, so went slowly. Started on a Vera which was woefully under powered and support was poor before I moved to Indigo which is about as stable as it comes without custom hardware, and amazing support. It let me build slowly and add as I needed to without having to pay service calls. I also have full control on cloud or local control etc and the plugin community is well developed.

The important thing is I didn’t want it to be a control your house from your phone setup, but a truly smart one, where things just happened for you, like lights automated, at night, but also day if it gets dark say due to a storm. Or heating is off during the day but if one of us works from home then that person’s study will have heating on during the day, and the kitchen etc. Not sure how much custom logic can be built into some of the custom hardware options.

I also like being able to unlock my side gate with my voice to my watch whilst I have my hands full. That is useful.

But its come at a cost of time and effort in setting it all up, both wiring and defining all the logic. There is virtually no code in my setup, although I could write python to control it if needed, but a lot of logic and rules / triggers through the application.

It does however let me update hardware cheaply. I Tried some zigbee temperature sensors that didnt work out, but they were £10 a pop. The £15 upgrades work much better. I find zwave most reliable, but zigbee can be faster (zwave seems to queue one at a time) but when zwave didnt quite have the right hardware I can use zigbee, for instance with colour temperature changing LED strips, rather than RBG ones.

Funnily enough there is an espresso thread on the home automation forum I use, where a lot of people started automating their espresso machines and moved on from there!