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!
