Home Automation / Smart Home kit

katos

Hi all!

What do you think about home automation/smart homes? What kit would you get for your home?

I am looking to purchase a new home within the next two years and am planning on some smart home kit to assist with making life easier, as well as overall home security.

Some things that I currently have in mind (Open to suggestions!)

Video Doorbell
CCTV system
Electronic gate
Smart locks (Internal, mainly for computing room)
Smart lights
Whole-home audio
Google Home displays

Ideally, I would like to have these integrate with Home Assistant, and (where possible) be able to store data locally rather than having to subscribe to 14 million different cloud offerings

tankerkiller125

So just going down your existing lists, here's what I've got going.

Video DoorBell - Google Doorbell (We have Android and Google Home devices)
CCTV - Ubiquiti UNVR system is really good in my experience, use both at home and work, if you wanted something completely different maybe start with the Frigate software and go from there?
Electronic Gate - I've got nothing for this one
Smart Locks - Ubiquiti has an enterprise level solution for this if you wanted to go "professional". Personally after seeing lockpicking lawyer I wouldn't put any other type of electronic lock on my doors.
Smart Lights - We have a mix of GE Smart Lights, Hue, and TP-Link Kasa Switches
Whole-home audio - We use a Google Home cast group for this, I'm not sure what other products exist here.

We've integrated all of this stuff with Home Assistant, we've also integrated things like our sleep number beds, and some other odds and ends. Personally, my favorite thing we've integrated is Sense, which gives us a great power usage overview. Which is something that the big boss at work is actually looking at getting setup at work (although that will use a different system because 3 phase 400 amp circuits)

katos

tankerkiller125 Thanks for the input! Much appreciated.

Can you please advise:

How did you tie in your Doorbell to Home Assistant (what do you do with this?)
Which smart lights do you prefer most out of those that you have?
Home cast group is a good idea actually, I'll check that out.
Can you elaborate on your sleep number beds? This is new to me sorry.
Sense is a good shout - I'll have to check that out too.

tankerkiller125

katos

Because I have the Nest Doorbell I'm using the Nest integration, it request a bit of GCP API setup and a one time $5 charge to get access to the APIs, but works great.
Out of all of them I love the Cync by GE lights for lamps, and the TP-Link light switches for things like dining room lights (where there might be multiple bulbs in a single fixture)
I have a newer Sleep Number bed that has Sleep IQ integration. In home assistant this allows detecting when someone is in each side of the bed, set the firmness, view the pressure, and toggle privacy mode. I have it setup to detect when I get in the bed, at which point it turns on my bedside lamp and sets a timer to turn it back off after an hour and a half.
Sense appears to be US specific, but there are similar solutions for EU/UK electricity monitoring systems. You can find all of those in https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/#energy notably we're working to role out IoTaWatt where I work. It looks like they recently switched to a reseller model (we got the work ones direct originally)