Welcome to SmartHomeLiving.Tech a blog focused on smart home, IoT and home automation as well as other gadgets you might want or need in or around your home. I mainly write about my own experience with the products that I own and use or have used. I don’t sugarcoat things and will tell how it is.
Who
Since I spend a lot of time debugging things at work, I tend to want things to just work at home. So I’ve built out everything gradually and have tested a lot of things. One of my main principles is that smart home features have to add convenience and never take away functionality.
House
We live in a 146m2 semi-attached house by a lake. It’s heated with a Nibe F750 heat pump with underfloor water heating as well as a Mitsubishi MXZ-F multisplit heat pump with 2 AP25 indoor units. The house is split in 3 levels with bedrooms upstairs, main living area in ground floor and sauna, laundry etc in basement with access to our lake side backyard and terrace with our Novitek spa.
Because of the views we have huge floor to ceiling windows on the lake side and those things are 10mm thick triple layer windows. The house is quite well insulated over all and that poses a problem for anything I want wireless connection to. It’s quite challenging to get any signal to pass between floors are thick concrete slabs with heating pipes in them. Let alone getting something to pass outside.
Equipment
I have gigabit internet coming to the house so I invested in Unify network equipment: Unify Dream Machine Pro, 2 x Unifi NanoHD AP and Unifi 6 LR AP. I have a Linux machine running Plex media server, Home Assistant and bunch of other software in docker containers.
My current setup is based on Home Assistant being the central brains and I use a combination of z-wave relays and sensors, Philips Hue light pulps. Temperature and humidity measurements are done using Ruuvitags. I have Somfy RTS motors for blinds. Most of my lights are dump dimmable LEDs and few indoor lights are Hue as well as backyard lights that are hue lights. I also have a smart fridge though I have not really used it’s features and smart dishwasher that I have used to automate a reminder to hit the Oras auto closing water valve button.
My home security is through Ring Alarm and I have bunch of Amazon Echo devices from the time when I thought Amazon Alexa ecosystem would be a good idea. In the beginning I used a lot of voice commands and Alexa was not a problem for us because we are used to using English. Currently I’m reevaluating the Apple ecosystem which I’m already heavily invested in with all Macs, iPhones, iPads and Apple Watches and Siri does understand Finnish so it’s good for the kids also.
Even though I have 20+ years of software engineering experience I try to avoid having to write custom code and rather try to use existing open source components. When do have to create integrations myself I publish them in my github since I firmly believe in open source and contributing back to the community.