DIY SMART HOME UPDATE – A Year with Self-Hosted Smart Home Tech (EP7)

It’s not too far from being a full year since I started installing my self-hosted smart home kit, so I thought I’d give you a bit of an update on what’s changed, what worked and what really didn’t. Being self-hosted, that means none of my data left my house, no one at Google, Amazon or Apple knows what I’m up to at home, and I don’t need to worry about some parent company deciding all my devices I paid my own money for should just… not work anymore.

As a quick refresher, I’ll give you a quick rundown of what I’m using. The whole thing revolves around the amazing open source project called HomeAssistant. I’m using a Zigbee dongle to connect to all my devices (meaning they can’t connect to the internet directly and be part of a botnet). I’ve got some Philips Hue colour temperature changing bulbs, some Sonoff temperature and humidity sensors, an Aquara motion and light sensor, Moes smart scene changer switches and a Moes zigbee thermostat. Since the last video, I’ve also added my solar project – also DIY of course – which itself has a few extra sensors to track how much energy I’m generating and using.

I’ve also started using the InfluxDB add-on in Home Assistant, which means it now stores all my usage data from the various sensors, so if I want to look back and see, say, how often the heating was actually running last tuesday, I can just look that up. I can also use the Grafana add-on to query that data for even more control. You can do sums, averages and lots more which has been useful for the solar power generation versus consumption. I’ve also added a new flow in NodeRED which calculates how much money I’ve saved based on the energy usage I’ve monitored, which is pretty nice!

So that’s what I’ve got, but what’s it been like? On the whole it’s been great. The biggest success by far is my smart heating control. Especially now we are into winter, having it intelligently control when to turn the boiler on has meant I’ve saved money on the gas bill, and kept the house at a much more constant temperature. No more waking up freezing or boiling, or having to get up and turn the boiler off because I’m being cooked alive. It’s not perfect, but it’s much, much better.

The other thing that I’ve enjoyed the most is the adaptive lighting control – as in the Philips hue bulbs change their brightness and colour temperature throughout the day. They are brighter and cooler in the morning, and get progressively warmer and slightly dimmer at night. This is especially helpful in our bedroom where when it’s bedtime we can basically have the light on at 10% brightness which helps not blind you and wake you up as you try to get ready to sleep. I’m also enjoying being able to remotely control things like the lights, including from my phone, even while I’m not in the house thanks to the Wireguard VPN. That’s been really helpful – say when we are away I can turn the heating way down and disable the smart heating control, then when we are coming home I can turn it back on and up so we don’t waste money heating an empty house, but return to a warm one.

What about some things that haven’t worked as well? In short, these Moes scene changer switches suck. In theory they are great – and for short periods they can be great. They are basically blank switches that you can map in Home Assistant to do anything you want. In my case generally speaking I use them as light switches, but my god they drive me insane. Day-to-day the most common frustration is that rather frequently you need to press them twice to make them do anything – first to wake them up, then again to actually complete the action. But of course you can’t click them twice too quickly otherwise it’ll register it as a double press and not do the action you wanted. That’s annoying for sure and gets on my nerves after this long, so often every day, but it’s nothing compared to their bigger problem. That would be these. These are all the CR2430 batteries I’ve used so far just with these switches. Yep. And no, these aren’t CR2032’s that you can actually buy locally, no I have to order packs of these on ebay. They last between 2 and 3 months, then they start flashing their LEDs non-stop until the batteries are flat – and they don’t even work while they are flashing their LEDs!

One other device that’s not as good as I hoped is the motion sensor. When it works, it’s great. It tracks the light level throughout the day and will only turn the Philips Hue bulb on if the light level in the room is below 10 lux, and it detects motion for more than a second. The problem is that it just randomly decides to drop off the network, and I’m not entirely sure which of the 10 different actions I always try actually gets it back on. I take the battery out, hold the pairing button down, restart Home Assistant and try forcing a reconnect in Home Assistant. One of those normally works, but it really shouldn’t be dropping off the network anyway.

So what’s next for my DIY smart home? Well we are thinking about moving in the not-too-distant future so nothing for now, but the next step would probably start with smart thermostatic radiator valves. They control how much of the hot water from the central heating system flows into the radiator, which means when say I’m gaming in my office making the room plenty hot, the valve can close off my radiator and turn on the heating to warm up the living room which is getting too cold. That would help balance out the heating especially when there are some external factors at play too. It would also mean we can turn off the heating in the rest of the house at night and just keep the bedroom warm – and vice versa during the day – further saving money heating rooms we aren’t using.

I’d like to get some door sensors for even better smart control too – although even better is using as few battery powered devices as possible. You can get wall-powered motion sensors and switches, so I’d prefer fitting some of those instead. They are a lot less likely to drop off the network or, obviously, need new batteries every 3 months. Because of the way Zigbee devices work, if it’s wall powered it can act like a router as well as a device, whereas battery powered devices can only act as endpoints. Powered devices basically strengthen the network, whereas battery powered devices are more like parasites to the system. With that said, the battery powered temperature and humidity sensors haven’t skipped a beat so they aren’t all bad!