I Tried Building the PERFECT Smart Home_ What I Learned (Mistakes Included

It starts with just a single smart light bulb. You learn how to turn it off and on with your phone, and then you start thinking to yourself, what if I can do this, but to everything in my home? And then you end up spiraling down the smart home rabbit hole. By that point, it's a little too late to save you. There's words for places like this in books. Home automations, home assistants, hubs, there's so much that goes into smart home automations that I wish I knew before I began this lifelong journey of trying to make the perfect smart home. And well, that's where I am right now. I want to talk about all the things I learned trying to make this house smart. This includes all the things that I would do differently with everything that I know now. It won't be Disney's 1999 classic smart home levels of smart, but with chat GPT, who knows? We might be getting there. But smart enough that I don't have to get off my lazy and flip on a light switch or ceiling fan. That's the idea, right? Make things more convenient and make less things for me to worry about, which you're about to see from me actually leads to a lot of inconveniences itself. So the first thing I'd like to think about in a smart home is actually what is the goal of this space? Is it actually to turn on and off the lights at certain times? Is it to provide you notifications when something is happening in your house? Or is it more complex than that? Figuring this part out is important because it can save you money in the long run because you've sorted out the problem first before you started to find a solution for it. Doing the opposite makes you end up buying too much crap or making a solution for a problem that doesn't really exist. I also found it easiest to focus on a single room at a time because if you focus on the whole house, you're gonna end up giving yourself a massive headache and nothing ever gets done, AKA me. And plus, everyone uses different rooms in their home differently. So we can sort out one room first. We can then use that as a foundation for all the other rooms. So here's an example in my own place. Okay, in the main bedroom, I have three major things I wanted to automate. The lighting in this room, the ceiling fan, and these blinds. I wanted everything to work when someone walks into this room. And it basically just has to automatically turn on the ceiling fan if it's a little too warm. The lights should turn on when it's a little too dark. And if I wanted to, I should be able to control the blind without having to get up and do it myself. I also have a TV in here, and it'd be really nice to be able to just turn it off if someone forgot to. So we found the different problems with this room. We can then think about how we would solve each one of these issues. The simplest solution is obviously to not be lazy and get up and do things yourself, but we're here to spend hundreds of hours now to save a minute or two in the future. So rationality is out the door. Instead, we'll have to think about all the different devices that are available to solve our problems. All right, we'll need a way to control the ceiling fan, each of the three lamps in the room, and each of the three blinds. And because I want these things to be activated by someone's presence, we also need something that can tell when someone is in the room, and a way to tell how hot or cold the room is. So what devices are available that do these tasks? If you're trying to control lights, there are actually three different options. The first is obviously to replace all the light bulbs you want to control with smart bulbs. You can control the color and strength of each of the individual bulbs, but the cost can get expensive really fast if you need to buy a bunch of bulbs for all of your different light fixtures. And when they die, you have to replace them, increasing the overall cost. The second option is to buy smart plugs. This lets you turn lamps on and off, or really any device connected to them on and off. But since they aren't designed specifically for just lights, you wouldn't be able to dim your lights with these, and functionality is limited to just turning things on and off. And finally, the last option would be to get a smart light switch. This lets you control the overhead lights and can be a cheaper option, since the switch is gonna cost around the same as a smart light bulb, but will more than likely outlast them. The only issue there is if you rent your place instead of own it, I doubt the landlord would enjoy you messing around with the electrical cables in their walls. I mean, I rarely trust myself with my own walls. Each of these obviously have their own pros and cons, and you really have to figure out for yourself what best to use for your particular situation. As for the ceiling fan, there are ceiling fans that you can buy that come with smart functions integrated in them already, but you can opt to use a smart light switch or smart fan switch that lets you better control the speed of the fan. I'm just gonna use this smart light switch since I don't really care about the speed of the fan when it's on, and really, I'm just gonna keep it at medium anyway when I have it on. Now, the hardest part was actually finding devices for the blinds. Smart blinds exist, and Ikea sells some fantastic ones for a reasonable price, but you may already have curtains or pool string blinds or beaded roller shades, whatever. My house already had roller shades, so I had to purchase these Aquara E1 drivers to smartify and motorize these existing blinds. These aren't cheap, and you can't really buy them in the States without using Alibaba or buying it off of eBay. Aquara really should bring these to the States. And if you have other types of window coverings, there's also curtain moving motors and drawstring blind motors if you plan on automating your windows coverings, and those are actually available in the United States. To solve the remaining items, we'll need to use sensors. These are basically the eyes of your smart home. Smart home sensors do a bunch of different things like track humidity, temperature, motion, light, and vibration. These can be used for your smart home to understand what's happening in your house and can be used in your home automations based off of those results. And sometimes you can actually find multi-purpose sensors that have more than one function built in, like the one I have right here. This is the Philips Hue motion sensor. It has a motion sensor, illuminance, and temperature sensor all built into this single device. So really, I just need this sensor for both temperature and motion tracking for the main bedroom. And with that, I have this single bedroom all figured out. I know I've focused solely on that bedroom, but so far you can see how I could set up a similar setup for a lot of the rooms in the house, including this studio. It does have very similar blinds, a ceiling fan, and lights all around it. So I just mentioned a bunch of different devices and sensors, all from different brands that all support different standards. What is Zigbee, Z-Wave, Matter? Does any of this matter? All these things make buying smart home products really, really confusing to new people. But to quickly explain it, there are some Internet of Things devices that just work off of your Wi-Fi, and these will just ask you to connect to them via your Wi-Fi network, and you're good. But then there's more complex smart home devices that use Zigbee, Z-Wave, and Matter, which are protocols on how these smart home devices interact with a hub. A Zigbee device can only talk to other Zigbee devices, Z-Wave to Z-Wave, and Matter to Matter. Typically with Zigbee and Z-Wave, the ones that start with a Z, you have to own a hub that these devices will use to communicate with your smart home. If you're looking for an all-in-one package, the Aotech Smart Hub has support for both and would cover your bases there. But here's the trickier part. There are some smart home devices that require a proprietary hub, like Lutron, who uses a hub for their light switches, and they don't really rely on these existing technologies. So you can see smart home tech is super confusing with a million different companies following a million different standards. It's ridiculous. Luckily, they all started working together to create Matter, which is a smart home standard that many companies are opting into that would enable your smart devices to be smarter and actually talk to each other. I call this world peace in the smart home world. It's pretty new with not that many products using Matter, but expect that list to grow. And some existing products will actually be getting updates to enable Matter functionality. The Verge has a nice comprehensive list of this. If you own smart home products, you know right out of the box that Google doesn't like talking to Apple Home and it doesn't like talking to... So these smart home standards are all very clicky and love excluding each other. So it's a really good idea that when you're buying smart home tech to pick the device with the most compatibility, or at least that's consistent with your devices because companies also love pushing their apps for their smart home devices. Then you end up with 50 different apps on your phone to turn each individual light on in your house, creating clutter on your phone and a mess to control. But of course, this next topic actually fixes that issue. We got to talk about the smart home ecosystem. There are three primary smart home ecosystems, Google Home and Apple Home or HomeKit. These are the smart home ecosystems that group all of your tech together under one umbrella. But you have to be really careful here because you have to be on the lookout to see if your specific ecosystem is supported by the device or hub that controls all of these devices that you're buying. So it requires a decent amount of research to make sure that you have the right device. Again, in the future with Matter, this should go away since most smart home devices will support Matter, but we live in the present. And even in the future, we'd still own existing devices and companies aren't currently selling non-Matter devices. We'll slowly start picking it up. So it's important to make sure your devices are compatible with all the platforms you plan to use right now or in the future. So let's talk about these main ecosystems. In 2023, these are all pretty similar in terms of functionality and the type of devices that they can support. In a pre-Matter world, Google and Apple had the most diversity when it comes to the type of hubs they offer to use with their assistant, like speakers, smart displays, and streaming boxes. And they also usually had the most smart home devices compatible with them. Apple Home had quite a bit less and is limited to only Apple devices. I've personally found that products that worked with Apple HomeKit to be a bit more expensive, but usually worked consistently compared to products that only worked on Amazon or Google, but that's from my own experience. But of course, you may have also picked up random Amazon Alexas or Google Nests and Apple products throughout the years, which can lead to a bunch of problems. These systems don't talk to each other and you get stuck in a situation where a bunch of devices only work for one or the other. I have a bunch of Google Home and Apple devices in my home and it can be a pain managing it all with some devices not working on one or the other. None of them are perfect solutions. Also, they have built-in ways to create automations, but they're all really basic. Like you can make things turn on at a certain time or use voice commands, but none of them can really make complex automations. So my solution for a while was just to use the Google Home and Apple Home and use them for different things. But while that's easy for me to keep track of because I set it up, when my spouse or friends and family are staying over, it's really difficult for them to quickly pick up how to use the smart home. I mean, if people already struggle turning on your TV, you can't expect them to figure out how an entire smart home works. The purpose of all this smart home tinkering was to make it easy for everyone in the home to use it, not just me. So this two-assistant format with basic automations just isn't gonna cut it. So that's where my perfect smart home journey ended for a while, until the last few weeks. So how do we fix these two major problems? Well, this is the deepest part of the rabbit hole I didn't wanna get into, but in the pursuit of a perfect smart home, I encountered black magic. Or in real world terms, home assistant. Home assistant is a tool that enables you to consolidate pretty much all of your smart home devices and more like your NAS into a single point. And from there, it could behave as your smart home, letting you control all of your devices in the home assistant app, or then route all of your devices back to your desired smart home ecosystem, even if they weren't originally supported by that ecosystem. See this TP-Link motion controlled light switch? It's not Apple home compatible, but with home assistant controlling it, it can be used in Apple home. Home assistant also has super robust automations that you make some really complex stuff. For example, I set an automation that looks to see if it's daytime. When the room detects motion and the temperature is higher than 74 degrees, home assistant turns on the ceiling fan. And when the temperature gets colder or no one is in the room, the fan turns off by itself. You can even turn on and off other automations with an automation. The level of customization home assistant provides is absolutely fantastic. That being said, it has its own issues too. Some integrations with home assistant just aren't very good and doesn't work the way you'd expect. Like this one that connects the Samsung frame TV to Apple home. Turning the TV on and off is super delayed. And sometimes it will turn off on Apple home, but actually just stay on. Home assistant also requires being a bit techie to fully set up and configure and since the automations are so robust, it's really easy to make a mistake in that automation that leads to unintended consequences. Like the light turning on randomly at midnight, causing your significant other to wake up. Not that that happened to me, of course. You should probably start tinkering your automations not in the main bedroom. Just some advice. So if you're willing to spend some time with it, it can definitely enhance your smart home and make it so much better as long as you're aware of its limitations and all of the complexities that come with it. So with all this talk of home automation, what is this bedroom capable of now? Well, the lights turn on automatically at sunset. The blinds close automatically at 8 p.m. They just take a while. The blinds close automatically at 8 p.m. When someone is in the room and the temperature is higher than 74 degrees Fahrenheit, the ceiling fan turns on. And if it's lower, it turns off by itself. This tiny remote lets me control the ceiling fan, the brightness of the lamps and open and close all of the different blinds. And since Home Assistant pushes all of the devices to Apple Home, my wife and I can use our phone to control the devices in Apple Home as well with all the complex automations happening in the backend with Home Assistant away from site. So after all of this experimentation, do I personally think my home is any smarter? I was able to make it do all the simple things that I don't like doing, but at the same time, integrate everything together in one place in Home Assistant and have it all controllable in a familiar interface for Apple Home. But it required quite a bit of trial and error and realizing that a $40 light switch that requires a hub could easily be replaced by ones that cost about half as much and provide the same responsiveness. So here's a summary of all my tips for when you decide to start on your smart home journey. Research what you're buying carefully, make sure they're compatible with everything you plan to use now and in the near future. Use third-party platforms like Home Assistant to further consolidate what you need and force compatibility for devices that aren't compatible with your smart home ecosystem and also use Home Assistant to control all the automations in a single place. That is if you're comfortable with a bit of techie tinkering. And lastly, take it one room at a time. So you're not starting a massive project with a big price tag and no end goal in sight. I started out that way and nothing ever felt done. It was a complete pain. So now that we're at the end of this video, what are my next home automation plans? I'm thinking maybe like a moisture sensor that activates the vents when I start showering and the bathroom gets really steamy and turns off when it's not. Or maybe like door sensors for the closets that when you open the door, the lights turn on automatically and when they're closed, it turns off by itself. I don't know yet. Do you have any home automation ideas? Was this video helpful in sorting out your own home automation needs? What are you doing for your own apartment or house? Let me know in the comment section below. And if you enjoyed this video, put a thumbs up and well, don't forget to subscribe. I'll see you all next time. Bye.