Starting my smart home over

Smart homes are nice but how do you set one up if your house is really old or if it's a rental? Well this place is both. I recently moved and our new place is almost 150 years old so we're gonna need to set things up a little differently. I just unpacked our boxes and now it's finally time to make this place smart. I want to walk you through how I set up my own place from scratch and give you some tricks for setting up your own. So let's go ahead and take a look around. Welcome to our new place. We are currently in the office. We have our wi-fi set up and the next order of business is to get our smart home hubs plugged in to act as the brains of our system. Now that the brains of the smart home are set up we're ready to set everything else up. I want to solve two problems out here. One, I want to go to bed every night knowing that my door is locked or be able to check really easily if it is. So we'll install a smart lock here and two, is the doorbell. I don't want to send data to Amazon servers so instead we'll be replacing it with this local only doorbell that will only run video footage within our own house. Let's start with the doorbell. Now that our doorbell is replaced I want to take care of the lock. Now the thing is I'm actually not going to replace the lock itself because we're renters I don't want the keys or the lock to change but what we can do instead is change the deadbolt inside the lock. They make smart dead bolts which is what we're going to use now. Let's try installing it. All right our first step is to just remove the bolts here. Bolt one and bolt two. Here's our lock itself and the deadbolt inside. When we pull this pin out here is the lock from the outside. So now all we're left with is the deadbolt that we're replacing. Pop this out and put this one in. We'll tighten this screw and this is the pin that works with my deadbolt but there are different shapes depending on your lock. Let's screw this in and then finally reinsert the pieces from the outside. Nice. Next on our list is lighting so let's head upstairs. Welcome to our very dark bedroom. We only have one light right now so the first thing I'm going to do is install these lamps on either side of the bed and add some smart bulbs to them. Nice. All right we have two extra lamps added and it's so much brighter in here not a minute too late because it's getting dark outside. One of the things that I want to add to each bedside table to control these lights is a button. One of my favorites is this hue button dial. It has a dial for dimming all of the lights and then you can actually control each button to do a different thing. So I have the first button to control a single lamp, the second button to control all the lights, and you can even set up buttons with automations unrelated to lights at all. So this third button controls our fan. Let's get these added to the nightstands. We have our sconces installed, we have smart bulbs everywhere, and we have buttons on the nightstands to control the lights. What could go wrong? Well let me tell you this switch could. As soon as you turn off this switch the buttons can no longer control this light which isn't gonna fly because I want this house to feel like it's not even smart at all. People shouldn't have to walk in the house and ask questions about how the lights work. So that's where this switch comes in. In our old place we just swapped out the switch with a smart switch. Which is great if your landlord is okay with it or if you live in a house but in this case we need something that requires little to no wiring which is how this switch works. It bluetooth connects to all of the bulbs so you don't have to do any additional wiring in your house. It's a perfect solution for renters. Let's get it added. Before we wrap up in here there's one more thing I want to get set up which is this little presence sensor. If you're unfamiliar with presence sensors they use radar technology to detect if someone's in the room regardless of whether they're moving which makes them perfect for detecting if someone's in the bed. Apollo Automation was kind enough to send me a box of sensors and this has been a sensor that I have been super excited to try out. Because radar waves can see through most materials I can actually just stick this behind the headboard of our bed. We'll get all of the presence detection of the sensor without any of the smart home uglies. Now it took me a little research to figure out but it turns out that the radar detects waves from this side of the sensor so I just pointed that side towards our bed and then calibrated the zones accordingly. With our presence sensor set up I can head to home assistant and set up an automation that checks if the sun is down the lights are off and somebody's in bed. If all three of those things are true when I hit the switch behind me the lights will default to a night light mode. This prevents me from waking up my partner while also not tripping over anything when I get in the bed. There are a ton of automations I have in mind for this bed sensor and if you have any that you've loved let me know in the comments below. Now let's head downstairs for our final order of business which is the plants. If there's one thing that makes almost any home instantly cozier it's plants. I moved about a Now for this move I just didn't want to do that again so we drove our plants from California to Oregon. Now they've just made it too far for me to kill the plants. To give them a little extra care I want to try out this plant sensor. This will give me additional information like soil moisture, light, uv index, temperature, and humidity. Now typically I'm just one to rely on my intuition to know when to water a plant or give it more light but I'm optimistic that this will give me a little extra layer of protection against killing my plants. This sensor can be powered either with battery or usbc and I'll opt for the battery route to reduce the number of cords in my house. All that's left to do is put it in the pot and set it up in home assistant. I'm not going to claim that these will keep my plants alive forever but I'm excited to set up some watering notifications and see if I learn anything from the extra data. So let's go back to where we started. This place is almost 150 years old and we're renters. When we moved in both of those felt like big challenges but it really came down to three principles. I couldn't touch the wiring, everything I add eventually needs to be removable, and I wanted to maintain the charm of the home. And to me none of those feel like a lesser version of a smart home. It's just the version that works in my place today. So if you've been waiting for the right place to get started consider this your sign to start with what you have. I have so many ideas in store for this place that I can't wait to show you and with that I'll see you in the next one.