Some of you know that I’ve been incredibly busy for the last year constructing my new house. Well, I haven’t built the house myself, but I’ve had to think about everything that I wanted in my new house. Where do you put the couch? Where do we want the kitchen, the bed etc etc. But what I really spend a lot of time doing is planning the Smarthome. And in my new house I wanted to go “ALL IN”.
First you have to decide what kind of “HUB” you want. Before I had a smart hub/home but was limited to Z-wave (I’ll get back to that later) and this time I just wanted multiple kind of protocols (Z-Wave, Zigbee, 433MHz, Infrared, bluetooth and Wifi). This because I wanted to connect a few different kind of devices.
Usually the more diverse the devices the more difficult it get to connect them with one single hub. Thats where the “Homey Pro” came in. I did my research and saw same good reviews especially about their easy interface. They made it easy to make an action reaction flow. More about that in a bit. When you are looking for a hub the most important is to make up your mind for what you will use it. For example lighting, your alarm system, or even switching on or off your coffee machine when you wake up. Most people start with lighting. When I started that was my initial goal as well. Switching on and off my lights remotely.
When I continued to read about the options of a smart home I quickly found out the options are limitless unless, your Hub doesn’t allow you to connect several devices. So, soon enough I ended up with Homey, a small futuristic ball with a led ring in the middel. It could connect to some of the devices I’ve already had. And they all work with different protocols. Mostly used is Zigbee. Ikea, Hue and some others use Zigbee, it’s usually a bit cheaper but the range of the products in term of radio range is less than Z-Wave products. Z-Wave products are a bit less popular because of the price, they send their commands directly to the Hub and are often with lesser delay. Wifi, Bluetooth and infrared are well known by most of you so.
I started with Lighting in every room in my house, the dimmable switches are from Fibaro (Z-Wave) but my on/off switches by Shelly (Wifi). I needed them to connect to my Homey what was easily done by my mobile phone. Add device and they ended up in my device screen in the app. Because lights themselves are not smart you can buy sensors to switch lights on or off automatically. I had some Fibaro Motion sensors (Z-Wave) but because of the price I also bought some other Zigbee motion sensors for about 15 bucks. Checked the app and applied these sensors.
In the Application from Homey I added the spaces in the house like: living room, kitchen, bathroom, office etc etc. The devices I’ve added in Homey I could then direct to the room there where in. Then the next step is to let the sensors send a command to the Homey Hub and let the hub do all the heavy lifting. For example I made a flow like this: If I walk up the stairs after sunset and the light is off, it will automatically switch on the lights on the next floor. If there is no motion for 10 minutes it automatically switches it off again. (usually I switch it off if I leave the floor anyway.) (In the Video at the bottom of this blog you can see how such a flow can look like)
Now, because I already had the sensors in place I decided to put those sensors to use some more. The motion sensors around the house are also used to trigger an alarm in case they get tripped by motion. If I’m not home I simply arm the alarm with the app or with a key lock. The only thing I needed to ad was a 150DB siren around the house. The Homey Pro, sends me a message to my phone, the camera’s around send live feed and my HIFI system will friendly (not so friendly) tell you to get out of the house. The lights start to flash etc. This all with the Homey Pro as a hub.
It didn’t stop there, since then I’ve added many more devices. (click here) if you want to find out what you can connect. The sky is the limit.
If I didn’t inspire you just yet I advice you to check out Homey’s website and find out if it fits your needs (click here for inspiration). I promise you if you buy one it will not disappoint you. You can even contact me and I’ll help you set it up with you.
