How I m Starting a New Smart Home from Scratch

I'm setting up my new smart home and it's not just going to be any smart home, it's going to be the best. Rock solid and bulletproof for my family trying to destroy it. Because trust me, they're going to try. That means better devices, better automations, and none of the mistakes I've made in the past. Let's do this. But wait, before I can even begin, I have to set up a good home network. If I have a bunch of devices all over my house and they can't communicate because of a weak signal or the network crashes, well, my smart home will be terrible from the start. So the first thing that I did was change the all-in-one modem router Wi-Fi device for my ISP into bridge mode. That way I can use my own device for a router and Wi-Fi without double nadding and causing problems. And warning, if you do end up using that all-in-one device from the ISP as your router, it will crash at least once a week and you'll be miserable. I know because I used to use mine years and years ago and it was the worst. Don't do it. So I'm going to be using UniFi again, but with some upgrades. And don't feel pressured to use an expensive UniFi system. An inexpensive TP-Link mesh system will work well if you're just starting out or on a tight budget. For UniFi, I've upgraded to a 10 gig switch and a U7 Pro XG wireless access point plugged straight into it. And hey, I mounted it to the ceiling, which wasn't that difficult to do. I also have a U7 mesh Wi-Fi access point hidden in a cabinet that works surprisingly well in there. I know for a better signal I could put it on top of the cabinet, but do you know where this cabinet is? Right outside the kids' rooms in their little hangout area. Sure, I might have a better signal for a few days until my kids see it and destroy it. When you live with a pack of wild animals, you have to take the proper precautions. These two wireless access points completely cover my house with a good Wi-Fi signal. But as you will see, I try to use as little Wi-Fi as possible. My computer and devices like the Apple TV have a hardwire connection to the Ethernet port in the room. Those Ethernet wires run to the low voltage box where I have a 2.5 gig switch connecting them. And all of that connects directly to the 10 gig switch, which is also connected to my smart home hubs and bridges. That way if a smart home device has to use Wi-Fi, it's not overly congested and much more reliable. I also have a detached shop that I added a Wi-Fi access point to, and I'll be talking about how I got the network out here in a separate video, so make sure you're following the channel. And let me tell you, the speeds are extremely fast. It's way better than I thought it was going to be. Getting my network to where it is right now took a decent amount of work. It was 100% worth it though to have a solid foundation to build my smart home on. Alright, now I can finally start setting up my smart home. First, I need a solid smart home platform to control all my devices. I've used pretty much all the smart home systems out there, and in my opinion there's one clear winner. That's Home Assistant. When I first started this channel, I would almost get annoyed by all the people saying, just use Home Assistant. Home Assistant! Home Assistant! Home Assistant! But now I'm a huge Home Assistant fan. It connects to basically every smart home device in existence. It's extremely powerful so I can dial in my automations exactly how I want them, plus it's free and open source. It used to be for the super nerds out there, but it's gotten way easier to use. Like you can buy a Home Assistant green and everything comes pre-installed. Not only that, they've really improved the user experience for people getting started. I can't think of one reason not to use Home Assistant, and if you disagree with me, come at me bro! I made a step-by-step video on how to get started with it, and I'll link it down below to watch after this video. Now, it might be tempting to go with a more simple smart home system, but if you watch this whole video, it'll be very clear why some of those other systems fall short. So now that my smart home system is up and running, I'm ready to add devices. I always get asked, what should I buy first, or where do I even get started? Well, luckily it's really simple to figure out. Here are my two main things I consider. One, what's the most annoying problem in my home right now? And two, is it in an area that gets used a lot? If it's yes to both of those, I'll start there. So my kids rooms? Yeah, sorry, but they can wait. Automating this plant? Not gonna make that initial cut. Poor plant! It wasn't automated because of the move, and look what happened to it! Sad. I do have a couple of places in my house that meet both criteria though. As I showed in my last video, if the ceiling fan and ceiling lights are both on, then the shadows from the fan are super annoying. This is in our living room, which definitely gets used a lot, so these need to be smart ASAP. But I don't want just any smart fan switch. Remember, I'm trying to build the best smart home, so I need something that can control more than just the fan. I want the switch to have extra buttons to control my smart home devices in the room, and I found this Zeus Zen32 that perfectly fits the bill. I can customize what each button does, but not only that, I can set the color and brightness for each button light, so I can actually remember what the button does. The white button makes it bright in the room, orange makes all the lights dim, blue controls the fan across the room, and the button with no light turns everything in the room off. That even includes turning off the TV. It's amazing. This switch is super family-friendly and easy to use. Rule number two, check. Grandma can come over and use that no problem. Okay, to be fair, I would have to give a quick explainer on what the buttons do. Even if she forgot though, she could just start pressing the buttons until everything turned off. Plus, there are no batteries to worry about since it's a wired switch, and it's extremely reliable because it uses a z-wave. This is a good example of why going with a simple smart home system falls short, because Apple, Amazon, or Google smart home systems can't connect to this smart switch. But with Home Assistant, just connect a z-wave radio USB stick, and you're good to go. Another annoyance in my house in this high traffic area are these pendant lights. I love how they look, but they are very visible when we watch TV, and it's also really annoying to walk around and hit the switch to turn them off when we're watching something. Extra walking? No, unacceptable. I have to make them smart. But how? Well, in my last home, I had smart bulbs in the pendant lights and controlled them with a smart switch. It worked fine, but I'm trying to make everything more reliable, so instead I put good quality dumb bulbs in. I won't be able to change the color, but they're already my favorite 3500 Kelvin white, so that's okay. And I'm using a smart dimmer switch to control them. That way it works 100% of the time if the physical switch is used, and I can still automate them. I'm using Lutron dimmer switches for these pendants and the living room ceiling lights. Just like z-wave, Lutron uses sub 1 GHz radio signals to communicate, so it doesn't interfere with Wi-Fi and things like the microwave that uses 2.4 GHz. That's why they work so well. I'm still going to use smart home devices that use Wi-Fi thread and Zigbee, and I've started setting them up in this house, and they also work good. But here's my priority for choosing a device to be used in my smart home. First, I'll see if there's a z-wave version. If not, I'll look for Zigbee, then thread, and Wi-Fi being my last choice. That order is based on my experience with reliability of each protocol, so until thread gets a lot better, I'll prioritize z-wave and Zigbee devices. That's just my preference. Now that I have some smart switches set up, it's time to start automating. But before jumping in and writing automations, it's first helpful to create scenes. Those will set the brightness levels of all the lights, and it'll make it much easier to manage long term because everything is in one spot. Let me show you what I mean. I created five scenes for this living room. A bright one with all the lights on. Another with all the lights on too, but less bright. A third scene with just the pendant lights on. A fourth that is super dim for watching TV. And a last one with everything off. Now I can run those scenes in many different ways. I can turn them on from pressing a button on the wall switch, using a smart home dashboard, or even an automation. If I ever want to update the brightness levels or add a light to the room, I just update that one scene and then it updates all the automations and button presses and all that. So that's why creating scenes first and using them is super useful. Okay, finally for the best part. Automating the smart home devices. Starting first with the ceiling fan and lights in the living room. My kids call these giant spiders, but I call them a giant headache. Luckily it's an easy fix. I don't want them on at the same time, so I created an automation that makes it so it never happens again. Look, the fan is on and I turn on the lights, the fan turns off. If the lights are on and I turn on the ceiling fan, then the lights turn off. Take that family! No one can have both on at the same time. And don't worry, this automation is easy to set up. I could create two automations for this to work, but with Home Assistant it's possible to do this with just one automation. I created two triggers. One if the fan turns on, and another if the light turns on. Click on edit ID and give it a name that is easy to tell which trigger it is. That way I know what device turned on to trigger this automation. For the action select choose, and for the option give it two conditions. If the light turns on from the trigger, and if the fan is already on, make an action to turn off the fan so they're not on at the same time. Then the same thing but opposite for the lights. Easy! This is how I programmed all the buttons on the ZOO switch. The same automation gets triggered for each button press. Using the trigger ID I know which button was pressed, but I can do different actions based on a single press, double press, or holding down the button. That way I can do things like double press the fan button to make it go full speed, or hold it down to turn off the fan. I was so excited to show my family I brought them over and guess what happened? It didn't work! What? My test subjects, I mean my family, were pressing the buttons fast and it wasn't changing the lights. It's not working! No! Dad you said it'd work! I thought it was gonna turn on the lights! No! I forgot to do one crucial step that allows anyone to press the buttons fast. Change the automation mode. By default a new automation runs in single mode which is perfectly fine for most automations, but for this it needs to be changed to parallel mode. That way I can press the buttons fast and turn on the fan and then the lights and it won't fail since it can run the same automation with different actions simultaneously. I also created some basic automations to turn the lights on and off. They turn on at 4 30 p.m right before dinner, they dim at sunset, and turn off around bedtime, and this type of schedule works great for us. But remember how those pendant lights reflect on the tv? I don't want them turning on automatically from a schedule while we're watching tv. And if I was using a more simple smart home system I would be out of luck. But with Home Assistant it's really easy. I'm using the Apple TV here in my living room and I can add a condition to skip the lights changing in the evening if the tv is on and playing. I can also take it a step further and automatically dim the lights to that scene I created earlier if the tv is playing something, and turn the lights back up when it's done. Allie and I have been watching Parks and Rec with our 11 year old every night and these automations let us settle in and relax quicker. Priceless. This is so much better than getting up and walking around the counter to turn off those pendant lights. And this automation makes me extremely happy and reminded me how much I missed my automations during the move. I didn't stop there though with the new automations. I wanted my desk light strips to automatically turn on when I'm sitting at the computer and turn off when I leave. I didn't want to use a sensor because it could get false detections with Allie's desk right behind mine and I wanted it to be super accurate. So I just set up an automation to turn on the lights whenever my computer turns on and it's connected to a second screen. That way the lights aren't turning on when I'm using my laptop on the couch, but only when I'm actually at the desk. Look how responsive it is at turning the lights on and off. I love it. What about automating the lights, thermostat, and music in the shop? Well, I learned a super useful automation technique when I was touring Riley's house years ago. If the smart lock unlocks, then turn on the lights, turn down the temperature, and start playing music. Nothing like an automation to get me focused on work. When I'm all done, I lock the door and everything turns off. It's so seamless. If the kids ever start barging in while I'm working, I might have to lock the door while I'm in here. If so, I would just disable the shutdown automation and use this dashboard to turn everything off. But for now, it's working great. All right, now for the elephant in the room. You might have noticed with all of these automations, I didn't use a motion sensor or any kind of typical smart home sensor. Of course, I'm going to use smart home sensors in the future, but they definitely make things more complicated. You can set up a motion sensor really fast and it could work 98% of the time. But if the lights are turning on or off when they're not supposed to, spouse approval factor can drop significantly and you could have an angry mob on your hands. But by automating with devices already around the house, like the TV, computer, or door lock, it's much more predictable and less annoying. Just something to keep in mind. I'll admit, when moving, there was some nice benefits of a dumb home. I mean, it's about as reliable and predictable as it gets. So that's why I really like my current setup, because I get all the benefits of a dumb home without the annoyances of a smart home. I might have cracked the code. I'm following all my smart home rules and it's working. I'm having so much fun setting my smart home back up and making it better than ever. Thanks for watching. Hey dad, when can I get smart home stuff in my room? Eh, it might be a while. Whoa, who did this? Hey, you guys need to take this off right now. Eh, it might be a while.