A modern yet practical smart home looks like this

Hey, what's up? Alex here. I'm back today to show you a very recent project I did at a new BTO in Yishun. For now, I will only do a smart home tour if this particular setup has something very interesting and different that I want to showcase. If not, you guys will keep seeing the same thing over and over again. But if you have been following this series, then more or less you know which are the products that I typically propose to my clients. Before I begin, let's check out the sponsor for today's video. I usually don't take out finance-related product sponsor but I think this one is really worth sharing. Cashew. It is Singapore's premier digital-first mortgage platform. Instead of chasing banks individually, Cashew instantly aggregates and compares over 500 home loan packages across all major banks. It is 100% free and unbiased. 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What I like about this platform is it's very fast in getting what I want to know. I don't have to to any of the bank personnel directly if I don't want to. No obligations and don't forget that this is totally free. So just head to cashew.sg and using my referral code ALEXDEAL. Alright, let's start off with the entrance area. I think they have done up this space quite nicely. Definitely one of my favourite spots. So you can see there's a little sitting area for you to wear your shoes, then a place for you to put all the shoes that you frequently wear and there's always an LED strip. Don't forget to include that. Very nice. Then there's also another LED strip like this all the way up. So try to always incorporate LED strips. I think they look much nicer as compared to downlights. So over here is just a couple of downlights on top. Then you have your open shelving. Then this is your main storage for all your shoes. Then this one is your DB. Don't forget to include ventilation. It can be on top or below. So let's check out what's inside. Okay, so straight away you can see this is a unified setup and as usual we have our DeskPi mini rack. So we have our UCG fiber, XGPoE switch, then our patch panel. Right below is where you can put your fans. Over here is Then of course we have our home assistant green. This is the ZPT2 Connect using it as a Zigbee coordinator. So here are your data points with your network cables and your power cables here. Everything nicely cable managed. Very organized sitting inside the DB. Another thing that we have at the entrance is the Shelly XL display panel. So right now it's on screensaver mode. It does have a proximity sensor which means when we are approaching the panel you will then wake up the device. So let me briefly show what we put over at this panel. So over here at the right hand side we have something very useful and this is bus arrival timing and I use different color code to represent the first, second, third bus that is going to arrive. Since this is at the entrance so it's very useful to check out how much time you have for the next bus to come. So instead of buying a separate device to check out all this bus timing the beauty of having home assistant is anything that has pretty much an open API specifications you can pretty much link home assistant to it and having it to display on the home assistant dashboard is super useful like this. Another very useful is you can see at this corner there's a front door tile. So pressing this will unlock the U-locks that is being installed over here. So we have the U, this one is U Ares gate lock. Then we have a U, I think this one is the Kira Pro. So for this model specifically the gate lock, once we press this button okay let me press this okay you can see the lock has been unlocked. This means that we don't need to place this U button unlock somewhere at this door. We can just put it inside our dashboard and this you can just use as a backup keep it somewhere. Okay besides that some other stuff we have here is this one is the weather forecast card, then some bubble cuts for the various lights in the living room, a couple of towels for the curtain controls, dining light and over here is a bunch of bubble cuts again for all the ACs for the entire house. Then we have media controls for the living room Sonos Art Ultra. Some scenes over here, living home, back home and another thing that I find very useful to include inside the dashboard is the robot vacuum. Robot vacuum controls over here because you might want to have your robot vacuum to start cleaning when you are leaving house. So here are the controls you can start, pause or go back to dock. Later on I'll show you what robot vacuum model that they are using. In the living room we have a couple of aircon unit so one over here for dining. Their dining table is not here yet but pretend that this is going to be a dining table with the pendant light here. Then another aircon unit is over here. So this model is from Mitsubishi but not the Starmax. This is Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and the specific series of this model is the JetFlow. I think this is quite new, something quite popular that I see quite a few of my clients actually wanted to use this aircon series. And since you know that this is not Mitsubishi Starmax, it means that it doesn't have your typical CM1050 port for you to connect your aircon module. So luckily we are still able to integrate the aircon into home assistant without having to use Ara Blaster. So let me show you how quick is the response time from my dashboard panel to switch on the aircon. So let me just tap on the dining aircon card. Okay you can see the aircon is now switched on. Okay beside the aircon we have our first ceiling AP. This is the U7-XG. This one placed over here will give you good Wi-Fi access for the entire kitchen and the living room area. So for all the lighting setup that you see over here in the living room including all the downlights, cove lighting, LED strips over here, they are all from Shope Lighting. But do take note that if you opt for the smart system from be it from Shope Lighting or from Solenair, they are all using LTEG system. So I don't know how well LTEG system will work on home assistant. So I will always recommend to use Shelly dimmers which I always use for all my other clients. And so we have Shelly dimmers and Shelly relays installed for all the lights. So with Shelly at least we know that 100% is going to work very well on all the major smart home system. So here is the living room space. Overall I would say pretty nice design. I think white color so far is the trend now and I think they look really very nice. We have day and night curtains at the side, LED cove light definitely. Then we have a special kind of a cave-like wall structure over here as the TV feature wall. Then we have a Sonos Arc Ultra. We have all our gaming PS5, Nintendo Switch. Oh and this is Expedition 33. Don't know whether this is from their collector's edition. We have an Apple TV there. Let's check out their display cabinet. I will be honest, most of these figurines have no idea what they are. I know some of these Labooboos over here. Okay I only managed to spot two figurines that I know very clearly who they are and that's Final Fantasy with Tifa and Zack. Very cute. Okay and very nice LG OLED TV but definitely you are able to see some reflections because of the light coming in. So for me personally I will always try to avoid having OLED TV in the living room. Right now I think there's new technology called RGB TV. From the reviews it seems like it's really pretty good, comparable in terms of the picture quality from OLED TV from LG. In terms of ceiling fan, we have the same two-blade design. This is the same as what I shown in my landed smart home tour. This is from Aerotron, two-blade design. But personally I feel that the wind speed is definitely not on the high side. Okay if you compare to like from 0.1 smart fans for example. Very similar to Haiku fan, more on the looks and ventilation instead of giving you pure wind speed. Then right at the corner I want to show you guys is a G5 Dome Ultra Unified camera. But this one has a flash mount installed. So with the flash mount you can see that it's super sleek just exposing the camera lens out only. Also over here we have a couple of ERA 300 Sonos speakers sitting on a stand. I understand from homeowners that they are planning to have this space for their future pets. So all pets related stuff will be over here. Okay another very interesting choice of device is the power track that you see over here. You can see the power track is definitely very different from the ones that you typically see on many of the house tours where you don't see the actual track. You can see so the thing is you will have all these different power socket connectors. So all you need to do is to push this right through then you can see this is powered up already. So this is the pantry. Let's check out the kitchen and see what appliances they went with. We have the Hitachi fridge. This is Bosch oven. Okay we have a corner fan. In terms of the smart home setup we are just going with smart switches because the lights pretty much don't have to dim. So the easiest way is to use a smart switch of course. Personally I find that this color is the nicest for the entire Aqara H1 series especially because the color LED is in blue color and it goes very nicely with this black color switch. Then of course the LED strips on both sides. Okay we have a dishwasher here and right beside is our robot vacuum. So the choice of robot vacuum is from Roborock. This one is the Asaros 20 series and with Roborock we know that it direct integrates into home assistant very nicely. So service yard. So for the washer and dryer they are both from Bosch. Okay and just now you can see the light automatically come up because we have a Shelly motion sensor over here. All right so that's the kitchen. Let's head over to the study room. Okay very typical design which is also a very good design is to have glass panels. Okay so that you can see what's you can see you can still watch the tv when you are inside the study room. First device that I want to share here is the Sonoff NS Panel Gen 2. Okay first of all you might be wondering why did I went with Sonoff NS Panel instead of Shelly Panel over here. Okay one very good reason is because Shelly Panel only comes with one built-in relay but Sonoff Panel comes with two built-in relays. In this case they want to split the light into two groups. So you can see that these are all surface mounted lights. There's no force link. There's no carpentry works. So it's difficult to do any sort of relays and dimmers. So the best and easiest way is to have a panel that has two relays built-in inside. So that's why we go with the Sonoff NS Panel Gen 2. The Sonoff NS Panel Gen 2 also comes with very good specs where you're able to put in live video over here. So let me demonstrate by going outside to show you how well the video is responding. So you can see the video footage is really very smooth. Besides that we have the controls for the aircon, ceiling fan, the lighting which is from the built-in relays from Sonoff Panel. Then this is the blinds, clock. Then we have a button for everything off. Then this is a button to unlock the door. So imagine a use case if someone rings the bell and you are sitting over here at the study room, you can just turn back and see who is at the door and if necessary you can straight away unlock. Talking about doorbell, let me just quickly show you what has been configured over here as well. So in terms of doorbell, this is the unified doorbell light. Very sleek looking and very affordable as well. So what happens when someone press the doorbell? So you can hear that the panel is actually playing the chime. So we managed to integrate having the doorbell chime to be played over at the Shelly display panel. Okay so for the study room we have a his and hers desk. Okay this is again the secret lab magnus desk with RGB lights behind. This can be integrated to home assistant as well. Okay very nice desk if you have the space for them. Then for the blinds over here, this is something quite popular nowadays. This is the Shangri-La blinds. Looks something like this. Okay so like I said in my previous video, as long as it's a space that you're going to spend a lot time inside, then I think it makes a lot of sense to use a panel instead of typical switches. Because with panel, you can always customize to control a lot more things as compared to using switches. And having this panel is definitely very useful over here. Alright now let's check out their common toilet. So in terms of switches, we went with smart switches to control the lights directly. So we have one switch for heater, then a 3-gang switch for the lights and the ventilation fan. So these are all Aqara H1 black color switches. So if you're wondering why I'm able to use a black color switch as a heater, because this is not a heater switch, this is just a normal 1-gang switch. I'm using a contactor behind to control the heater instead of having going directly to a heater switch. So stepping into the common toilet, actually I just want to say that their toilets are my favorite, because I think they are done up very nicely over here. Very dark color theme is what I like as well. So we have a mirror over here, then this is the basin, a smart toilet bowl. We have the controls from TOTO, then we have our switchboard presence sensor. Then into the shower area, this is a KDK ventilation fan. So I also like to have this kind of niche to put all your shower, your shampoo. Then at the corner, I have placed a Shelly humidity sensor. So of course, this sensor will be able to control the ventilation fan. Alright, so for the next common bedroom, they are using it like a walk-in wardrobe. So I have sensors put inside here. So once I step into this space, you can see the LED strips inside the cabinets has automatically light up. Okay, that's controlled using the everything presence sensor. So it helps to switch off everything when nobody is detected in this space. So the rest of the lights are being controlled by the smart switch over here. So this is the Acura Z1 Pro gray color 4-gang light switch. Couple of buttons here to control the lights. I have the last button which you know that is a wireless switch. You can do multiple controls there. One will be controlling that LED light strip. Then I set for double press to switch on the AC. Double press now and you can see the AC switch on. Then for the Z1 Pro, there is also a slider. With the slider, I think the best use case for it is for blinds because I can always just scroll up. Then you can see the blinds coming up. Then if I just do a scroll down, slide down I mean, then you can see the blinds are coming down. So best use of the Acura Z1 Pro slider I feel is to control the blinds. So for them, they hack away a part of this room so that you are able to directly enter the master bedroom. And this is master bedroom space. Again, in terms of lighting, very nice. We have LED strip at the side that is dimmable. Okay, then we have another of this feature wall similar to the one in the living room TV console feature wall. Then a couple of bedside lights like this. Then down lights on top. Okay, cold flight all the way. So although there is so many different lightings, all you need is just one panel to control everything. So we have our panels. Okay, all the different lightings and for the aircon, for the curtains. Okay, we still have space to put the weather forecast. Then a couple of scenes for waking up and good night scene. Then there's a couple of controls that we are exploring right now is to control their bed. This bed is from Woosa. So with the Woosa bed, you know that you are able to do recline. Okay, the bed will move up and you can also go back to this flat state. So with Home Assistant, we are able to integrate all these controls and put them inside the dashboard as well. So if I tap on this anti-snore, now you can see the bed automatically comes up. So if you have a snoring problem like myself, having this kind of feature definitely helps a lot to reduce that snoring. Then when you want it to go back to flat, then again tap of this on the dashboard and you can see now it goes back to the flat state. Again, all this is possible is because of Home Assistant. Lastly, the master bathroom. Very similar theme and of course, you will be able to see the lights automatically come up because we have a motion sensor, a presence sensor, two-sensor approach and the smart toilet bowl also will automatically open up when you are approaching very near to it. And I just want to mention that the doors that they use for the entire house are pretty high quality doors. Very heavy doors and I would definitely say that they are soundproof. Alright, to conclude with some closing thoughts to share. The homeowner is working in the tech industry as a software engineer. Somehow, I have quite a number of clients in working in tech, whether it's a technical role or whether it's sales and marketing. As long as you are in the tech industry or you have interest in tech, then I think you kind of will appreciate what I do and what I advocate is to have a proper smart home setup. And that's the reason why we are not using any of those LTE devices but going with Shelly, Sonoff NS-Panel, Acura switches, minimize 2R devices as much as possible and bring everything together into Home Assistant. And that's all for today. Thanks for watching and thanks to Cashew for sponsoring this video. See you in the next one. Bye!