How To Build a Smart Home (101): The Ultimate Beginner's Guide to Home Automation

Building a smart home should be easy. Instead most people get caught by confusing technology, marketing that over promises, and devices that just don't work together. So let's fix that. By the end of this video you'll know how a smart home actually works, what to buy first, and which of three types of systems you belong on. I'm going to name the exact one I had to a beginner in 2026 and I'm going to show you how to build all of it without paying a single monthly fee to anybody. I'm Brian and Automate Your Life is where I help you save time and money with smart tech. Now there are time codes below so if you already know a section, skip past it. But we're going to build you up from the ground and get you moving today. So let's start with what a smart home can actually do because this is where most people's expectations are wrong. Most people think a smart home is a motion sensor turning on a light when you walk past it and that's a 2015 smart home. Today the better version knows you're sitting in the room, not just moving through it. So here's what my house actually did yesterday and I didn't touch a thing. The shades opened part way in the morning because it was mild outside and the sun was doing the heating for us. When everybody left the house knew and it backed off the thermostat and it armed our security system. The vacuum ran while the place was empty. A package showed up and my doorbell told me it was sitting there. The photo frames cycled through new pictures on their own and the dryer finished and the house told me so I didn't find that load sitting there three hours later. Now when the sun went down, the outside lights came on and when the last of us went to bed, one button locked the doors, killed every light in the house. None of that is exotic. Every single piece of it is something you can go buy right now and that's the actual promise. A smart home buys back your time. It takes running the house off your shoulders, it watches your property and it manages what you're spending on in terms of power. That's the whole pitch really. One more thing because this part is brand spanking new. AI has moved into the products themselves. Lighting can now build its own animations. Cameras can decide whether that's a person or a package right on the device in milliseconds and we're now seeing local AI agents built into products running from inside your home. None of this happens by accident. Everything I just described is a rule that somebody had to build. So let's talk about how that actually works. So now you have the basic idea of what a smart home can do. So let's talk about how they work. I'm gonna start with an oversimplification of things but we'll get deeper and a little more technical as we go forward in our video. At a high level, you'll have devices in your home that sense what's happening. Not surprisingly, those are often called sensors. There are many types but some examples are leak sensors for water detection, door sensors to know when something's open, and presence sensors to know when someone's in a room. Cameras are often considered a sensor too. Then you will have action devices. These are your smart light switches, your bulbs, your plugs, or even things like smart shades. Cameras can be an action device too. Now these devices and many more will communicate with a device that speaks their language. Now there are many languages and because of this, those devices are often called hubs or controllers. Today a hub can be everything from a little white or black box to a full-on computer. What they do is communicate with all the smart devices around your home. They process all the information coming in and then they send out commands to turn devices on or off. They can even be used to change settings on your devices. For example, you can change how far a presence sensor can detect you and there are many reasons you will want to. So what's happening in a smart home is that all of your devices are telling your hub what's happening. Then as a smart homeowner, you build automations that tell your hub what to do with that information. You'll build those automations in the app that goes with your hub. In the end, a smart home runs on automations and so it is really key to understand what an automation is. I describe automation as essentially a cause and an effect relationship. Let me give you an example. Enter a room with a presence sensor in it. As the sensor detects you, it sends that information to your hub. Because you have an automation that says when there's someone in the room, the lights come on. The hub instantly processes that rule and sends a command to the smart lights to turn on. In this situation, the cause was you entering the room and the effect was the lights coming on. So let's drop down another layer. An automation starts when a specific event occurs. We call that event a trigger. In our previous example, the trigger was the presence sensor detecting that you were in the room. The light bulbs turning on is the effect in our cause and effect relationship and it's often called an action. And you can have multiple actions happen. That's why we aren't limited to just one light. But there's a third component to automations that exist in many hubs called conditions. Conditions are a check or a blocker to our cause and effect relationship. If a condition isn't true, the actions don't happen, even if our trigger has occurred. And this helps you in a lot of ways. In our current example, if you enter the room at dusk or later, you will probably want the to come on to a pretty bright state to light up the room properly. However, in the middle of the day, you may not want the lighting at all. The condition here that we would add to the automation is the time of day, but it could also be the amount of light that's in your room. You have a few options for conditions and even better is that you could use both of those conditions in this automation to make sure that the lights only come on when you truly need them. That's because in many hubs, you can have multiple conditions. And one of the reasons I've explained it all like this is because all of the apps call it something different. You won't always see the words trigger conditions and actions. Every app has its own naming scheme, but you should always return to those simple concepts in your own head. So whenever you look at a screen like this, I want you to see trigger conditions and action. Let's make that real because trigger condition and action are just words until you watch one run. It's two in the morning and a pipe lets go in my basement. The leak sensor sitting on the floor has a sensing cable running along it. Now, when water touches that cable, it completes a circuit. That's how this sensor knows it's wet. It doesn't decide anything. It just broadcasts that one thing. I went from dry to wet. Now, my hub hears the broadcast and it knows exactly which sensor that is because I paired it and I gave it a name. So this isn't some anonymous signal. It's basement leak sensor just went wet. The hub runs down its list of automations looking for one that starts with exactly that. It finds it and it starts. Then to us as humans, it feels like everything happens at once. The valve on my main water line closes. My phone gets a notification and a set of bulbs in the house turn red because at two in the morning, I want to know before I'm standing in it. That's a whole pile of separate actions. Here's the part I really want you to catch. That automation has no condition on it and that's on purpose. If water's coming out of a pipe, I don't care what time it is. I don't care if I'm home. I don't care if I'm asleep. I don't care if I'm on vacation. Shut the valve every single time. That's what an automation with no condition looks like. It runs, no questions asked. Compare that to something a lot less urgent. My porch light, they come on when someone walks up to my home, but only between sunset and midnight. So what happens at two in the afternoon when the Amazon guy walks up? Well, my sensor still fires. The trigger still happens. My hub still gets the message, but it checks the condition, sees that it's the middle of the afternoon and stops right there. Nothing happens. No lights come on. The condition doesn't stop the trigger. The trigger already happened. It's over. It's done. The condition stops the actions. A trigger is a moment in time. A condition is a situation and an action is what you do. One last thing before we move on from this. For any of that to work, every one of those devices and the hub have to be talking to each other and they have to speak the same language. How are they actually doing that? Part of my job is to introduce you to great companies with great products that work for your home. And I've had the Tapo C675D camera and solar panel kit on my home since early this year. They're also today's sponsor. So let me tell you about it. It is two 4k cameras in one body. The wide lens watches the whole scene and the pan and tilt lens swings over and follows whatever's moving. A person, a pet, a car, doesn't matter. The AI that tells those apart runs on the camera itself too. So it's fast and it doesn't require the internet. Daytime, nighttime video, they're both sharp. And dusk is where most cameras fall apart and this one holds up. Here's the part I really care about though. It records locally to a micro SD card or to the Tapo H500 hub. So there is no subscription and the solar panel keeps the battery full. So I haven't touched it since the day I mounted it. It's a set and forget camera. So check the links below in the description. The way we tie a whole smart home together is through networking. It sounds scary but it's really not okay. There are a few simple terms you have to understand with smart homes specifically. The devices you bring into your home connect to some kind of network. A network is really just describing a group of devices communicating together. Most networks today are wireless like your Wi-Fi but you can use physical connections too like plugging in an ethernet cable directly into a hub or a camera. But what's different about smart home tech is that we move beyond Wi-Fi. Many products do use Wi-Fi and we'll talk about that a lot but smart homes also use some weird terms. Zigbee, Z-Wave, Thread, Bluetooth and Matter. Let me try and break down those into terms that hopefully we all relate to. Wi-Fi, it's like a big high-speed highway. It's great for high bandwidth devices like cameras, streaming sticks, smart speakers, but it uses a lot of power. So it's not usually good for battery operated devices like little sensors. There are tricks that some companies use to give you good battery life on Wi-Fi devices today and that's actually one of the improvements in the last couple of years that we've seen. In general though you won't want to put every smart device on Wi-Fi. The fact is your router or mesh system has an upper limit for how many devices it can handle. A cheaper router will have a very low limit. You will experience hitting or nearing this limit when devices start to drop off your Wi-Fi or sometimes won't connect. Basically you can overload your system just by putting a lot of devices on it and there's a lot of details here but it's one of a few reasons why I don't recommend you build a smart home entirely based off of Wi-Fi. It's also why we have some of these other network types. Today there are three wireless technologies employed specifically for smart homes. Zigbee, Z-Wave, and Thread. I'm going to put a table up on screen right now comparing their exact ranges, speeds, and frequencies but here's the breakdown of what you need to know today. All three of these share two big benefits. First, they are low power. They sip on batteries meaning a tiny sensor like this or a tiny door sensor can last for a year or more. Second, they all create what's called a self-healing mesh network. Now mesh means that instead of every device trying to shout all the way back to your hub they talk through each other. Devices plugged into the wall act as repeaters passing the signal down the line so the more of those repeaters you have usually the stronger and further your network reaches. Self-healing means the network works out those routes on its own and works them out again when something changes so unplug a smart plug that half of your sensors were routing through and they will find a new path without you touching anything. But here's the practical part. Healing is not instant. Depending on the technology it can take minutes and sometimes a lot longer so if you rearrange your house or you move a plug from one room to another and things go a little flaky for a day afterward that's not broken gear. That's your network rebuilding itself so give it some time before you start troubleshooting. On some hubs, mostly Z-Wave ones, you'll find a button that says something like network repair or heal network and that's what it's for. You almost never need to touch it but if you've moved a lot of devices around at once that's the nudge it needs. As for the differences Z-Wave is the oldest. It runs on a much lower frequency than the others which is why it reaches further and why it never really fights with your Wi-Fi. That's a big part of why it's great for security type devices. There's also a new version of Z-Wave called Long Range that can travel incredibly far. Zigbee. Cheap, reliable, absolutely everywhere. It's a little faster than Z-Wave but it does share the airwaves with your Wi-Fi. Thread is the newest standard and its biggest advantage is incredibly low latency meaning when a thread sensor detects something the reaction is practically instant. Like Zigbee though it does share the airwaves with your Wi-Fi. Sharing used to cause real interference problems in a smart home. It's much less of an issue than it was five years ago but if you want the full breakdown on all these technologies I've linked a deeper dive video for you in the description. But you know there are a few more technologies to discuss that you might use in your home. There is Bluetooth Low Energy or BLE. Some companies use this because it allows your smartphone to communicate directly with the device without needing a hub. This is nice when the Wi-Fi goes out in your home. You might also hear about LoRa which is what cities are using for smart cities because the range is incredible. I've used it in just a few smart home hubs today but it offers a lot of benefits for farms and acreages like Z-Wave Long Range does now. So that's six technologies or highways that you'll run into in a smart home. Wi-Fi, Zigbee, Z-Wave, Thread, Bluetooth and LoRa. But there's another term that you'll hear all the time and people confuse it with those six. The term is matter and you're going to see it the logo and the name on lots of boxes. Now hold on because matter is important and there's a whole section coming. But if all these devices are speaking different languages on all these different highways who's directing the traffic? Well that brings us to your controllers or hubs. We saw this earlier in the video with the hub receiving signals and then sending them out. A few years ago a hub was almost always this dedicated box you bought and you plugged it into your router. That box was filled with radios and antennas and that allowed it to use one or more of those big technologies. Today though you can have everything from computers and servers or NAS drives all the down to these little boxes. Some smart speakers and displays can be used as a hub or a controller and they all come with different options for using all of these technologies. Ultimately though they are the ones directing traffic in your smart home and a lot of people think that they will have just one hub or one controller but the fact is a lot of companies will force you to buy their hub. Now the reason I'm going to give you for this will make some people suspicious and listen. Sometimes a company does that just to get you to spend but there's a real reason this happens and a real reason you will care. So those of you who want to be suspicious go ahead. I don't care because this is the truth. Now think of it like this. If I make a great sensor like this one from Aqara. It's an amazing presence sensor and it has an incredible array of different advanced settings. I have to build an app that handles all of those different settings and features. Now I can't force another company to put my 10 custom settings or features into their app. That limitation alongside a few others is what drives people to have a primary brain or hub alongside maybe one or two secondary hubs. But there is something that is finally helping to fix that mess and it's called the MatterStandard. Now let me explain how that changes how you build a smart home today. It is plastered everywhere. Matter, the logo, the name, the marketing and it's in almost every product today. So we need to be very clear about what Matter is and what it isn't because marketing around it has confused a lot of people. Matter is not a new wireless technology. It's not a new type of hub. Think of Matter as USB-C for your smart home. Now remember what USB-C actually fixed? Every company had their own cable. Apple had one. Android had another. My camera has some weird one and none of them worked with anything else. I ended up with this giant bag of cables and then everybody agreed on this single connector. And notice what didn't happen. The devices didn't all become the same. Your laptop, your phone, your headphones, they're all still different products from different companies. They just agreed on the plug. Now that's Matter in a nutshell. A smart plug from many different brands can be built totally differently by companies that compete with each other. And every major app still knows how to talk to them all. Apple Home, Google Home, Amazon, SmartThings, Home Assistant, Homey. You stop having to check the back of the box to see which one of these you're allowed to buy. Just a few years ago, smart homes were incredibly frustrating to build because of what we call walled gardens. You might buy a smart plug on sale, get it home, and find out it only works with Amazon. So if your home was built on Apple Home, you were out of luck. And even when a product did connect, you didn't necessarily get all of the features that the box was telling you you were getting. It was pure chaos. Matter was created to destroy those problems. It hasn't worked perfectly, but today if you look at First, it guarantees it works almost everywhere. You don't have to stand in the store trying to work out whether you're buying the right version for your home. Second, it means you can use it with multiple apps at the same time. So if you prefer Home Assistant, but your favorite person prefers Apple Home, you're both happy. By contrast, Zigbee and Z-Wave devices are stuck communicating with only a single hub. And third is a benefit called local control. And basically it means that you should be able to control your device and have automations happen even when the internet is unavailable. Now, one catch there, your app also has to work without the internet and plenty of them still don't. But your automations will keep running either way. And that's the part that really matters. Now when Matter first launched a few years ago, it was pretty limited. It mostly just covered, you know, like basic plugs and bulbs. Honestly, the rollout was a bit messy and things didn't work well. Now the standard has matured drastically. Matter doesn't just cover lights. The standard has expanded to support robot vacuums, appliances of many types, heat pumps, EV chargers, even your solar panels and home battery storage. Some cameras like this one are now Matter ready too. Matter is finally allowing us to pick the best hardware and the best app for our specific needs without researching a device's compatibility for days. Now there is one big drawback though, and you've experienced it with your USB-C cables too. You grab a cable, it charges the thing, but it won't do video. Or it charges, but very slowly. They all fit, they don't all do everything. Matter's the same. Govee's light fits and every one of these apps can turn it on and off and change the color and the brightness, but their effects and animations aren't part of the standard. So for those, you're back in the Govee app. Before I break any of this down, let me show you something. This television is so old. It's dumb as a rock. It's got a television remote and it doesn't connect to the internet. It survived because it was well built. Now it is part of my smart home because of this little thing right here. It's an infrared blaster and it can learn the TV's remote and then send out those signals whenever I want it to. I'm starting there on purpose because most people think building a smart home means replacing everything that they own and it doesn't. But to know what you actually have to replace and what you can just make smarter, you need to know what's out there. So here's how I break it down. Five groups. Sensors, action devices, combo devices, control interfaces, and accessories. Now sensors are the eyes and ears of your home. Their only job is to notice something and tell your hub about it. The one almost everybody starts with is a contact sensor. Two pieces. One on the door and one on the frame. Now the bigger piece has all the electronics in it. The smaller piece is actually just a magnet. Pull them apart and your hub knows the door is open. Now those two halves need to sit pretty close together when the door is shut and companies will tell you exactly how far apart is the maximum. But the little trick here is that you can make the magnet stronger. You don't actually have to use this. The one I want you to actually pay attention to is presence. Now for years we used PIR motion sensors which look for moving heat. They work but they only see you when you're moving. If you sit still on the couch for 10 minutes, a motion sensor will decide the room is empty and then it shuts off your lights. So annoying. But everyone who's built a smart home has been left sitting in the dark by one of these. Today we have millimeter wave radar presence sensors and these track movements so small that they know you're in the room just from the rise and fall of your chest while you read. That is a huge upgrade from the last few years and it is honestly the difference between a house that reacts to you and a house that kind of fights you. A real drawback though is that they are sensitive enough to pick up other things that move like a fan or a plant or even blinds and shades. Now that depends how the sensor was built and how you place it. You can absolutely get false positives. Beyond those two there is a sensor for nearly everything you can think of. Temperature, humidity, air quality, right down to CO2 or VOC levels, water leaks, inline meters that watch the flow through a pipe, vibration for a mailbox or a laundry machine, ambient light, acoustic sensors that listen for glass breaking or a smoke alarm going off, plus power which is the category growing the fastest right now. That runs from a simple smart plug that tells you exactly what your TV is drawing all the way up to a whole home energy monitor that clamps onto the circuits inside your breaker panel and then tells you what the entire house is pulling or producing if you've got solar. Two things before we leave sensors, okay, because both of them trip people up. First, a lot of sensors don't arrive looking like sensors. They're built inside other products. This camera has a motion sensor in it. This display knows when you walk up to it. This thermostat has presence detection built right into it. You may or may not get direct access to those sensors in your app but they are absolutely affecting how that device behaves. Second, not everything feeding your home has to be a device at all. Your utility can hand your home the current price of a kilowatt hour. A weather service can tell you what's coming this afternoon. That information gets used like a sensor reading. So if sensors are the eyes and ears, action devices are the hands. They take a command from your hub and physically do something. Smart lighting is where most people start. Bulbs, LED strips, and smart wall switches. And if you've got switches that you actually like the look of, you can put an in-wall relay module in the box behind them and then make the dumb switch smart without changing how it looks. Most people have no idea these exist. Smart power is your plugs, your power bars, and inline dimmers which turn anything you plug into a wall into a smart device. But it goes a lot further than that. There are smart breakers now, entire smart electrical panels, and there are battery backups that report to your hub so your home knows the second the power goes out. Window treatments run from retrofit motors that pull the curtains you already own all the way to full replacement shades. There are even smart awnings. And a lot of these window treatments now come with solar panels so you never charge them. Appliances are further along than people think. Fans, portable AC units, humidifiers, my fridge, my oven, my microwave, they're all connected. The control you get is often limited but it's there. And safety and security includes gear like automatic water shutoff valves and sirens. Your smart speakers can be included here too because a speaker that announces a leak is taking an action. Workers are the newest group and they're moving well past robot vacuums. Robot lawnmowers are getting really good. We're starting to see machines that fold laundry. Most of the complicated ones of these aren't ready for a normal house yet but they are coming. And then there's the one I opened with. IR and RF controllers. An infrared blaster copies a handheld remote so it can turn a dumb TV or a portable AC unit into a smart one. An RF blaster does the same thing for radio remotes, fireplaces, garage door openers, and even fun things like this little fog unit I used for Halloween last year. 20 or 30 bucks and gear you already own joins your smart home. You know pound for pound, it's kind of the best value in the video. Now number three is combo devices and here's the thing that trips people up. Most of what you'll actually buy doesn't sit neatly in either of those first two groups. Many do both jobs at once. That's not a different kind of product on a different shelf. It's just what happens when a company builds the sensing and the acting into the same thing and it usually saves you money because you're buying one thing instead of two. Now the simplest example is a smart plug with energy monitoring. It's a sensor because it knows what's being pulled through it. It's an action device because it can shut that power off. Your cameras and video doorbells are combo devices too. They sense motion or presence and then they use AI usually to work out whether that's a person, a vehicle, or a package. Whether that AI runs on the camera itself like this one or up in somebody's cloud like this one matters enormously to you and we'll come back to it. But they're also acting because they do record, they play sounds, they let you talk to whoever's out there. Now your thermostat is a combo device too. Reading temperature and humidity while firing up your furnace. Your smart lock is another reporting the state of your door while locking and unlocking it. Now number four, control interfaces. Now automations run your home in the background but you still need a way to take the wheel. The truth is you can't automate everything and you will crash and burn trying. That's what control interfaces are for. Here are a few examples. Wireless buttons and dials that you could stick on a nightstand or beside a door. Voice control through smart speakers. It's worth knowing that it isn't just the three big Google, Amazon, and Apple anymore. There are smaller companies now doing local voice assistants like this one from third reality that actually never send the request out of your home. Your TV and streaming boxes which can put camera feeds and scenes on screen and dedicated dashboards which can be a mounted tablet or an e-ink panel like this one or a full-on computer. And our fifth group are accessories. They're a supporting cast. Two things are worth your time here. Batteries are one of my biggest ongoing costs and most people don't budget for them. I now pick sensors partly based on what battery they take and I use rechargeables wherever I can. There's a huge tip there okay. When a battery starts dropping in voltage the sensor doesn't die completely. It starts behaving strangely. Half your weird problems are a dying battery or just a bad one. Then there's installation. You know there's cable channel to hide wiring. Mounts that let you put up a camera without drilling and honestly a 3D printer has become one of the more useful things I own for this. There's one more accessory that matters more than all of those and that's camera storage but that one isn't really an accessory decision. It's a money decision. So I'm going to deal with that properly in a few minutes. Now before you buy anything, three things that will save you a return. Be careful pairing smart bulbs with dumb switches. If you screw a smart bulb into a fixture that a regular wall switch controls, the first person who flips that switch off cuts power to the bulb and every automation you built stops working. Guests do it. Kids do it. Your partner does it. That's why a smart switch or an in-wall relay is very often the better long-term answer. Now before you buy a smart switch, go look for a neutral wire. Pull the plate off the switch. Look for a bundle of white wires here in North America in the back of the box. Most smart switches need one. A lot of older homes don't have them so there are no neutral switch models. You just have to buy them deliberately and you know if a light is controlled from two switches, that's called a three-way and it needs a specific model or a companion switch to work. If you rent, none of that is your path anyways or not usually. Bulbs, plugs, retrofit motors that clip onto your curtains and camera mounts that don't need a screw. You can build a really good smart home without putting a single hole in a wall. I did it for years on the channel and you can take all of it with you when you leave. Let me show you those of five groups working together because that's the part that actually matters. So someone walks up to my front door. A sensor on my porch catches them walking up the walk and then it tells my hub. Now my hub turns on the porch light and that light is an action device. Now my video doorbell is a combo device sensing them arriving and acting at the same time. It's recording the clip and letting me talk to them from anywhere. If I want to override any of it, I reach for a control interface and I have a few. Whether it's the dashboard on my kitchen counter or the little control interface I have on my thermostat. And that recorded clip is sitting on a micro SD card inside my home in the doorbell's chime. The SD card is an accessory and it's the reason I'm not paying anybody a monthly fee to store my footage. That's a great smart home working as intended. And that brings us to the final big question. Which smart home ecosystem and primary hub should you choose to run all of it? We've covered the devices, the networks, the languages. Now comes the most important decision you'll make in your smart home journey. Picking the brain that controls it all. Earlier I mentioned that you will likely end up with one primary hub as the main brain and a few secondary hubs to handle specific brands or technology. There are few reasons for this. Number one, you unlock advanced features. You often need the manufacturer's hub to access deep settings or certain features. This is pretty common with Zigbee devices where brands layer custom features into their own apps. Number two, Matter, it's got a basic baseline. As we covered earlier, Matter standardizes basic controls, but advanced settings, scenes or features still require the manufacturer's app or in some cases hub. And number three, there's other wireless standards. Well, your primary hub might lack a specific radio frequency needed for certain devices. The best example of a secondary hub is actually Lutron. They make fantastic smart lighting and motorized shades, but there's a catch. Lutron devices don't speak Zigbee, Z-Wave or Thread. They run on their own technology called Clear Connect on 434 megahertz and nothing else in your house speaks this language. So your primary hub cannot talk to a Lutron switch directly. It doesn't matter which hub you buy. What you buy instead is a Lutron bridge. And here's the part people miss. The Lutron bridge is a hub. It's just a hub that only ever handles Lutron's gear. So the picture looks like this. Your Lutron switches and shades talk to the Lutron bridge. The Lutron bridge talks to your primary hub. Your primary hub never speaks to those switches directly. It speaks to the bridge and the bridge passes it along. The good news is that Lutron has done really great work making sure that their bridge connects really cleanly into almost every primary hub on the market. So you don't lose the devices. You don't lose control of them. You just accept one extra box. And Lutron isn't the only one worth knowing about here. You know, Philips Hue has their own bridge and it's worth having if you want their lighting effects and the sync features for your TV. SwitchBot has a hub for a lot of their retrofit gear. Ikea has one if you want cheap, reliable Zigbee or now today with the new one Matter Over Thread. Your goal today should be to choose a primary hub which is the central app where your core automations, all your devices, and your control interfaces live. Here is what you should look for when choosing your primary brain. First is radios. You want a hub that speaks Zigbee, Z-Wave, and Thread because those are the three that Smart Home Gear actually uses. Now Bluetooth is on there too but mostly that's for device setup. That's how your phone finds a device the first time. Second, and you know this is a little tricky, okay? Matter travels two ways. Matter over Wi-Fi and Matter over Thread. The Wi-Fi half you get for free. Your hub's already sitting on your network so it can already reach those devices. Thread is the one to watch. Thread's got its own separate road and it needs an on-ramp onto the rest of your network. That on-ramp is called a Thread Border Router and it takes real hardware. An actual radio inside the hub. So on the box you want to see two things. Matter Controller and Thread Border Router. If it only says Matter Controller then you've bought a hub that can only do half of Matter. Third, Local Processing. You want a hub that makes its decisions inside of your home. If the thinking is happening in someone else's cloud, your lights are slower, and the day your internet goes down your home stops working. Those three things I wouldn't compromise on at all today. Then there are three more what I'd call nice to have. Number one, good dashboards and room views so you can actually see your home at a glance. Family permission so your kids get a different level of access than you do. And three, automation depth, meaning it lets you stack multiple conditions together. Things like all true conditions or any true conditions. Let's get into choosing one of the three levels of hubs. This is how you can narrow down your choices quickly. Level one is what I would call the Voice Assistant Ecosystems. In plain terms that's Amazon, Google, and Apple. This is the default entry point because you probably already own one of these speakers or you've at least already got the app on your phone. Many modern speakers now function as Matter Controllers and Thread Border Routers out of the box. But this is the category to watch in regards to that Thread thing as some smart speakers don't have it. The pros are easy setup, great voice integration, and Apple Home stands out here with faster local execution of automations. The cons are vast though. Automation logic remains basic to this day. Building conditional rules like checking time, room state, and lux levels together, that basically can't happen. You can't do multiple conditions. On top of that you'll find subscriptions all over these services. Even Apple wants you to pay for cloud video storage. Amazon and Google are full of subscriptions. They as companies are pushing you deeper and deeper into their overall ecosystem. And these days they favor their own products heavily with better features for those products over others. Level two are the Consumer or Beginner Automation Hubs. Now if you want real automation power without needing a technical background, you do. You step up to a dedicated consumer hub. And remember stepping up to a dedicated hub doesn't mean you lose voice control. You can still link these hubs to Amazon, Google, or Apple Home. So your voice assistants act as a front end interface while your hub does all the heavy lifting. Akara is the beginner automation hub that I actively are pushing people towards today. Akara makes a ton of products. They build reliable hubs that speak both Zigbee and Thread. They even embed those hubs directly into products you're already buying like security cameras. Now most of their hubs also come with an IR blaster built right in so you can bring those dumb devices like your TVs into your automations. And their conditional automation engine has pretty good depth. Their homepages are highly customizable and their hardware runs fast and locally most of the time. Akara is also still one of the best brands to buy if you want to control everything from Apple Home on your phone. Now Samsung SmartThings is the other big name at this level and it's still the king of this space when it comes to balancing ease of use with device compatibility. In fact, SmartThings could push up another tier but they kind of let the platform slip in a few ways. They still have a lot of automations that execute in the cloud rather than locally which holds them back, lowers their overall reliability. Lots of features don't get fully polished and there are some bugs that just seem to live forever in the platform. Still, compared to the voice assistant platforms, those level one things, SmartThings automations are very powerful. You can customize a favorites page specifically for each person in your home and the routine builder gives you great depth. There's also good integration with their appliances, although the controls aren't always what you'd hope for. And when you're comparing Akara and Samsung, Samsung allows you to connect a wide variety of Zigbee and Z-Wave devices directly to their hub. You will not find that with Akara. On an Akara hub you can only connect Akara Zigbee devices which does limit your choices on that side. Where both of these platforms have turned to solve that problem is Matter. Both Samsung and Akara are heavily invested in the Matter standard which means they can pull in all kinds of Matter over Wi-Fi and Matter over Thread devices from other brands today. The other reason I call these beginner consumer hubs is because they make it easy to upgrade later and Akara in particular has been designing their sensors and their hardware so that if you eventually decide to step up to level three, a powerhouse hub, their devices transition over pretty seamlessly. Level three are those premium powerhouse hubs. If you want the most powerful local smart home possible, this is where you move. Homey or Home Assistant. And Homey offers a few different hub options today. They're on the more expensive side up front. Today the Homey Pro Mini is about $250. Full Homey Pro is I think $450. But once you've bought the hardware there are really no subscriptions to worry about. That is unless you look at their self-hosted version where instead of buying the box you run their software on a NAS drive or a spare computer. That one can be a subscription or you can buy it outright. And the Homey interface is fantastic. They have the best dashboards out there, great compatibility across the industry and the most powerful visual flow engine for building automations. Home Assistant on the other hand is the undisputed end game. Today I would almost call Home Assistant the true operating system of the smart home. And in fact their software is literally called HAOS. So they think so too. Now Home Assistant integrates with almost every brand, device, service you can name. And it gives you total customization over automations, dashboards and your devices. It's focused on being local. But let me be clear about this. Home Assistant itself runs entirely inside of your home. But some things you might connect or use might require cloud services. Those would require the internet to work right. But what I really like is that the platform tells you which one those are before you add them. So how local your home ends up being is your decision and nobody's hiding it from you. It's also become much more accessible in the last few years. You can buy their ready-made Home Assistant Green Hub. That's what I'm using in my home. I think it's $199 right now. You can build your own Home Assistant version using a Raspberry Pi or you can run it on a NAS drive or a spare computer. The learning curve is definitely steeper than the other options on this list but it's not nearly as intimidating as it used to be. Now by the way, choosing between Homey and Home Assistant is a big decision that a lot of people are facing right now. So we have a dedicated comparison video breaking down Homey versus Home Assistant head-to-head. So if you want to go deeper into hub hardware we also have our Smart Home Hubs 101 guide and a video covering our top three favorite hubs. All of those videos are linked in the description below. Let me tell you the worst part about subscriptions in your smart home. Honestly it isn't even the money. When you buy a product that depends on a subscription you aren't really buying the product. You're renting access to a cloud service that the company has to keep paying for to run. And the day that service stops being profitable enough for them they kill it. Not your subscription. They kill the service and you know when the service dies your product dies because it's dependent on it. You're left holding e-waste that you paid full price for. I've been covering this industry for about eight years on the channel. I've been playing with smart tech for a lot longer and companies will absolutely pad their profits this way. What they've gotten very good at is using a cheap starter product as the gateway to get you into their ecosystem and then putting the parts you actually want behind a monthly tier. The video doorbell trap is the best and most iconic example today. Many people start their journey by buying a doorbell to watch for packages but take a Ring video doorbell. It'll happily send you a notification let you talk to whoever's out there for free. What it will not do without a subscription is save a single second footage. There's a ton of other features tucked behind the paywall too and my latest Ring product required two subscriptions just to get what I wanted. Here's the trickiest part of video doorbells. Many video doorbells will work only inside the manufacturer's app and won't connect to another hub at all. I know almost everyone wants a video doorbell but don't buy this first. Buy it once you have your primary hub and make sure the two work together. How this works is once you've bought a Nest or a Ring doorbell they get you with that first subscription. Then you want to buy their cameras and their thermostats so they all work within one app. Now your choices are very limited for those devices in your home and then you end up paying the subscription forever. So how do you avoid subscriptions? The first thing is to prioritize local storage. This camera right here has a little micro SD card right here. You just flip down this face and that's where it goes. Now you can also attach this to network attached storage or NAS or get ones with local network video recorders or NVRs. Something else to look for is on-device AI. Select devices that run computer vision and object detection right on the camera hardware rather than routing video clips to cloud servers. You'll see this mentioned on packaging or marketing as local AI detection. It can also be called edge computing. And number three, run a local hub. So you pick a system that processes those automations inside of your home and stores the data on the hub. Pick that hub first. Don't pick the video doorbell first. Please. So we've covered a lot but let's put it all together so you can build this without getting overwhelmed. First, build a solid foundation. Your router or mesh Wi-Fi is your smart home's lifeline. If you have a larger home, invest in a good mesh Wi-Fi system where you can wire with Ethernet. It'll cost an electrician's time but it's worth it to wire a mesh system and to wire to devices like TVs or streamers. Also, do not use cheap Wi-Fi extenders unless you enjoy a smart home that constantly goes offline. And as you buy your network gear in your primary hub, make absolutely sure they support Matter and Thread because that's how you're future-proofing your setup today. When choosing your hub, prioritize the depth of automations and the options you will have with your hub. Second, let's talk about money. You don't need much to start. Call it a couple hundred bucks. That's a real hub, a couple of sensors, and a couple of smart plugs. You might push up to 300 bucks but that's enough to build your first handful of automations and find out whether you actually enjoy this. Around 500 is where it starts to feel like a smart home. You've added some smart switches or more lighting, a camera, a button or two for manual control, and enough sensors that the house begins reacting to you instead of waiting on you. Past that, it scales as far as you want to take it. You know, shades. Expensive sometimes but great. Locks, presence sensors in every room, energy monitoring on your breaker panel, a dashboard on the wall. For the hub specifically, you got real anchors. An Acara hub around 100 bucks, 150, Home Assistant around that 200, Homie Pro Mini 250, and Homie Pro 450. Don't start buying it all at once. Start with one problem. But as I said in the subscriptions part of today's video, watch what you start with, okay? Don't get captured and as my dad would say, throw good money after bad. Start with something almost embarrassingly simple. Put a smart plug on a lamp and have it come on at sunset and go off at midnight. That's a trigger and an action. It costs you about the price of lunch after your hub and you don't have to touch a wire or a wall to do it. Then go back and add one condition to it so it only runs on the days you're actually home. Now you've built all three parts of an automation with your own two hands and you'll learn tons from just doing this and it won't overwhelm you if something fails. Here are the first five automations I built and in this order. One, that lamp on a schedule, which you've already done. Two, a leak sensor under your kitchen sink that sends you a notification. Cheapest insurance you'll ever buy and actually you can usually tell your insurance. Pays for the entire hobby the first time that one fires. Number three, a contact sensor that tells you when a door has been left open for more than five minutes. Number four, everything gets turned off when the last person leaves the house. You can lock a door lock if you've got one. Five, your bathroom fan or another fan runs for 20 minutes after humidity spikes and it shuts itself off. Five automations and you'll have used triggers, conditions, actions, sensors, action devices, and your hub all together. And that's this whole video running in your home. I want to give you one habit, okay? What you got to do is you got to name your device by room and by function on the day that you add it. Put every device into a room as you go. It takes a few extra seconds in the app and the difference is huge. If you call something plug three in year three, you're toast. One rule to design around, okay? Everything has to still work for somebody who has never heard of your hub. Your partner, your kids, a guest, a babysitter. If the only way to turn on a light is your phone, then you built something for you, not for your home. That's the number one reason people rip these systems back out. Keep the physical switches working. Keep a button somewhere obvious and test it by handing someone the room and saying nothing. Then you can let the complexity grow organically to fit your life. You take on small projects and expand on what you already know. Creating good notes for yourself for how the system works really helps in the future and you can build it out slowly but surely this way. This is smart home 101 so it can't take you all the way down the path but the rest of the path is already built for you. The videos in our smart home beginners playlist are built like a course. A lot like this video was today. There's a video about smart home hubs. There's a video that teaches you a lot of advanced automation ideas and topics and you can even get help with your wi-fi and your network. Click on that playlist, save it somewhere and keep learning. Otherwise, thanks for watching and of course, live smart.