This video is about my journey into making our home smarter. I didn't actually set out
to plan a smart home, I sort of fell into it. And almost anyone can make their home smarter
and automate various mundane tasks and activities. However, home automation shouldn't replace your
current workflow but blend with it. I use Home Assistant and I'll explain what Home Assistant is.
Why I chose it and give you an overview of our current setup. As developers of Home Assistant
state good home automation never annoys but is missed when it's not working. So stay tuned.
Hi John here and I have an addiction to smart plugs! There I've said it! At the time recording
this we have 3x three gang smart sockets and 17 single smart sockets dotted around the house.
They're all the same brand Kasa they work brilliantly, no lag down time and actually
are very easy to set up. They work locally but also work over the cloud as well which means you
can trigger them when you're away from home. So far so good. We use these plugs to control things
like standard lamps so they come on automatically at dusk. The coffee machine which Jill often turns
on whilst we're driving home this means it's heated up and ready for use when we arrive home.
The downside to these smart plugs is the interface used to control them. The smartphone
Kasa app works fine, it's intuitive, it's easy to use. However, once you have a number of plugs
there's quite a lot of scrolling involved to find the one you actually want to activate. There's
also a lot of manual input required every time you want to turn things on or off you have to go into
the app to do it. For me a smart home shouldn't require you to manage things. You shouldn't
have to turn them on and turn them off, be that lights heaters and other appliances and devices.
And to emphasise this point I recently purchased 3 small cheap battery operated LED lights that are
motion triggered. We placed them in areas in the house that are a little bit dark.
The cupboard under the stairs, a dark corner kitchen cabinet and the airing cupboard upstairs.
And they were really simple to install, no wiring just batteries. They can detect the
amount of ambient light so they won't trigger when it's bright and sunny. It's actually still very
exciting when you trigger them even to this day. It's a little bit of magic I guess. And that's
home automation helping seamlessly without having to manually trigger things. And that's really what
I wanted to achieve. And the problem with smart devices and their corresponding apps is that as
you expand your collection of smart devices and different brands. Each has its own app to
control it now you have multiple apps to control things and it becomes a little bit of a chore.
There's lots of clutter on your phone, you have to remember which app you need for which device. This
got me thinking that there's got to be a better way to visualise and manage these devices...
and so started the slippery slope! Initial research landed me with products and services like
Google's home assistant, Amazon's the Voldemort of smart speakers 'she who could not be named'.
I wasn't keen on these solutions as they are cloud-based and my data's going to the data gods
of products and services that will most likely span me with things I want but don't really need.
Data as king as they say. I wanted something that was locally hosted, a solution that would
work without an internet connection but it also means that no data leaves our local network.
The Kasa app is internet based which means it i'm not keen on using the app. After lots of
research I came across Home Assistant. It's an open source community-led initiative. The more
I read about it the more it seemed to fit the bill. It's free, it's open source software, it's
developed and supported by like-minded individuals who want to improve home automation and living in
a smart home. It's a very active community who help each other out. I took the plunge
and purchased Home Assistant Blue package as I didn't have a device to run Home Assistant on.
If you already have a Raspberry Pi or similar you can download the software and simply install it.
The Blue Package was a limited supply run of hardware that had Home Assistant pre-installed and
ready to go. Home Assistant in a blue box if you like. Just plug it in and you're up and running.
My blue box arrived on the 23rd of November 2021. Time to get started. It's worth stating that I'm
no coding wizard. I struggle with even basic coding which meant I needed things that were
easy to set up and figure, and visual wysiwyg that type of thing rather than code based solutions.
As Home Assistant has evolved it has embraced more and more built-in integrations that make
adding new devices so much easier. I'm just going to scroll down this list here.
Just have a look at all these devices that are currently available in Home Assistant
and more are added every week. It's a very active community adding new integrations and new devices,
as I say on a weekly basis they launch monthly updates as well of new software.
So yeah it's very very active. My blue box arrived I fired it up and this is what it looked like.
Not very impressive or inspiring. Then followed a steep learning curve to watching loads of YouTube
videos. Reading forums to understand Home Assistant's capabilities. 2, 3 months down
the road it's a bit of a far cry from where it is when I uploaded it. So let me just take you around
my current setup it and it is still working progress. I guess it's like most things it's
an evolving platform. It's available on desktop and also the mobile app so this is my desktop
dashboard. This is the landing page that you come into. And I've configured all of this myself. So
as I said earlier, showed you the screenshot, that's what it looks like when you first get it
on. A vanilla install if you like. And then you can configure it however you want, it's
very flexible. This is my current dashboard. Over on the left-hand you can see I've got the weather
with the forecast. I've got some actions there. 'Goodnight', which turns off all the lights
downstairs and turns the ones on upstairs. I can override that with 'Goodnight Off'.
'Post' I'll come back to that later. Battery level is for the 'Post' which again I'll come back to
later. Next column we've got our Ring doorbell. We've then got 3 locations around the house;
the glass studio which we can see the temperature, the humidity, and the amount of charge in the
motion detector battery 87%. Same with the garage we've got the temperature and the humidity
and the photo studio temperature and the humidity. The things below that are John and Jill's phone
so presence detection. We know where we are, we're both home. If we weren't sure
we could just check... oh yeah we're home! That's useful for triggering lights on so as you leave
they will automatically turn off or as you arrive it can automatically turn them on.
We don't currently use that. Over on the other side we've got other rooms; lounge, office,
kitchen etc. and again the little icons there allow us to turn things on and turn things off
via the dashboard or via the phone. This basically allows us to activate things if we wanted to,
but I talked a lot about automation and the fact that it allows us to perform tasks and
actions without having to click buttons or open apps and so on. These are the things that we
currently automate around the house. Let's just get into the list of automations, there
we have a number of lights that come on automatically 10 minutes before sunset.
The program adjusts the timing each day as the time of the sunset changes throughout the year.
Most of these lights are on smart plugs however the outside porch lights are LED GU10 bulbs and
they're from a company called WiZ. And they're wi-fi operated and can be integrated into
Home Assistant to work locally. Again no cloud required and they are triggered also to come on
with the same automation as the other lights. Also with the porch lights I have another automation
that will automatically turn them off 30 minutes before sunrise every day.
I don't have to do anything, it's all automated. Previously those porch lights I had to manually
turn them on every night and then also remember to turn them off in the morning. So you know
it just makes life easier now I don't need to worry about it. You can manually override that,
the light switch still works so you can turn them on and turn them off by the light switch.
Other automations I've created turn lights on and off as we enter and leave a room or rooms. Plus
the sensors will measure the amount of daylight in the room and only trigger
the light to come on based on the darkness that I've chosen. So if it's daytime the lights won't
come on as we enter the room or leave the room and if it's dusk or dark then they will.
I've also set them to turn off automatically after a predetermined amount of time without any motion
being detected by the sensor then they'll turn off. Another couple of things we've worked on as
well. Since having our new front door installed we started to use our old post office letterbox which
is by the front door. And this is because when we ordered our new door we didn't want a letterbox in
the door and we have a Passive house rated front door which is perfectly insulated. You then decide
to cut a big hole in it reducing its insulation properties, causing drafts and heat leakage.
So once we'd had the door installed this presented a bit of a problem because we obviously didn't
have a letterbox! So we decided to use the one that we had out the front there already which
was already being used as a sort of ornament. We now put it into function but unlike a letterbox in
your front door we never knew when the posts had been delivered. 2 or 3 days later we remember to
look in the post box and lo and behold there's 2 or 3 days worth of post sitting in there!
The solution was to use a motion detector. I installed one inside the post box. Now when the
post is delivered it triggers the motion sensors as the post falls past the sensor and I have an
automation setup that notifies my phone that the post has been delivered, as well as getting a
notification in Home Assistant to the same effect. So that's it, that's the start of our smart home.
We've plans to increase the automation but like most things there's no point in doing
things just for the sake of doing things. As I said earlier good home automation never annoys
but it is missed when it is not working and that's one of the ethos of Home Assistant.
It's finding situations and workflows that can be automated. My next one to work on is to tell me
which bin needs to be put out on which collection day. We've got 3 bins and they rotate around
week in week out. And I always forget which one of the 3 bins needs to be put out now. So there we go
that's where we are at the moment. Any questions dive down into the comments and I'll pick them up.
Thanks for watching and I'll see you on the next video. Alright take care, bye.