Both crestron and control 4 are nice systems. If I had $30,000 to spend upfront and another two or three thousand a year to spend on maintenance, I’d go for one of those.
But I don’t. My personal guess (and it’s only guess) is that by the summer of 2016 there will be several players offering a reliable plug-and-play home automation system with some Voice control and some AV features for under $5000. Apple’s homekit/Insteon will be one. And I expect Samsung/smartthings to be another.
So for now, I’m only buying the stuff I’ll get immediate use out of, and that I would be willing to replace all together in about 18 months.
But what “willing to replace” is is going to be different for everyone, because different people have different priorities and different budgets.
For example, I’ve put off buying a video door bell for now, because to me, $300 is a lot of money, The use case isn’t that important to me, and I want to wait and see what platform I’m using for my big projects in late 2016.
But I went ahead and got the cheapest Apple Watch now, because I’m quadriparetic and voice control is very important to me. I use it a lot for home automation. So buying that device, knowing I might replace it in a year or so, made sense for me, because it gives me a lot of value now.
Everybody has different priorities, and different budgets.
Lots of people are custom-mounting cheap tablet computers to use as dashboards with scene (or mode, as ST calls them) control buttons:
I agree very much with the advice in this thread. Search the forums, then run as much copper in the walls as you can (minimum would be a neutral wire to every switch box), then take your time installing smart devices.
The one exception to the “go slow” method, in my opinion, is that if you are building new you should probably just bite the bullet and buy all smart switches/dimmers/fan controllers. The time and materials price that your electrician will charge you to install a dimmer is more than you would expect. Best to pay once for a smart switch.
One more thing: the accuracy and precision of temperature readings z-wave/zigbee multi sensors are often questionable. You will get the best readings from the ecobee remote sensors. This may or may not be an issue for you.
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matt
((Possibly not the Matt you're looking for))
23
+1 to the ease of a SmartTiles.click dashboard.
+1 to Sonos, if you’re willing to pay a premium. For me, that was worth spending because a clean mobile phone app that easily integrated everything from the home computer library to digital services to NPR produced a high Spousal Acceptance Factor.
Some additional disorganized suggestions here:
(1) Plan around other residents needs (which they may not be able to articulate). Your willingness to tolerate HA that doesn’t behave as anticipated will always be higher than that of everyone else in the house. For proof, I submit the first post of this thread. Don’t be that guy. (Good advice there too.)
(2) Plan for larger electrical boxes. The Z-wave switches are fat. In a wall-panel of multiple switches, you can run out of room. Your electrician will not be anticipating this. He’ll think there will be tons of room in the box, because he’s accustomed to installing thin switches. Then he’ll see a giant z-wave switch and say, “what the hell is that?!”
(3) Buy your router last, at a place with a good return policy. I retired an old 2.4 Ghz router in favor of a 5ghz router because it reliably crashed my Zigbee network at high data through-puts. I couldn’t determine if it was the router itself, or all 2.4 Ghz traffic, but your best bet is to have all your HA stuff installed first, because you can’t easily replace that, and test the router at the end.
(4) Sounds like you’ve already decided on ST, but whatever you do, don’t get yourself locked into a proprietary system. If it isn’t interoperable, you don’t really own the hardware. If you buy a lot of ST hardware and decide you hate ST, you can still get their Z-wave and Zigbee stuff to talk to someone else’s system. If you get locked into a proprietary system of non-interoperable hardware, you risk having several $K in hardware orphaned because some CFO decided to cut loose the HA division in order to hit Q3 estimates.
@matt how exactly does the interface with Sonos work? Can you actually control it and use it in IFTTT logic, like as an alarm or turn on when “away” and motion is detected?
I am liking the features of the Lync6 system from HTD and would like a Sonos as an input, but am not sure what that means for ST integration.
matt
((Possibly not the Matt you're looking for))
25
@mrjoedave - To connect another audio system to the Sonos, I think you need to purchase their Connect:Amp product, which is pricey. There’s no Line Out on my Sonos 1s.
At the software level, there is a sub-app inside the SmartThings app which finds your installed Sonos items and treats them like SmartThings devices.
Once that is installed, you can easily set up simple If-then routines. E.g., if the moisture detector I have next to our hot water heater detects moisture, the Sonos plays a voice message through its built-in text-to-speech engine. (For a while I had it set up to say “Matt has arrived” based on our presence detectors. It was amusing once and became annoying rather quickly.)
I think because it goes through the cloud, there can occasionally be performance issues, but I have a daily weather report that plays every morning when we enter the kitchen and it has worked flawlessly for several months now.
All that being said, I’ve been tinkering with @joshua_lyon 's awesome SharpTools on a cheap, dedicated Android tablet, and between that and the Android apps Tasker and Autovoice, I could probably build all of that without Sonos integration, on any sound system. But being a non-programmer, I find Tasker had a far steeper learning curve than the SmartThings app and Sonos.
