@Eric.C.Miller I've been hearing some good remarks about Lutron. I will read through your thread and do some investigating. Thanks for your input! WAF is pretty high on my list, which is why I think the dimmer switches are the way to go!
@scottgu3 I've heard good reviews on the Ubiquiti Unifi systems. I read they were originally commercial products. I did a quick glance at them and need to revisit them. I don't have any cabling ran to ceiling points but there are 4 CAT6 ports throughout the house. The only thing that turned me off to them was the cost but I will have to revisit. I'd be curious if anyone has any experience with the Google WiFi System since that was what I was planning on using. CenturyLink offers Fiber at my new build, while completely too much speed for me, it is only $10 more a month over what I would use otherwise I may have access to very high-speed internet.
@BorrisTheCat I would love to go hard-wired on all my sensors. The builder was just charging way too much to do this up front, may have been a mistake but oh well. How hard is it to pull the wires have the build is complete? Is it worth it still? I've been reading good remarks about the Konnected system.
Depends on if you can do it from above? Will carpets be fitted or could you get boards up before? This is just for ceilings, walls it all depends on how much mess your prepared to make and the cost to repair it, suddenly ÂŁ80 isn't that much when you consider the long term savings and cost of doing it after. If your lucky you may find existing routes and depending on what your running could use them or pull cables through which would make less damage.
Agree with @BorrisTheCat here. If the walls are still open, grab a roll of CMR Cat-6 and pull it yourself. Terminate later. I pulled all mine to a point in my basement, and then installed a structured wiring cabinet between a set of studs. I knew where in the ceiling and walls the wires were, and terminated them using pushdown jacks and old work low voltage boxes. Easy Peasy. Almost free.
@BorrisTheCat & @scottgu3 Yea, unfortunately too late for all of that. Walls are already in and primed. I do have some access underneath as there is the basement so I might still be able to pull it off. If not I will just go wireless. Really, for me, it's to monitor my soon-to-be teenagers. Two of them have rooms with a rooftop and if they are anything like I was that was an easy point of egress at 11 at night!
On another note, my HE arrived today! While I am still in my old house I may still fire it up and just check out the interface. I am watching for Amazon Prime Day to see what sort of deals I snag for the new home!
It was integrated with my Homeseer controller, but not yet with HT.
Elk sells a Zwave module as well as a network module so it should not be too hard. I'm still relatively new to HT - using it for less than a year it seems. It is a very impressive controller and at my age I may never marry it to the Elk. I don't know the layout of your home, but if it's two stories or has a basement it could be worth the trouble to install a nice 2" PVC conduit between floors possibly in closets that could end up being wiring closets. If your electric panel will be in a finished wall a spare conduit up to the attic could be handy. I can't imagine them preventing you from installing empty conduits, but ask to be sure. May be too late for much.
+1 on the Elk. I had one in my last house and installed one in my new one. Elk says that they do home automation, but it's very limited.
The benefit is that it's a UL listed panel, and everything is damn reliable. I have never had anything fail, in 11 years. It just works. Most of my stuff is wired, but I do have the GE Caddx radio for it and have some wireless sensors. The Micra-G door and window wireless sensors are completely hidden and super reliable. And they are only $25 each.
If you want to do security, get reliable equipment. I don't consider Z-wave to be reliable at all. Z-wave tends to put me into a rage, wireless zwave stuff has not reliably communicated in my experience.
Welcome to the Hubitat Community! Congratulations on the new home build. Hope you're not too tired of opinions at this point.
I would suggest a better system if you have a large home. The Linksys Velop system is very good and the TP-Link Deco M5 is a good budget friendly system. Both a good if you have young kids and need parental controls. Deco M5 is better at parental controls and includes built-in Trend Micro Malicious Content filtering, Intrusion prevention and Infected device quarantine. It also supports WiFi presence detection via IFTTT.
I have the Deco M5 myself, and I've installed the Linksys Velop for several small businesses in lieu of a more expensive commercial system.
Neither. Lutron RA2 (Integrated driver) or Insteon (community driver)
Broken for now. This can be solved right away with community drivers, and next month things will be clearer when the new program with Google Assistant is rolled out.
So many opinions will come from all these questions. I feel strongly about this one. Alarm systems should be stand-alone. I personally own an iSmart Alarm system I had to hack with a blunt instrument to get local control. I don't have a horse in this race, but I very much like the Ring system, despite it not having direct integration to Hubitat.
You can find ways to integrate these into the Ring system. I would suggest you simply purchase Nest Protect smoke/CO alarms. They're just hands down the best and cover two of your criteria right away. They also would integrate with your Nest thermostat to disable the HVAC system in the event of a smoke or CO alarm, without doing anything. They communicate with the Nest thermostat over thread, so you don't need an internet connection or WiFi operational at the time of the incident for that to work.
@SmartHomePrimer Thanks for the suggestions. I did a deep dive on some of the mesh routers available. I certainly see where the Ubiquiti systems excel but for a price and a bit more technical setup than I am looking for. The Velop system seems to really shine, their tri-band system is about $100 more than the Deco M5. Century Link is offering a fiber line at my new place for $10 more a month than what I pay now, so the tri-band with fiber would hopefully take a while before becoming outdated. With Amazon Prime Day coming up, I am watching closely for deals on either of those systems.
I'd say after a few days a of looking at everything that has been suggested here I am still a bit torn on an alarm panel. I did not run wired sensors, I might still be able to even after I occupy the home. The Elk M1 seems to be the gold standard here, the only problem I have with it is I am struggling to buckle down and really read through how to set it up. This leads me to believe that the system is not really intuitive and takes a lot of fiddling to set up. @ritchierich I appreciate the link you provided but it only adds to my previous point. I am back to square one on the alarm system. I agree with everyone's suggestion that it should be independent and that's why I am considering 2Gig again. They have their new GC2e out and soon they should release GC3e, these are their "encrypted" systems. Now the link between their sensors and the panel are encrypted. I haven't seen much documentation yet on the encryption methodology so I am curious if anyone has seen or read about these sort of encrypted radio devices?
I love my Ubiquiti setup, but it's always a challenge to me when need to go in and update things. Always seems like I need to relearn everything. And...I absolutely dread the $$$ I'm going to have to spend when they start rolling out wifi 6!
Sounds like you're doing your research though, and you're narrowing it down to a couple of contenders that should work well!
Personally I think the stuff you're doing right now is the fun part! Implementing them is never as much fun as researching and what iffing it!!!
Good luck with your buildout and enjoy your new home!
I would like to add a plug for Unifi devices. One problem with consumer-focused devices is after a very very short while they stop getting updates, even security updates. Being a more commercial-focused product, not only do Unifi devices get regular security updates, but there are also feature updates as well. The Unifi devices may be a tad more complex to set up (not beyond an average DIY person) but once up and running provides a very smooth experience.
There's a learning curve to the Unifi stuff if you don't have a networking background. But, you get to learn something new.
Plus, in 5 years, you're probably going to know this stuff anyway because as society progresses, people become smarter because of all the things they are exposed to and have to learn. There are kids today that know more than Bell Labs engineers knew 40 years ago. Might as well get started now. The Unifi forums will help you out, and so will we.
I pulled the trigger and got the UniFi setup. USG, 8-port Switch, CK2-Plus, and a UAP-nanoHD. So far it has been rather easy to setup, still watching Youtube videos and tweaking it a bit. I've noticed a slight increase in connection speeds in various spots of my house. Appreciate everyone's opinion to go with UniFi, I am very happy with it so far. I may end up with one more AP at the new place depending on signal strength. At some point I will buy a few of the UniFi cameras since they integrate well with the UniFi Protect system and the CK2-Plus.
Recently bought some Sengled Zigbee bulbs during the Prime sale, have to admit pretty nifty and easy to use with HE, the wife was impressed with it which is always a good sign. I've got my CT-100 thermostat included and I think I managed to include my 2Gig GC2 panel but not sure how to do anything with it yet. I did add my Sonos speakers but control seems very limited with the included app. I've got lots more research to do to get things right but I move into the new place this Friday so I will be starting all over soon anyways.
Wife bought me a Nest for Father's day, still trying to get the receipt so I can swap it for an Ecobee3 Lite. Sounds like everyone has better luck with those and since Google bought Nest who knows anymore.
Congrats on the Unifi! I went with an Edgerouter for mine, and have dumb switches, but I've been looking at those POE enabled switches of theirs.
I think once you have it set up, you'll be amazed at how well it works and how little care and feeding they require. I've had mine for ~5 years now, and I still can't get over how seamlessly I roam from Hot Spot to Hot Spot in my house. Crazy good stuff.
How did you train your wife to get you good stuff. I'm lucky if she says "are you still alive?"
Just kidding, but she begrudging accepts automation. She and I have worked together every day in technology for the last 30 years. New server for home. OK. New WiFi setup. OK. New router. OK. New sensor or zwave switch. No. I find ways but it isn't necessarily easy.
You ever get that working with Hubitat, let me know. It never discovered mine on the LAN. I posted here and not one person responded. So as far as I know, it doesn't work.
I am on a plane so my VPN to my hub is very slow.... while running the Sonos app, can you have a second window open with the logs window open? I would love to see if it shows any output
Also, do you see any entries with the name “ssdpTerm” under System Events?
@scottgu3 I couldn’t wait any longer and decided to pull the system out of the box and setup now in the home we’re moving out of. So far so good. Did something to it today and couldn’t figure out why my phone wasn’t connecting to the WiFi so... I reset it all and did it again. Now it’s working just fine. I need to remember with a system like this to create backups prior to making changes.
@zarthan LOL. Luckily she knew I liked the nest since I bought one for her father a number of years ago. Everything else is pretty typical WAF, as long as it works for her I’m good.
@St_Isidore HE app found all my speakers and I’m able to add one speaker at a time to my dashboard and control that speaker only. No grouping and no changing station, play, pause, next, and volume is pretty much it. Once I find some more time I will dig into what others are doing with it.
The Unifi forums will help you out, and so will we.
