Hey all,
I finally got around to putting a name to my blog about retrofitting smart home tech to a 1980's house.
I've started with a couple of posts on smart bulbs vs smart switches, but the most recent post was about why I settled on Hubitat.
Comments/feedback welcome, the next post will be about automation - what, why, how, and when! 
Awesome! Iām excited to read the whole adventure. Thanks for sharing!
Looks good...although the hub could do with a dust 
Yeah, it turns out that the particles from a dry powder fire extinguisher are far harder to remove than I expected, they seem to embed themselves into the plastic somehow...
I had an "incident" with a LiPo charger about a year ago and I'm still finding pockets of the extinguisher powder when I move things in the garage...
Two new posts over the weekend:
and
Enjoying the blog! Very timely, as am nearing the final stages of moving house and am hoping to go to town on some automation.
The stuff on network backbone is also useful, as am flip-flopping between wired and mesh. I think your latest post has tipped the scales to wired, but it's a 1820s 7200 sq ft Grade II listed behemoth, so need to think about the enormous amount of damage it will cause to the building fabric chasing cables into plaster, listed building consent, etc. In a more modern house it would be a no-brainer.
Just wanted to flag that the Disqus board isn't working for me. Not sure if that is an issue at my end or yours, but that's true on both laptop and phone and with all ad-blockers disabled, etc. Cheers!
Thanks, I'll check out the disquss thing now.
As far as your property is concerned, I've worked on a similar building and we used external-grade ethernet cable and went out through the windowframes and round the side of the house as appropriate.
The other route we took in a similar building was to put everything in the loft and run the cables down from there, this assumes that there is both room in the loft and that there are no connecting doors/panels up there, but if you can get from the Internet Connection into the roof space with a single cable, then put your networking kit up there and use micro-channel for the drops - it doesn't look as "nice", so that's almost certainly a consideration, but it's a lot easier than trying to drill through walls etc.
Very interesting - I'm in a UK 80s build house myself, which I've been gradually rolling smart tech into over the last 4-5 years. Not terribly throught through ahead of time, it's mainly been a "Ah, that's an option too? Let's give it a go." exercise as I've become aware of things on various forums. A few hubs used over that period - initially Hive, then Smartthings, and more recently Hubitat.
Like you, keeping things easily useable in a "normal" way has been high on the list of priorities.
Thanks for raising the existance of the Aurora AONE in your blog; that quickly went to the top of the "Let's give it a go" list, and one was ordered, fitted and added to Hubitat on the first attempt last week. The only slight challenge was its size - not the usual back box depth issue (it was replacing a "manual" rotary dimmer, so the existing box was deep enough already), but the length of the control circuit box. This only gave a mm or so's clearance at top and bottom of the box, the wiring came in through the centre of the top edge and was a few mm wide itself, and it was a literal squeeze to get everything in!
Download the Hubitat app
