What are you trying to achieve with home automation?

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I know I see a lot of discussion here on how to do this that or the other, but I haven't come across the discussion of what we are actually trying to achieve and why.

My setup is a mix that started off with my wife wanting to add security monitoring to the house because of a former troublesome neighbor, To be blunt the guy that used to live in the house thatis next door we are pretty sure was a drug dealer. Always had sketchy folks around, the dog would go nuts at all hours of the night when one of his a--hole friends or whatever jumped my fence trying to get away from the cops etc...

So for us, it is...

#1. Full permiter surveillance with offsite video storage and alerting.
#2. Intrustion Detection. Should someone get onto our property, not be deterred by the automatic lights or the obvious presence of cameras, and breech the actual entry points of the house, I have 4 LOUD sirens that are triggered, a few strobe lights, and all of the house lights that are visible outside get turned on to max intensity. This required automation of all of the house lights that can be seen through a window.
#3. Automatic courtesy lighting. I had under ST, and will figure out how to set up under HE an Alexa routine where I say "Alexa Guest Incoming" and it will turn on the kitchen lights, front porch lights, and driveway lights.
#4. Detection and automation of our arrival / exit. I need to configure this under HE, but the same routine as seen in #3 but triggered by the arrival of our phones within range of the house. That way if we are coming home late the houe and yard won't be darkened up.
#5. Automated lighting / motion lighting, with modes in HE. My wife and I work contrary shifts so when I am awake, she isn't and vice versa. We are both at home due to COVID. The light intensity from the automated lighting varies by how dark it is outside and if someone is trying to sleep at night. Not so dark as to endanger toes, but not so bright as to wake up the dead.
#6. Programmable, schedulable, HVAC control. I am looking to add smart vents as well so as to allow for individual scheduled room management based on utilization and time of day / modes.
#7. Thermostatically automated control of ceiling fan speeds. WIth the perceived of cooler temps due to air movement, we can and do keep the house warmer with fans going than without. I would like to add humidity sensing here as well. Probably go with some Zooz 4 in 1 sensors in the areas in question, which are basically every bedroom, living room, and kitchen, PLUS the bathrooms so I can automatically turn on the vent vans should someone be taking a steamy shower. Too bad there isn't a stink sensor for the vent fans!
#8. I mentioned motion and presence lighting. Another big need here is hands free operation of switches. Imagine this, You have your hands full of grocery bags, or they are all greasy from working on the car, or any other reason you can imagine for not wanting to touch a wall switch, and you need to enter a pitch black room to put the groceries up, or wash your hands or, whatever... Just walk within range of the motion sensor and voila!
#9. No more asking your spouse. Where'd you put the TV remote. For the most part anyway...
#10. Alerting for safety. We have smoke detectors, but they don't help us know what is going on if we are out to dinner. Alexa Guard keeps us informed...

So what am I missing with HA, what am I missing out on?

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My goal is pretty simple, I'm trying to eliminate Alexa from my life lol. Seriously though, after 5 years with her I've had enough. Back then it seemed really cool to have a voice assistant, but over the years the entire family has really gotten over it. We only use it for turning lights on and off at this point and half the time that fails for one reason or another. So I started researching motion based lighting options and that led me to Hubitat where I'm just getting started. For me, timers and motion will work for 95% of my life. The last month we've gone back to pressing switches with our fingers and it honestly feels so much more rewarding than waiting on whats-her-face to decide if she's in the mood to assist or not.

We'll see how far this journey takes me, but I'm pretty excited about the idea of NOT talking to my house. :slight_smile:

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LOL, Honestly, I don't have a problem with a voice assistant per se, but my happy dance would be complete if I could fully separate it from snooping data miners.

I really need to dig into putting together and testing out Pi based open source voice assistants, maybe HE will support it, or I might have to learn to write my own integrations, I'm really not that good, yet...

What's funny is my wife is convinced Alexa is sexist because it listens to me, but won't for her.

I know it's because of the cadence my wife talks at. I keep telling her to slow down. She should be saying.

Alexa, command, argument. So for example.

"Alexa, Turn on Master Lights".

At the speed she speaks, I am certain Alexa hears and is trying to understand.

"Alexaturnonmasterlights".

Sigh.

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Mine started with an argument at 1am as to who was going to go outside and turn off the pool pump.

From there home automation entered my life and its been here ever since.

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LOL, the automations that are not directly security in my regards started by my wife constantly leaving XYZ lights on an hour after I went to bed, and asking me to get up and turn them off when she comes to bed.

Automation is cheaper than the arguments and potential fallout.

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I ran with the comfort control a little further then HVAC and Fans... i added curtains the open/close on time of day and outside temp. I also added a casement window and skylight so that when it’s super nice outside during fall - spring in TX they open up and cool the place off reducing my need for AC.

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I would much higher recommend these instead of the zooz 4-1, they do everything the zooz does except lux (which isn't really a lux reading anyway), and they are much more friendly on your hub from being slowed down from the excessively log chatty zooz 4-1's. They are also cheaper.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Iris-Motion-Sensor-IL07-3rd-Generation-Works-with-SmartThings-Zigbee/153437876092?epid=27031268812&hash=item23b99c2f7c:g:21gAAOSwJRFco7Nh

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You will find a wide variety of opinions, although I believe that the one thing that brings all users together is the strive to "Improve their Experience and Quality of Life in their Home". This can mean very different things to different people, LOL.
Just a few examples:

  1. I love how HE replaced my existing alarm system / you are crazy to use HE as your alarm system

  2. HE is about automating your home, why would you want a wall tablet / the wall tablet is the best thing about my HE

  3. I never need to use wall switches anymore, everything is automated / I like to still use my wall switches, I installed smart switches so I could turn all lights off at bedtime and lights on/off while I am away.

  4. etc..., etc...

Although, I think you could get everyone to agree on their use of HE to "Improve their Experience and Quality of Life in their Home", this means different things to different people, and that is O.K. What is right for me, is not necessarily what is right for you and that is how it should be.

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My real automation journey (I did dabble in X10 and other stuff back in the day) was when we bought our cottage, we wanted to be able to monitor heating in the water pump "shed" so that it would not freeze and also monitor water damage from water leeks a bit all over the cottage. So after looking around at different monitoring systems, I looked at ST but just did not like the fact that it was cloud based, HA was a no go because I just did not want to get into all the complexity of it just for the above features needed. I stumbled upon Hubitat and after lurking the forums and reading a lot of threads I finally decided that this would be my choice because of the possibilities there after.

Then the wife saw all the capabilities like remotely setting the thermostats, lights and more and before I knew it, she was pushing me to get this and then get that, etc... So now I have 2 hubs (one at the cottage and now one at the house), but have plans of selling the house, tearing down the cottage and building a new house on that lot next to the water where we have the boat and all.

So we are buying stuff and testing everything out so that we will know exactly what we want when we will start building the new house. We do have many things automated and like the wife, we much rather have automations running and not have dashboards like many have. Inovelli switches are used to indicate status of various states in the home and we try to use presence sensing as much as possible for lights, fans, etc.

We even wired the boat with a ST arrival sensor to turn on dock lights and some backyard lights when coming in after dark, this has been one of the nicest additions.

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I've been playing with Vox Commando. It's a paid-but-relatively-inexpensive Windows program that uses the Windows speech recognition libraries, but it does so on the PC it is running on. I'm about to move my testbed setup to a stick PC that'll be on my firewalled IoT network.

Integration with Hubitat is pretty easy to achieve using HTTP scraping from VoxCommando and the Maker API on Hubitat.

I am working on a little driver to let Hubitat see the VoxCommando as a SpeechSynthesis and SpeechRecognition device, but I'm not sure how much that will change most specific actions being on the VoxCommando side.

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For me it mostly began as a hobby! I realized I need a hobby that let me "make things that have function".

I'm seeing its most value-adding propositions as highly customized HVAC control (for right now my HVAC system is space heaters and a window air conditioner controlled by connected switches managed by Hubitat)...

And lighting. My wife and I have very different preferences for light levels and when we build our new place we're planning on dimmable lights everywhere, Lutron Caseta dimmers, and full Hubitat integration that I intend to play with for the next three years until I can be confident of being able to see enough to use my house, without bothering my apparently-night-vision-possessing wife. :wink:

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A word of advice from someone in this hobby and who also built his own house, build a nice tall attic with at least some subfloor. I pre-planned the hell out of my wiring but once you move in everything changes. On paper, TV should go here! Run cables. Moved in? Tv looks terrible there! Also, tech is constantly changing and I am constantly needing to run new cables for things. So don't stress over the pre-planning, just give yourself easy access to change things in the future.

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Oh for sure! We're doing our best to plan that in. I think I'm going to end up with less attic than I wanted because of some other architectural decisions we had to make, but I'm planning on asking for spare conduit in my exterior walls and a few other things to hopefully make up for some of it.

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#4 and #7 are big ones for me, neither of which I have done (ugh). I would like to set up a dedicated wall mounted tablet for dashboard control and viewing of perimeter cams as well as direct control f devices. A big want and I’m 75% there on is monitoring if my cat is in the garage with a Bluetooth LE tag so we don’t accidentally open the garage doors and let him out. I’m trying to get HE to recognize the tag with a Rpi Zero located in the garage, then turn on a colored light in our laundry room (path to garage) and hopefully prevent big garage door from operating.

Other than that, turning on lights prior to sundown or be able to recognize that it’s gloomy out and not enough light in the hoist so HE turns on living room lights. Oh, and bathroom fan control for high humidity. My son is horrible at remembering to turn the fan on before the shower. It’s like entering a sauna after he gets out. Lol

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IF, and honestly it would take me winning the lottery at my age to be able to afford it, I could get a house built, I would ABSOLUTELY have it built with full standing height / decked attic, and I will one up this, complete with an actual infrastructure closet like you would see in a business office, basically a small air conditioned room that had all my network gear, ethernet, VoIP, Coaxial, etc.... run into it. Run all the ethernet ports I could possibly want, and, well have my network gear racked in a space bigger than a small walled off section of closet.

I'd still place the HE hub / hubs down in the living space where we are providing services as then are #1. Tiny, and #2 actually effective closer to the stuff we are controlling.

I should mention some other things I will LIKELY automate but am not going to do yet.

Blinds.

I haven't brought this up here, but I am having mobility problems due to arthritis in my spine. I have cordless blinds which are fantastic, until I have to raise / lower them. If there is a way to automate these, or replace these with good quality automated / smart blinds that would make my life easier.

And I totally agree with the improve the quality of life in the home comments. That is what it is all about.

Honestly, after my ADT, then Iris, then ADT Smartthings experiences with security, honestly HE couldn't be worse for security if they tried. I am not trying to build Fort Knox, I am trying to keep idiot neighbors friends out of my property and on notice a bit.

You wanna blaze up in your back yard I honestly don't care. You want to consider coming into my house and grabbing my stuff, you are going to have some serious problems.

I was never edgy about security from my neighbors before the last set of renters. It wasn't the parents, it was the dumb a** pasty kid that wanted to be a rapper type that was trying to fund his career by selling uh, unlicensed pharmecueticals, and the imbeciles that brings to the neighborhood.

And this is coming from a guy whose apartment living experience included my downstairs neighbor shooting her boyfriend in a dispute over whose cocaine was in the kitchen...

I do NOT miss that apartment, or those particular neighbors.

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I haven't done #7 in HE yet, I was doing it with ST. I am sure HE handles it, My Iris sensors have temp readings. I use my non contact thermometer to validate the readings, adjust in software, then set up a rule, if temp from sensor blah between A and B, set fan speed to 1, if between C and D set fan speed to 2 and so on.

Had not considered gloomy daytime for lighting automation. Dangit now there is something else I need to consider. I have come home from work with it being dang near midnight black due to storms and I really should do that.

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We had a house broken into while building our new house. It changes you. One of the first things I did in the new house was setup an alarm system. Smart home seemed to kinda follow that.

As far as number 7 what I'm doing is pretty simple and its making the house really comfortable. I have an ecobee thermostat, but this could be done with any thermostat I'm sure, but when the ecobee reports the AC is idle, the ceiling fans turn on, then when the ecobee changes to cooling mode, the fans turn off. This way there is a rather constant air flow throughout the day. You never get that extra cold from having both running at the same time. Works for me anyways. It would be better if I had a thermostat I could read from without using the cloud tho, so it would be a bit more instant.

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We moved from a high-cost-of-living area to a low-cost-of-living area. Our new house was a lot bigger than the old one, and had many more lightswitches. I got tired of adjusting the same lightswitches the same way every day as I moved throughout the house. That was the start of it.

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Hmmmm. Not sure if the Honeywell does that or not. Going to have to look into it. Honestly I don't mind the momentary push of cold air though, I actually kind of like it. A good example right now. It is 75 deg F, yeah we stay a little cooler than many, and I pay for it, but I digress,

My speeds jump every 2 degrees Below 71 deg F, the fan stays on low unless we are in away mode. At 71 the fan goes to medium, at 73 medium high, and at 75 high, or max or whatever. Or in HE speak, 25%, 50%, 75% and 100%.

Now that there is that, I need to figure out a rule to make that happen, and I also need to figure out how to adjust temp readings from the sensors in HE.

I've never had a break in that didn't involve a roomates ex, and technically it wasn't a break in, but a keyed entry when she should have been there escorted. Long story that I don't need to go into. Nothing like coming home from work with your roomate to find the apartment trashed, and his ex girlfriend naked and dang near alcohol poisoned. Neither of us had any idea how she got a key. Or at least he says he had no idea. Oh well that was technically his couch, and she actually cleaned it up / paid for dry cleaning services after she sobered up.

The lesson I took away from that, no roomates with crazy girlfriends. I am way past that phase in life at this point...

Oh and FYI, they got back together, he married her, they had 2 kids, she wasn't spectacularly sober, or faithful, they got divorced blah blah blah. You know the song and dance...