Moved to our first 'house' after having been purely in Apartment/condo buildings.
My wife wanted 'security' at night while we sleep, so I knew I wanted to get Contact Sensors and I wanted a few automated things like doors with keypads.
Ended up getting Wink 2, which was actually reasonable at the time, but long before they started charging realized how limited I was so did some research and ended up on Hubitat + Ring Alarm convo thanks to the customer integration.
Long long road, and many devices since then haha. But so worth it!
Then got Wink2 and finally had an epiphany when they started faltering and jumped to HE.
I look at several others, including HA and ST after using Wink, just didn't like the complexity of HA (at the time) and ST didn't sit right with me. I foresaw them going closed eco and subscription based. HE just seemed easier to setup (though the dashboards have always been a rub).
Somewhere along the line I got into Blue Iris and off brand IP cam stuff including a Uniden doorbell. FWIW, I also run UBNT gear and am an Enterprise IT Engineer (Large IBM systems). Don't write a lick of code but can integrate infrastructure.
I was using Harmony long before I started any HA (with MyQ) being the ember. The Harmony evolved into One/Ultimate/Elite/hubs, etc. Sad they got out of it but everything still works.
Oh man I remember seeing X10 demonstrated at a Sears store while shopping with my mom. And then they showed up at Radio Shack. And if anyone remember the DAK catalog they always had discounts on them there. I was able to get a controller that plugged into my computer via serial ports and control the lighting at my table in the basement without needing the computer running. The controller had 8 switchs on it that address 8 X10 devices. My mom wouldn't let me automate any other devices in her house. But when I got married and moved into our own house, I immediately did X10 switches and plug in light controllers and got a real programmable thermostat.
From there things did move much in automation. Then I moved out to Illinois and had a larger house and didn't like the feeling of a dark empty house. Discovered the home automation catalog and the StarGate controller for X10 and other devices. That opened up so much more, telephone integration, IVR, room scenes, If then conditions with sensors etc. That was the real Ah ha moment and I never looked back.
I started in Philips Hue, probably in 2018, quickly starting to use All4Hue to write mode-based "automations" on the Hue bridge as I built out my lights and accessories. I think my first aim was to setup motion-based lighting for my bathroom during the night and my laundry. That quickly moved to all lighting
I then wanted to do more with modes, other trigger options like contact sensors, plus open up more options to automate other stuff in my home. I remember watching / reading reviews of Homey, but being turned off by the price. Can't quite remember how I landed on Hubitat... but glad I did, joining in July 2019 with a C-4.
Somewhere in amongst all that I purchased a Harmony Elite, Somfy roller blind and awning motors with a Bond bridge, various raspberry pi's, a Mitsubishi ducted air conditioner, EcoWitt Weather Station, SensorPush Temperature and Humidity Sensors and Gateway, Kasa plugs, Solar Panels and Battery storage linked to a SolarEdge invertor, Google Mini's and a Sonos bookshelf speaker. There are various smaller things like my Logitech devices, SteelSeries mousepad, APC UPS', Garmin watch and playing around with Tasker on my mobile devices.
I was working for an integration company doing mostly Elan, Savant and Control4 design and programming. I was extremely disappointed with these platforms in terms of price vs capability. Had noodled around with Smart Things over a decade ago, and was leaning in that direction for my own home when I heard about Hubitat. I bought a C-5 right when it was brand new for my own home, and have never looked back. That C-5 is still chugging along so well I have had no reason to need to upgrade yet.
Purchased a house that already had a pretty extensive RadioRa2 set up (~180 devices upon move in). I wanted to do some things that couldn't be done natively - the former owners had used Control4 to do those sorts of things, but I was 1) too cheap and 2) hate paying people to do things that I can do myself, so Control4 wasn't an option. Hubitat fit that need nicely.
As an example of what I'm referring to: one of our bathrooms has a RadioRa2 keypad that has a series of buttons for how long the exhaust fan should run (15, 30, 60 minutes). RadioRa2 can't actually do that natively, so it needs a 3rd party system to actually make those buttons work.
Mine started with a basement refresh in 2013; I was looking for a way to automate my planned home theater. I have a software development background, four decades and counting, starting from when Computer Science wasn't a major in most colleges and you did Electrical Engineering. I've worked on embedded systems as well as shrink-wrap software, so I was kind of ready for anything. I started with a Vera3, with only the theater as the planned target. That spread out to the rest of the house pretty quickly. At the time, their built-in automation was really weak, but there was a plugin available to offer more. It was pretty powerful, but anything but user-friendly and a lot of users complained about its complexity, bizarre syntax, occasionally odd behaviors, and it was one of the few plugins that cost money. I thought I could do something more user-friendly, more GUI and less texty, and free. By that time, I had already written a couple of other plugins for various purposes, so I dove in and eventually published the Reactor Vera plugin. When Vera was acquired by another company, it became apparent that they were going to sunset the platform (a slow death by neglect, it turned out, and their new product has yet to duplicate the capability of its predecessor as we approach the six-year mark since acquisition), so I built an entirely new Reactor, reusing the UI flavor but with an entirely new engine to run with multiple home automation platforms, including Hubitat. Today, my HA necessarily incorporates all of the platforms Reactor supports; Hubitat (C-7) is primarily responsible for about half of the main level of my house, and all ZigBee devices. Overall, I'm at about 300 devices, spread across Z-Wave, ZigBee, MQTT, and net-direct (HTTP, TCP/UDP, etc.). WAF is high now that most of the expense is behind me. These days, it's a slow trickle playing with new devices (mostly sensors) and upgrading old ones (newer Z-Wave, newer LED controllers, etc.).
Previous house had three switches in three wildly different places for the outdoor lighting we wanted on dusk-dawn every night.
Easy fix, right? I bought 3 astronomical timers, installed them, and I was done forever. Or notā¦
It turns out those timers either didnāt like our power or just life itself, and I went through 4 or 5 total (They just would die. First, theyād lose their backup power source, then eventually just cease to work at all.) before I figured out I needed to do something different.
Started out with ST and that single automation of 3 devices. I knew HE was being born at that time, but didnāt jump because I didnāt need anything else.
Grew up in a home with a bunch of manual timers that controlled lamps through out the house. When I moved into my first home my dad bought me several to setup with lamps around my new home. After years of random power outages and DST changes I grew tired of pulling away furniture to change these dumb timers to set the current time and bought a SmartThings kit in 2014 (I still have that Gen1 multisensor that uses AAAA batteries on my garage door to this day!). The flexibility of their platform quickly hooked me into doing more automations around the house such as automating my hot water circulation pump based on our shower light switch turning on. Didn't help when Lowes started deep discounting their GE Zwave switches in the old blister packs because living in NC where they are based we have tons of stores I bought tons of switches I didn't need because they were cheap. This lead to me replacing most every switch in my house.
Then like most have mentioned I grew tired of SmartThings outages and their long transition away from Groovy and found Hubitat in Feb/March 2018 just after they launched. I have been a mostly happy customer for the last 6 years. I started out with a single C3 hub and learned it couldn't handle my large zigbee and zwave mech so I bought several C4s and split hubs by protocol. From there I upgraded the C4s to C7s and recently consolidated 4 hubs into 2 C8-Pros.
The flexibility of automating my home from various sources like Google Calendar events, Alexa, Siri, motion, etc has been awesome. My family is hooked and I also enjoy tinkering and improving things.
I started with a few 433-mhz dimmers to change position of some light swiches whitout having to re-wire the electricity. I saw that solution at a friends place and thought it was a cool way of doing it.
After a year or two we where renovating our bahtrooms and had a lot of troubles with the contractors and since I didnāt trust them doing a good job with the plumbing I needed a solution to monitor for waterleaks and that later changed to a fear of my house security in general so you can say that I use my smart home to monitor things in order to keep myself calm.
X10 for Christmas lights, but it really began with Ecobee, Ring doorbell, Wink 1, Wink 2, playing with motion and lights and particularly scenes. Cloud only was a fail for me. Local was a no brainer after traveling for several months and being unable to connect with my Wink system after some glitch. Looked at Smartthings and local Hubitat. I believe I started with Hubitat 4 and have been drinking the Kool-Aid ever since.
The slippery slope started with the light over my stairs and my OCD. Classic setup with light switches at the top and bottom of the stairs, but my OCD just hated both switches "up" for off. So, of course, I would just descend the stairs without using the light ... you know, to maintain that sweet "double-down off" switch positioning. After about 90 mishaps and some accidental cat punting, I bought a smart bulb. Instant junkie. Now smart home automations and changing batteries are my two biggest hobbies.
haha. But so worth it!
