Three bed rented semi, so nothing that involves rewiring or touching the consumer unit. I already have Home Assistant running on a spare mini PC, and I want lights in four rooms, heating control, and door sensors on two external doors. I had 600 in my head and I suspect that is fantasy. What did yours actually end up costing including the bits you bought twice?
Mine broke down as a coordinator stick for about the price of a takeaway, contact and motion sensors at ten to fifteen each, smart plugs at under a tenner, and bulbs anywhere from six to fifty depending on how much you care about colour. Then the heating happened. Radiator valves were forty to sixty each and I have nine radiators, which turned a two hundred pound project into a seven hundred pound one on its own. Sensors and plugs are cheap, anything that moves water or gas is not.
It works fine if you do whole rooms rather than half a room. I did bedrooms and the home office first and left the hallway and bathroom dumb, and honestly the hallway never needed it.
Nine radiators at fifty is the whole budget. Did doing four of them and leaving the rest manual work, or does it get weird having half the house controlled?
The hardware is not the cost. I spent about forty hours in the first month and I still spend an evening a month on it, and I enjoy that, which is the only reason it is not a terrible deal. If you would not enjoy the evenings, buy four smart plugs and stop, because that is where the actual value per pound is.
Budget doubles for two reasons. Radiator valves, and the fact that you will replace whatever you bought in the first month.
Renting changes the shopping list more than the budget does. Everything battery or plug in, nothing behind a faceplate, and buy sensors with normal adhesive rather than screws. When we moved I unclipped the lot in an evening and the landlord never knew there was anything there.
One line item people forget is a UPS for whatever runs the hub, plus a backup target. Losing the mini PC and the config is far more expensive than any sensor because it is a weekend of your life rather than fifteen pounds.
@first_repo_finn · last wk.
I run Hue in two rooms and generic Zigbee bulbs in the rest so I can compare them properly. The Hue bulbs cost roughly three times as much and in three years not one has dropped off or needed re pairing. The cheap ones work, but I have re paired them maybe a dozen times between them and two have died. Whether that is worth the difference depends entirely on whether re pairing a bulb makes you angry.
Reply
Report