Making a smarter home

In the beginning…

I’ve had smart technology in my home for quite a few years now. It all started with a Philips Hue starter kit consisting of three bulbs and a gateway. Being able to control your lighting from your smartphone or tablet, without having to leave your chair to switch on the lights. Until someone else in the household used the physical light switch, making it impossible to control the lights from the app…

Then Ikea introduced their Trådfri range. I bought their starter kit as well: a switch with a bulb and, once again, a gateway. I also tried a few “Zigbee”-compatible bulbs bought via Alibaba, but all of them still required their own gateway. That didn’t feel very practical. Before you know it, you’d have a separate gateway in the meter cupboard for every brand.

For lighting, I’ve since settled on products from Ikea and now also Lidl. They are far more affordable than the expensive Philips Hue products.

In addition, I have a Tado room thermostat and a Tado radiator valve in every bedroom. With today’s energy prices, that turned out to be a good investment. I now have full control over my heating behaviour and can combine that very effectively with the infrared heating panels in my home.

Automation

At some point, the techie in me started to itch. Could control be simpler? And could I perhaps use buttons from brand X to control lights from brand Y? I soon ended up with Domoticz, an open source application that allowed me to switch lights on and automatically turn everything off in the evening. However, Domoticz was rather spartan to use and lacked support for quite a few brands. For me, it faded into the background again. I wanted a solution where I could mount an iPad on the wall so everyone in the household could control the home: temperature, lighting, music, opening the front door, and possibly even via a spoken “Hey Siri!” command.

Home Assistant

I’m a strong supporter of open source software. After a period of automating everything purely through the Philips Hue app, the need for a proper automation solution became much greater. We recently installed infrared heating panels on the ceiling, but they don’t have a built-in timer. So once you switch them on, you have to remember to switch them off again, because they draw quite a lot of power. The most powerful one uses 1000 watts per hour.

I solved this by using a smart plug from Lidl and controlling it via Home Assistant. With Home Assistant, you can truly connect everything, regardless of brand, and do some very smart things with it. As soon as a heating panel is switched on, a timer starts running and after one hour it switches the panel off again via the Lidl Silvercrest smart plug. This is a temporary solution for us, but it works.

At the moment, I’m working on reading the temperature from the Tado radiator valves per room and switching on the heating panel in that room when someone is present and the temperature drops below a certain threshold. Once the desired temperature is reached, the panel switches itself off automatically.

A first automation for controlling my IR heating panel in the living room using Home Assistant.

I can almost hear you thinking: “Is he really letting a Tado radiator valve work together with a Lidl smart plug? Does that actually work?” And the answer is: yes, it really does. And I no longer have to worry about all those Zigbee gateways. As long as a device can get an IP address, it can be controlled with Home Assistant. More on this soon.