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Cdpkook132

Cdpkook132

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New topic?!?

Smart homes and what have you integrated? How do you like the product and what would you change. Ask questions and give feedback

So far I have:
Wink 2 Hub
GE light switches
-living room fan
-bedroom fan
-bedroom light
-front lights
Cree Bulbs
-all my living room lamps
Nest Thermostat for downstairs
YI camera covering front door inside and back door (probably more coming)
Ring Doorbell Pro
RainMachine Irrigation Controller
2 Alexa Dots

All powered by my Nethear Orbi mesh router


How do you like your smart devices? How do you have them setup? How do they make your life easier?




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My front lights come on and turn off at sunrise and sunset automatically.

My lamps come on and off automatically for our living.

Ring (brand new) notifies us of activity at the front of the house.

Irrigation (brand new) works with local weather and doesn’t over water, and is much easier to program.

Fans turn on 15 minutes before we come home to circulate some fresh air to make the house more comfy

Nest thermostat conserves energy when we are gone

Bedroom light/fan makes it so we don’t haven to get out of bed in the dark (lazy here, I admit it)

Alexa for voice commands and weather updates

Orbi/wink controls it all! Great WiFi for everything anywhere.


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My other expensive hobby!

I have Zwave switches and Lutron Caeta switches, an iHome plug, a LIFX bulb, and Honeywell Thermostats all running through a SmartThings hub. I’m working on migrating everything to home assistant, for fun and some more automation ability.

Right now I’ve got quite a few basic automations running, lights come on when we get home, lights go out when we leave, and thermostats change accordingly as well.

A couple of morning routines turn on specific lights at specific times, complete with slowly ramping up to 100% from 0.

Lighting and thermostats know when I’m working from home and operate accordingly.

There’s still more stuff that I want to do, but I need to finish the migration to home assistant before I buy anymore switches or lights.
 
I had nest in orlando. We are going to use again in our new house in Ga. Also going with Ring and Alexa. Since the kids don’t know how to turn off lights, I’ll be going with sensors for bathroom and hall way lights.
 
For now our house only has the dusk to dawn lights for the front of our house. I've been looking into the Ring as I feel like we are starting to get more and more solicitors lately and it would be nice to just bring up the phone and ignore the door unless it's a package or neighbor.
 
Smart Homes

It looks like I’m going to go with the homeseer switches for all of the home. Has anyone use them or do you recommend a different brand of Z wave switches?


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wubears71 said:
It looks like I’m going to go with the homeseer switches for all of the home. Has anyone use them or do you recommend a different brand of Z wave switches?


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What hub are you using?

The homeseer switches seem to be pretty good, based on reviews. I’ve got GE switches and they’re pretty good too.
 
dazeedmonds said:
What hub are you using?

The homeseer switches seem to be pretty good, based on reviews. I’ve got GE switches and they’re pretty good too.
Click to expand...

Going with smart home. We will have the Samsung fridge with the big display on it and it seems that smart home does everything I want.




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wubears71 said:
Going with smart home. We will have the Samsung fridge with the big display on it and it seems that smart home does everything I want.




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SmartThings?
 
wubears71 said:
Yep. It was a kickstarter home automation hub that Samsung bought up.

https://www.smartthings.com/products


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Ok that’s what I thought. SmartThings is a solid choice and my primary automation system right now. I’m moving to HomeAssistant, but using SmartThings as a zwave antenna basically.

SmartThings has its limitations, like all of them, but overall it’s pretty good.

As for the zwave switches, any that you can find a good deal on that are one of the major brands should be ok.
 
I like my GE switches. They work and are the same style as all my other switches. The not actually staying up and down is a bit different but not bad


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My Second love or maybe third. I use smartthings hub and mesh internet system for all of my automations. I have the following.

all of my outside lighting on automations.
Schlage locks
All window and doors have open/close sensors to work with the smart home monitor system.
3 Motion sensors again for smart home monitor
Dome siren
Integrated smoke/CO alarms
Various interior lights
Mine and my wife’s phones set up as presence sensors.
By far my favorite is the smart home monitor. I have it set to arm home and arm away and disarm based on our presence sensors and times of day etc. also having the smoke and CO detectors integrated makes it nice if you are gone and something happens.
I also have my Nexia thermostat set up with a custom device handler to work with smartthings. It changes based on our presence as well. It was a real pain to get working correctly since it isn’t supposed to integrate with smartthings.
And I guess last l but not least I have a temp/humidity sensor in my crawl space. Primarily for winter time to make sure my water don’t have a chance to freeze.



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I feel like my house is smarter than me now.

I had been having some AC problems that I was starting to feel was thermostat related so I removed my Nest I installed 6 year ago and replaced it with the new Ecobee thermostat. (it did fix my issue) It has Alexa installed and is fully capable of providing dining music in my dining room via my SiriusXM and Tidal accounts. It is my first experience with a smart home setup so we've now also installed a Philips Hue hub to control the lights on the downstairs. I'm sure we'll eventually switch the entire house over in time since the bulbs are so expensive. The neighbors will probably think we are throwing rave parties in our house with the crazy colored light shows we can do now.

Eventually I'd like to eventually install a Ring doorbell since we don't have a working doorbell.
 
Bringing back an old thread, but I am considering adding some simple smart lights etc to the house this year

Reading through various things and a couple pieces of info caught my interest

Has anyone used the Nanoleaf products?

Also, is anyone using the Matter protocol side of things for controlling devices?
 
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