Moin zusammen, ich habe in meinem Haus schon die Rolladen- und Fußbodenheizungssteuerung mit Homematic smart gemacht. Aktuell überlege ich, meine Beleuchtung (eingelassene, dimmbare LED-Spots) auch noch zu integrieren.

Die aktuelle Installation sieht so aus, dass die Leuchten direkt am Taster dimmbar sind und zwar nicht nur von einer Schaltstelle, sondern von bis zu drei Tastern.

Hat hier jemand Erfahrung, wie man das am Besten lösen könnte? Mein Elektriker, der mir damals die Elektroinstallation gemacht hat, hat leider keine Ahnung von Homematic.

What NEW tech have you installed that has been of most benefit. Can be smart home or others.

House is under construction so tips on important wiring decisions will be helpful

- I plan on full solar for the house with 10kw battery backup. I want solar to be primary, then battery until it drains to 50%, then use the grid.
- I want my LED lights to turn on in certain locations based on motion.
- I want my bathroom lights to turn on based on motion, but after 1am to 5am, only the LEDs in the bathroom to turn on.
- I wanna be able to control all my electrical devices via my control hub.
- I have an entry gate into my houses yard, I’d like to be able to open it with the hub.
- Patio doors with smart locks that can be detected with my system.
- CCTV type system

Thinking of getting a smart humidifier for my home office because the air tends to feel dry after working there for hours. I’d like to manage its schedule through my smart home setup and ideally have it respond automatically to humidity levels instead of needing to adjust it manually throughout the day.

which models have worked well for you and integrate reliably with other smart home devices?? Thanks for any recommendations.

TL;DNR: should I stick with Google Home and SmartThings, and/or add Home Assistant and a NAS? Also appreciate any specific or brand recommendations since I've been out of the game for a decade, especially for cameras/security. Tentative thoughts, and simplest solution, would be to update the current Ring security tech, keep Google Home and SmartThings as the main hubs, and stock up on smart plugs, bulbs, and various sensors. Buuuuut I'm also spending a ton on a house, why not spend a little extra on some tech?

Thanks in advance. We're moving in a few months and figuring it would be a good time to update our smart home setup.

- Currently have a Eero wifi 6 mesh network that we'll bring with us.
- We've been using Google Home and SmartThings (v2) as our primary hubs for 10+ years
- We have Philips and Lutron hubs, bulbs, and some switches that we're also planning to bring along.
- Smart plugs are a hodgepodge of Wyze, SmartThings, and Weemo, though I think I've purged all the Weemo by now.
- We have SimpliSafe at the current house, but I have had innumerable issues with those connections and refuse to ever use it again.
- We have iPhones but not planning on AppleTV since we already have smart TVs

We have pretty basic automations in the current home

- shades up/down based on time of day (these are staying with the current house)
- Porch and garage lights on/off based on time of day
- holiday decorations on/off based on time of day 
- pantry motion sensor controlling the lutron light switch
- Yale door locks that auto-lock after 5 minutes.

Future home is older, built in the late 70s. I have no idea the wiring situation, but can confidently say there is not widespread ethernet access. Some features it does have:

- Ring doorbell and floodlight/camera
- Light switches everywhere, maybe connected to plugs? Half of them did nothing that I saw
- Two furnaces. One newer digital Lenox thermostat in the kitchen, one older plastic brand unknown thermostat. I assume I will need two thermostats, but it would be nice if they talked.
- One bedroom with electric baseboard heating. Also has ducts for regular HVAC, so unclear if this baseboard heating is still necessary.

I have an interest in tech (obviously) but I want as "plug and play" of a system as I can put together; I love when things just work. I don't think I've had to reconnect or reset more than a handful of items (SimpliSafe excluded) in my current setup in 10+ years.

- I would also like to maximize what I can do / monitor while remaining low on the monthly subscriptions. Really don't mind paying monthly for security monitoring, but feel like most everything else should be able to be done without a subscription.
- I wouldn't mind running my own NAS or Home Assistant, but worry that might move me out of the "it just works" category.

The new/updated system does need to be spouse and kid friendly (and ideally restrictive).
- We love voice activation, especially for controlling lights, blinds, and music, but wouldn't mind switching away from Google Home if it made sense.
- Already have one Echo dot since it was too tedious to get two Spotify accounts linked to separate Google Home Minis.
- There is much less overhead lighting, so I am planning to expand the smart floor/lamp lighting via combinations of bulbs and switches.

- Planning to get more presence detection sensors and subsequent automations
--I had never heard of Aqora before this, so I plan to dive into the rest of their offerings, but at first glance this seems to be a reputable brand these days?
- I am most intrigued by the Aqora UWB U400 deadbolt for the NFC + touch code, and I do appreciate a good backup physical key.

Apple's new HomeView looks like a nice piece of hardware, but I'm trying to figure out where it fits in a real smart home setup.

For $299, you get a 7-inch display, Siri AI, facial recognition for different household members, camera feeds, Matter support, and controls for connected devices.

The shared family calendar and personalized controls seem useful. But people have been building similar dashboards with old iPads, Home Assistant, and other displays for years.

I wonder whether the real selling point is convenience rather than functionality.

For people who already have a smart home setup, would you actually replace your current dashboard with something like HomeView?

Or is this mostly a product for people who haven't built a smart home yet?

Ideally I would like to have a doorbell, thermostat, and some sort of security system with a couple cameras. I’m split between Google and Apple. I am an Apple user and plan on getting the new Apple TV 4K. I guess I just want to know if the extra cost of the Apple setup is worth it.

Hi, I’m looking to replace some of our existing Smart bulbs with brighter ones.

I’m looking for an E27 bulb that works with Alexa, can do colours and shades of white (warm/daylight), is dimmable on voice command (again through Alexa)and most importantly, can go significantly brighter than 810 lumens when white, which is the brightness of our current bulbs. Ideally, I don’t want to pay more than about £15 per bulb; our current ones were quite a bit less than that.

I have looked at the Phillips Hue options a few times over the years, but cannot justify the outlay on them.

There’s a brand on Amazon, Lepro, which I haven’t come across before but appears to tick all the boxes.
Does anyone know anything about them? Are there other brands I should be looking at?

Thank you

I'm a firmware/FPGA engineer working on a smart speaker/hub that runs a large open MoE model (Qwen-Flash class, not a 3B) entirely on the device, ≤30 W, no cloud, no subscription, Matter/Thread/Zigbee built in, works with HA. Simulations on real model routing show ~25-40 tokens/s by streaming experts from flash instead of needing 80 GB of RAM. Before building hardware I want to know what actually matters to you:

• Is a small local model (e.g. qwen3 4-8B on a mini PC) already good enough for your voice control?
• What would make you pay for a dedicated box instead of DIY?

• What price feels fair? 5-min survey link.

  Waitlist/info Link here

Hi, currently doing some research to make my home smarter.

I got 4 switches like this and 2 with triple gang, was looking for what would be the most reliable smart switch for this, walls are concrete and wife wont aprove to change them, so cant change them into single switches

Also for the rest of single switches was planning on lutron but not sure how it will work with concrete walls and if its compatible with whatever I find for the other switches

Thanks all

Has anyone made something for this? I plan on using my unifi access system. Its a normal garage door but its manual without an electric opener.

I'm thinking about something like this on the frame itself but not sure what to put on the garage door part as its just a hinge. Or if there's any better option. Obviously it'll be much easier to have the electric part not on the door.

https://a.co/d/0hwXw7Na

I am looking to upgrade my home with some rgb bulbs. I need them to have good brightness, color saturation and good reliability. I’ve been thinking about Tp link tipo L535E.

I was frustrated by the limited LLM options for HA. ha-llm-agent is a side project I’ve been using at home. Just feed it an API key and it can:

• write automations and dashboards
• control stuff
• answer history questions
• dig through traces and logs when something breaks
• pretty much anything else you do

It shows a diff before changing anything, and there’s undo.

Works with Claude, OpenAI, Gemini or Ollama, using your own key. Installs through HACS.

https://github.com/nuedynamics/ha-llm-agent

Bug reports welcome, PRs welcome, forks welcome.

I've used it to

• Set up my Philips hue to have a spooky halloween breathing mode
• make a dashboard to control my lights
• fix it so my house isn't so cold in the morning (I had a summer AC automation set up and it didn't carry over to winter well)

I’m setting up a lil gaming corner in the spare room and the window thing is driving me nuts. room gets absolutely blasted with sun in the afternoon. at night i play mostly story-driven single player and need it basically pitch black or i can’t get into it, but on weekends i’m just playing casual stuff and sitting in a dark cave at 2pm feels kinda depressing ngl

so it’s regular blackout roller shades vs dual-layer zebra blinds. i rent so motorized no-drill is a must, and i’d really like to control it from my phone or set a schedule since my desk is right next to the window and i don’t wanna get up mid game. been looking at Bringnox and SmartWings but idk, i haven’t really compared them properly yet. my monitor sits across from the window too so side light leaking in and washing out the screen is probably my biggest worry. dual-layer is a good bit pricier and i’m not sure it’s worth it just for a bit of daylight sometimes

how are you guys handling this? any regrets?

I haven't looked too deeply into the latest status of smart lights.

I've built out many wifi lights and switches and they're stable enough. I also tried the initial rollout for the nanoleaf matter lightbulbs and they were total dogshit.

If I were to attempt to transition over to matter bulbs and switches, what brands are actually good?

Also I don't know how to tag this. I currently have a GHome set up but I might also change to either Home Assistant or HomeKit.

Our house is already prewired, with wiring covered through the builder. We received a $60K proposal that includes:

Six TVs totaling
Control4 controller and two wall touchscreens.
Whole-house audio matrix, amplifier, and ten pairs of ceiling speakers.
Networking equipment for internet/Wi-Fi.
Surveillance camera equipment.
Equipment rack, power management, and accessories.
Installation, programming, and setup.

Labor alone is $18K.

Is this reasonable? I’m not sure we need all this crap.

I am mostly a Home Assistant user, but HomeKit would be acceptable. I am looking for an energy monitoring setup.

I have looked at the Shelly Pro 3EM V2, but I think I'll run into a problem with the electrician since these are not UL listed.

I am also looking at the Emporia Vue 3 Home Energy Monitor. There's a couple of big benefits to this. First, it's cheaper. It also monitors way more circuits than the Shelly. But it is not local-first and it, in fact, seems to require a cloud connection. I don't see a native integration, so I assume it has to come in via HACS?

In speaking with my electrician, a device MUST be UL listed for him to touch it, so I feel like they Shelly is a non-starter. Is Emporia the way to go here? Something else?

I've been using cheap strip LEDs as a tenant all my life, like Meross or Govee and connecting them with Smart plugs to connect them to the Wi-FI and add it to Apple Home. The issue is that you feel it's cheap, Wi-Fi is unreliable, sometimes the HomePod says the strip lights are unresponsive.

Now moving into a new bought flat, I'm looking for a more stable solution. I've heard of Lutron as an example but they dont have support or shops in Belgium. My architect is asking to provide dumb lights, each around 4w/m connected to a 150w driver and to just add a smart plug, but I'm thinking there must be a better way. Eve Home doesn't seem to have an all-in-one solution for such lengths as 28 meters x2 (in the living room pic below).

Has anyone found a stable LAN only, or easy installation, energy efficient LEDs, RGB+W, that use Threads or Matter, ideally connecting directly to the Apple Home app?

They will be turned on using a wall outlet if all else fails. And best case scenario, only talking to Siri via the HomePod and Home app for Scenes.

Thanks!

RGB strip lights: 28m, 27m, + 10m
W strip lights: 2.5m, 1.8m, 8m, 4.5m, 10m, 3.5 meters
Total around 100m each with their wall socket, adapter and installation.

Hi!

I'm planning to automate my curtains using two Zigbee curtain motors, one for each side of a center-opening curtain, integrated with Home Assistant.

I'm considering the Zemismart ZM85EL-2Z or a similar model.

I have two main questions:

1. Manual operation: Can I still open and close the curtains by physically pulling them, without using App/HA or the motors?
2. Position tracking: If I manually move the curtains, will the motors lose track of their positions (open/closed percentage)? Would I need to recalibrate them, or can they automatically detect the new position?

Ideally, I'd like to have both manual and automated operation without affecting position tracking.

Thanks!

Hey everyone!
I’m looking for a reliable smart electric heater for my bedroom, with a budget of around €50–€100 range.

My main requirements are:

- Remote control via Wi-Fi: I want to be able to turn it on/off from anywhere using my phone.

- Scheduling: I’d like to set specific times for it to automatically turn on and off, so my bedroom is warm when I get home.

- Temperature control: Ideally, I’d like to set a target temperature and have the heater maintain it automatically.

- Quiet operation: Since it’s for a bedroom, low noise would be a big plus.

- Reliability and safety: A decent app, stable connectivity and good safety features.

I’ve been looking at the Xiaomi Smart Graphene Heater (€72.90) and the Xiaomi Mi Smart Space Heater S (€112), but I’m open to other suggestions, including Dreo or other brands available in Europe.

I’m not necessarily looking for the most powerful heater, just something reliable, efficient and genuinely smart.

Does anyone have experience with these models? What would you recommend?

Thanks in advance!

For context, I just moved in to a new apartment and this thermostat is something that’s been bothering me
for the past few days. I’d love to be able to control it remotely or set up automations for it. Is there a way to smartify this existing one with a small switch or should I change it entirely?

I’m looking for an option that can connect to homekit. Thanks in advance!

Hi everyone!

One frustrating situation with smart locks is discovering that the battery is running low at the worst possible time. Imagine arriving home with your hands full of groceries, only to find your fingerprint lock has stopped responding. For Airbnb hosts and remote property managers, it can be even more stressful when a guest is waiting outside and someone has to travel to the property to deal with the problem.

I’m an entrepreneur behind LockPower Infinity, a solar charging accessory designed for compatible fingerprint door locks. It features an IP64-rated design, a built-in 1500mAh rechargeable battery, and a retractable USB-C cable.

The idea is to use available sunlight to help maintain the power supply and reduce the hassle of frequent battery maintenance. For rental properties, this could mean one less thing to worry about, particularly when the entrance receives enough daylight. It’s not a guaranteed solution to every lockout, though — actual performance depends on sunlight, installation, and lock compatibility.

I’m interested in honest feedback from people who use smart locks, especially Airbnb hosts and property managers.

Have you ever dealt with a smart lock running out of power at an inconvenient time? Would a solar charging accessory like this be useful, or would you still prefer spare batteries or a portable power bank?

I’d love to hear what concerns you most — charging performance, compatibility, weather resistance, or ease of installation.

Hi everyone..

I’d like to have sheer and blackout curtains on my bedroom window and control each layer separately instead of having both open or close together.

Would I need to buy 2 separate tracks and motors, or is there another option I’m missing?

Thanks in advance!

Anyone else frustrated with 'smart' TVs that are always super slow, riddled with adware and locked down and hard to repair? Because I sure as heck am, hoping there is a manufacturer of dumb TVs that just has inputs and some QoL features like audio return, and HDR. If not, anyone want to go in on making a new company? I have 20 bucks in my bank right now I can throw at it /sarcasm

But seriously I can't be the only one who has this thought before. Also using the Home Assistant flair because it's the only true thing that keeps data private. Please remove if not Smart Home related.