Looking at options - Smart Holiday Home Setup

[jolly condor]

Whilst I have been using Home assistant for a few years, I only have WiFi devices. I also have my Ecowitt weather station and security cameras integrated.

In the holiday home I want to be able to remotely control & automate

• the lights in the entrance way and on the stairs just inside the front door, so that the lights come on when guests arrive as this area is quite dark.

• heating controls so the house is warm in winter when guests arrive. I have Cielo Breeze Max smart thermostat

• TT-Lock smart lock maybe integrated

• We have two TAPO P110M smart plugs

Current thinking:

• Home Assistant Green as we are not going to have a lot of devices

• SMLight Tech SLZB-MR1 coordinator so that I can have a mix of Zigbee ZHA and Matter devices. I read that you should not put your coordinator near your WiFi access point - is this right? They will both be almost next to each other on the same switch.

• **Govee COB strip light pro **for maximum brightness on the stairs

• Linkind light bulb for the entrance light

• THIRDREALITY MMWave motion sensor might be a good option (stairs 5m - straight – no bends) and door is 2m in front of the stairs = total of 7m. The coordinator would be down the end of the 5m hallway to the left of the the top of the stairs . I am not sure if I would need another motion sensor due to the distances and I am not sure if I can put this sensor up high out of reach of children - so looking for people to tell me their real world experiences.

I am open to other options/brands as well. I have also looked at Aqara motion sensors which tilt, which might work better since stairs are involved. Given the distance I am from the holiday home, I need reliable devices.

[jolly condor]

anyone got any thoughts on the devices I am looking at getting?

[bold otter]

Reliability, backups and backup access to the most important devices could be important. I chose to prefer some devices with their own cloud solutions to allow for another method of remote access like Shelly has and probably most smart locks.

I would hope Home Assistant Green's storage is more reliable than MicroSD on Raspberry Pi which has been the weakest link for me. They just break.

I'm having all of my stuff in the same rack cabinet with two wifi APs and ZigBee controller. It is steel and class so it even blocks the signal to some extent. However, you can extend the ZigBee just by having ZigBee routers elsewhere. I think most always on power ZigBee devices such as smart plugs will work as routers so extending the ZigBee network coverage. It is plug and play, there's nothing for you to do other than adding the device normally to your network.

[jolly condor]

Thats a good tip about ensuring that you have another way to control the device in the event you have a HA issue.

[vapid frigate]

maybe take a look at https://github.com/maxi1134/Home-Assistant-Config/blob/master/documentation/zigbee.md#zigbee-devices for zigbee devices that are tested, or for wifi stuff check https://github.com/maxi1134/Home-Assistant-Config/blob/master/documentation/wifi.md#wifi-devices

[jolly condor]

thank you for the lists. I have decided to go with smart switches from Zemismart...I have been talking to a few people who have used them and found lots of good reports...it means I wont need the lighting changes to

[vapid frigate]

For future use, if having the choice between wifi and zigbee for your devices, go for zigbee, hence it's more reliable than wifi and will run if wifi/internet drops.

Also a good thing to assure things will work is to google the device and add home assistant compatible to your search, look for pages of home assistant with details (if found)

[jolly condor]

yep I have been doing a lot of googling ...

the joys of technology and the ability to control another way is important

[vapid frigate]

One last thing if looking for doorbell or camera, note that 2-way audio is not supported in home assistant at this moment, alltough many companies advertise with "works with home assistant"

[jolly condor]

thank you for that...I had read about it. I use Reolink cameras and can use their app for 2-way audio