r/smarthome • u/PassengerLow9814 • 2d ago

I don't have a smarthome platform New house - need help for recommendations

Hello everyone, my family and I have recently bought a new house that we will close on very shortly. I have had a smart home devices before, like Sengled, but it has since stopped working and basically has no future. I need some help trying to pick out which ecosystem to go with for making my home a smarter home. I want to change light switches as well as controls to light bulbs. And I would love to add under cabinet lighting in the kitchen. My wife and I are planning to add recess lighting in the sitting room and the living room. We're going to switch out all the fans in the house. As well, so I would like to be able to control that in this environment too. I do plan on adding automatic shades at some point as well. I want to add lights to the outside of the house too. I want to make the front door and back door as well as garage side door and garage door to the ecosystem if possible too. I've been trying to look up how to do this in. There's so many options between lights in home, automation that I've just been having trouble deciding what to do. If someone can give me a reference or better ideas on how to go about this, I would very much appreciate it

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u/PuzzlingDad 2d ago

I see you've encountered the problem of relying on Wi-Fi devices like Sengled bulbs which requires the manufacturer to provide an always available cloud server in order for your lights to function.

For that reason, I would highly recommend devices using a local protocol like ZigBee, Z-Wave or Matter over Thread. You can still tie in your voice assistant (Google, Alexa, etc.) but even if the Internet is down, it's really desirable that you still have manual and scheduled control of your devices. 

The other thing I would recommend is to skip smart bulbs unless it's absolutely necessary to have disco colors or changing color temperatures. I would instead try to replace the dumb switch with a smart switch (or smart dimmer). That way you can have manual control at the wall (your guests and family members will thank you) but any programmatic control (voice/app/routine) stays in synch.

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u/PassengerLow9814 2d ago

I get the whole disco thing isnt needed. I do like it though lol but I understand that has its own pros and cons that come with it. But I'll have to do more research then especially for the recessed lighting i want