Smart home and automation

Smart home devices talk to each other in several ways, and that choice decides how the system will behave five years from now.

• Wi-Fi: easy to start with, but every device loads the router and most depend on the manufacturer's cloud.
• Zigbee: a mesh network on 2.4 GHz, battery devices last a long time, and control is local through its own coordinator.
• Z-Wave: runs on 868 MHz in Europe, so it stays out of the way of Wi-Fi and gets through walls better, but the device range is smaller and pricier.
• Matter over Thread: a newer standard that runs locally and links devices from different makers, though the range is still growing.

For most homes, a local hub such as Home Assistant on a small computer, with Zigbee as the main network for sensors and switches. The rules run inside the house: a water leak sensor closes the valve even when the internet is down, and the light comes on with motion without the command travelling to a server in another country. We add Matter devices where they exist, because they work with the same hub directly.

Remote access runs through a VPN rather than open ports on the router. The hub's configuration is backed up to a separate medium on a schedule, so if the small computer fails, the fix is a replacement and a restore.

Twenty Wi-Fi plugs and bulbs mean twenty clients on the router and several apps with their own accounts. When a manufacturer shuts its service down, devices that depend on its cloud are left without control. So we use Wi-Fi for things that need bandwidth, such as cameras and speakers, and put everything that only switches on, switches off and reports its state on a network built for that.