At the time of this writing, our house is still being built. The interior wall are up but not yet painted. We are still a while away from even moving in, so why start this project now? Because as I've learnt over the years, if you get yourself some spare time, make use of it. We have an ever growing list of tasks to perform once the house is handed over and we now have a little one on the way who is due to arrive not long after we intend to move in, so I'm trying to get a head start where I can. I work in IT; I know Murphy's Law is real; I know I'm going to have some challenges with this. So the more I can knock over now, the better. Also, as there are potentially going to be stock shortages and shipping delays, I'd like to know in advanced what I need to have things somewhat functional rather than waiting longer than necessary. Like this one time I was taking my car engine apart and ended up breaking a component that will take 3 months to come from Japan. Cable ties to the rescue! Just don't apply that mentality to this project okay.

A lot of the discussion below will initially start off with a heavy focus on lighting and fans. As I progress, additional smart home functions will be discussed. I also intended to mainly just cut straight to the point where I start configuring what I have selected but my old blogging habits have resulted in me starting a whole write-up on this adventure. Maybe I just secretly like writing a diary.

To give an idea of how I got here, let's rewind a little. Back in November 2020 when we had our electrical selections, I knew already that I was going to set our home up as a smart home. The convenience of having Alexa or Google turn on lights by just asking, or having lights automatically come on however you so desire is one of those conveniences in life that once you get a taste of, makes you lazy not want to go back to not having it.

I definitely wasn't going to go with a third party vendor to install a solution for us. My technical background would never let that happen. Knowing this, you need to start thinking ahead about how you will approach your smart home solution.

Thankfully, you don't need to wire your home in an advanced way to enable automation. You don't need a fancy control box where everything needs to wire back to and you don't need to run extra-low voltage cabling everywhere for your switch controls. There are solutions on the market that make use of existing cabling and for your average home owner, these solutions will be more than capable. When it comes to bolt-on solutions, I pretty much narrowed it down to two technologies.

1) WiFi based solutions
2) Wireless Mesh Networks (Zigbee, Z-Wave, etc)

I have previously worked with WiFi based solutions back in the days when they first started coming out and while they certainly do the job, they also leave a bit more to be desired. I also work in the hospitality technology industry and as such, I have been exposed to a bit of the second solution, Wireless Mesh Networks, mostly in the form of Zigbee. While both are wireless technologies, the way in which they operate is quite different.

Both solutions above offer similar products in terms of how they integrate into your current installation. You can either replace your lights for the smart variety where it's the light itself that is controlled, or you can replace the switch side of it so everything attached to the switch is controlled.

A single storey house provides flexibility to do a lot of work after handover however I also looked at things from an efficiency and convenience standpoint. For our home, I chose to go with down-lights everywhere we required and ensured that the switch circuits were exactly how I wanted them. I didn't bother with two-way switches or anything like that because once you automate things, two-way switches are no longer necessary.

Colour changing ceiling lights were not really something I desired so sticking with just dimmable down-lights was more than enough for me. By ensuring all the lighting circuits are set up right in the first place means I can just replace the switching components over and all the attached lighting will then be switched.

Since I now had my mind set on a Wireless Mesh Networking solution, I just had to find what components I required. Initially searching for Zigbee products as that is what I've seen in the past, some further research showed that Z-Wave would be more ideal for this purpose and more widely supported. When it comes to products that are approved for use in Australia (this part is very important), two main vendors came up in all my searches; Aeotec and FIBARO. When it comes to these two brands, both have equal positive and negative reviews so it really comes down to which solution supports your requirements. For me, if I wanted to use the dimmer modules, the Aeotec has the advantage here as it can work on a lighting circuit as low as 10 watts, which will definitely be needed on a couple of our lighting circuits. This alone set me down the path of using this particular brand. While you can mix and match with Z-Wave products, maintaining some consistency is a good idea.

There are multiple suppliers of both products however in my own searches, SmartHome Australia was the site I landed on and I was satisfied with their range of products so this was the place I decided to purchase from.

There will be three primary products that I will be interested in for all our lighting as well as the ceiling fans (more on that one later):

Nano Switch - https://www.smarthome.com.au/aeotec-z-wave-nano-switch.html

Dual Nano Switch - https://www.smarthome.com.au/aeotec-z-wave-dual-nano-switch.html

Nano Dimmer - https://www.smarthome.com.au/aeotec-z-wave-nano-dimmer.html

For any light that will not be dimmed as well as for the ceiling fans, the Nano Switch or Dual Nano Switch will be used. Both are just an ON/OFF switch, it's just one can do two lighting circuits independently so this comes down as to how you wired up your house. For lights that we want to have the ability to be dimmed, the Nano Dimmer will take care of the job.

These modules allow you to keep your exiting light switches in place (in our case we have Clipsal Iconic switches) and the control module wires in behind the wall. Initially we will keep the toggle switches in place but we will eventually change them out for bell-press switches which will return to their initial position so the switch won't have an ON/OFF state. The beauty of this solution is that you can modify the behaviour of the switches so in the case of keeping the toggle switch, you can make the lights either change state each time the switch is toggled (ie. if the switch is in the off position and you turn the lights on with the app, toggling the switch to the ON position will turn off the lights. Or you can modify the behaviour to have the switch behave like a normal switch so that if the lights are already on and you toggle the switch to the ON position, the lights will still remain on, after which you can toggle the switch to the OFF position to turn off the lights.

With the above plan, every lighting circuit is covered and the lights in the main living area have dimmers. There is also a standard Nano Switch assigned for each ceiling fan.

This is where I should probably mention how I will approach the ceiling fans. So the ceiling fans don't operate like a light on a dimmer. There is a motor capacitor that is located behind your switch wall-plate in most cases that when combined with the rotary switch on your wall, allows you to control your fan speed to either LOW, MED, or HIGH. Without getting too technical, there is a way to control all three speeds with the solutions above however this requires at least 1 x Dual Nano Switch and 1 x Nano Switch to achieve the three fan speeds. For now, this is not a high priority so this will go into the TBD bucket.

What I will do however is wire the fan rotary controller into a Nano Switch. This means that I can use our app controls to switch the ceiling fans on or off to whichever state the rotary dial is set to. While it is not ideal, it is a start. This also means that if say at night we have the fan on and set to low and it starts to cool down a bit, we can then turn the fan off without having to get up out of bed. Some functionality is certainly better than none.

Because this entire solution is scalable, you can start with as little or as much as you want. Since this is always going to be an ongoing project, I decided to start off with all the living areas and master bedroom. The other two bedrooms and less trafficked areas of the house can be added to the smart home pool later on down the track once everything else in the house starts to come together.

Above I focused on all the modules for the lights and fans themselves, but who controls the modules? Well, that's where the Gateway / Controller / Smart Home Hub comes into play. Think of this like This is where it starts to get more interesting. There are quite a few options out there on the market ranging from basic to high end. For much of a muchness, the feature set would typically be about the same when factoring this in for a home environment but where it gets variable is ease-of-use and user friendliness. For most people, a complete gateway solution is the way to go. It will be the most straight-forward to configure and if using one made by the same manufacturer as your modules, should be easy to integrate. If I was to go down this path, the option would be the Aeotec Smart Home Hub.

HS4 Pi will run perfectly fine on a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+, which would be the same as what the official HomeTroller Pi runs on and is available locally for about AUD$60.

That said, I'm a tech guy. If it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing. I wanted to use a Raspberry Pi 4 instead so I went shopping for one of those. I could have used the 2GB model but I wanted to get the next step up just because that's me, so settled on the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B 4GB available locally for about AUD$93. While I was at it, I went on Gumtree and managed to find a nice metal case for $15. While not essential, having a case like this with a built in heatsink will help maintain optimal performance and extend the life of your Raspberry Pi.

My package has arrived so at this point, we are ready to start the base configuration. Before I go any further, one thing I must say is wow! These Nano Switches and Dimmers are really a lot smaller than I was expecting. They are very deserving of the Nano name. Have a look at the photos below for a size comparison with a 50c piece.

So I will jump forward a bit where after a lot of initial troubleshooting and some forum research, I managed to find a couple of things that are pretty critical to the whole operation. Save yourself the hassle by applying a couple of changes now. While still in the installed plugins page, head on over to the Z-Wave Plugin, click on More, then click on Settings.

On the next page you will see two options. "Show Legacy Z-Wave Menu" and "Show Legacy Z-Wave Device Config Page". Enable both of these options then click Save. These will be very important for sending custom commands to the Z-Wave modules that can change the way they behave depending on your installation. The newer Z-Wave configuration pages with HomeSeer do not interact correctly when sending customised parameters to the modules so for now, it is best to use their legacy configuration pages.

Once again, please refer to my section at the start of this page with regards to electrical works. Information in this section is purely informational.

So with the plan to make of a seemless installation to involve less time with an electrician while I troubleshoot the devices when adding them to HomeSeer during the installation, I had preconfigured them and added them to HomeSeer before they were installed in our home. This is only recommended if you have the resources to do so. If not, just disregard the following image and proceed to the next section.

Installation of the Aeotec Nano Dimmers and Switches is a fairly straight-forward process for an electrician to perform. The terminal block of the Aeotec devices are clearly labelled and the provided instructions are clear enough to follow.

The following sequence of photos is purely for informational purposes only to show how a Nano Switch fits easily behind an existing switch plate.

Before securing your Nano Dimmers or Switches in the wall cavity, you will need to add them to HomeSeer. This is why pre-configuring the devices by adding them beforehand can be beneficial. This will save your electrician's time if you have trouble getting the devices to communicate with HomeSeer.

So first you have to power up the Nano Dimmer or Switch so it is waiting in standby. Then head over to HomeSeer. Go to the Devices page then select Add Device, then select Z-Wave:

Assuming all the modules are installed, it is time to make some adjustments to the installation.