I have had around a dozen smart bulbs/switches/plugs from three companies for 5-10 years now. Globe Suite, Meross, and ‘C by GE’ (General Electric). All three are dependent on their respective cloud services, and are integrated with Google Home. (I know, I know… It’s time to dump this crap, it’s why I’m here) Globe Suite has been great tbh, but ‘C by GE’ is absolute trash, and one of the two Meross devices have now died, prompting a long awaited change.
My big sticking point is knowing where to start with hardware. I don’t know much about the different communication protocols/methods or what to choose (zigbee? Z-wave? Do I need some sort of Hub? Can/should I just use a wifi connection like the current setup? 🤷), and I don’t really know where to look to purchase smart devices that aren’t cloud dependent. (buying from Canada)
Funds are tight so this’ll be an over time project. For now I’m looking to replace three switches. One single pole. One 3-way. Ane one dimmer. Neutral wires are available at all three locations.
Later I’ll be looking to replace 3 smart plugs. Adding current/power monitoring would be neat, but definitely not a priority as I have an Iotawatt at the pannel. After that 4 dimmable white light smart bulbs. Finally there’s an RGBW LED controller that’ll need replacing. The plugs, bulbs, and leds are all Globe Suite; I’m not in a major hurry to replace them as they’ve given me next to no trouble compared to the other two companies garbage.
Where do I start? Where do you guys buy hardware, and what manufacturers?
What should I be looking for in hardware I can integrate with HA and essentially firewall off from the internet?
Finally, how about things like sensors? (weather, motion, moisture, sound)
The next week or so I’ll fire up an HA container just to poke around a bit more. That part I’m pretty confident in, it’s just figuring out some hardware to go with it. Thanks for any advice :)
Personally, I try to avoid wifi devices, because they tend to communicate through a central server, and it’s harder to be sure they aren’t secretly phoning home. Zigbee and Zwave intrinsically lack internet connectivity, so they are necessarily local-first. My network is Zwave - no experience with zigbee - and it’s been great. Devices all have a little QR code that you can scan to add the device to HA, whenever the device gets powered up. Good range of available devices, from switches & lights to environmental sensors. Most of my devices are Minoston or Zooz, bought from their websites; haven’t had any trouble. Honeywell thermostat. Aeotec outdoor thermometer.
I run HA in a container on an RPi, and I have some sensors running off the Pi’s GPIO. Actually started with the GPIO sensors and only got HA running because its visualizations looked easy. Those sensors include temperature, CO2 and airborne particulates.
I am pretty much doing the exact same thing except I went all in on Zigbee instead of Zwave and I can share that it’s pretty great as well. One of the reasons I went the Zigbee route is because I owned some IKEA smart devices and Phlips hue devices and both of those use Zigbee. Using Zigbee also allowed me to continue to purchase smart devices from IKEA with easy integration.
You can also just do both Zigbee and Zwave. The only thing you need to make sure is to try to build a good mesh for both so that you don’t run into connectivity issues. IIRC ZIgbee and Zwave do not share a frequency so you shouldn’t have any interference issues.