In the last post, I talked about my trials and tribulations on getting my climate control hardware integrated into my home automation setup. In this post, we’re going to continue the story of installing hardware in my house and I’m going to talk about installing the sensors and switches into my home automation setup.
In doing research before buying things (research is cheaper than hardware), I found that there are a couple different standards right now for home automation hardware in the US (where I am).
There’s Zigbee, Z-Wave, Insteon, x10 is still around a bit, Belkin, Philips Hue, and a ton more. As a fan of open standards, I decided I didn’t want to center my system around something that is proprietary to one manufacturer. That meant I was not going to use Belkin or Philips hardware primarily. I also decided I wanted the hardware to be able to send feedback even if it wasn’t a sensor. So x10 would no longer be my hardware of choice (although I do use all my legacy stuff I had left over from my earlier experiments).
I took a look at what was left for standards and looked at what was available for hardware. It looked, to me, as though more people were leaning towards the z-wave standard of hardware due to the number of manufacturers and the number of devices those manufacturers were making using the z-wave standard vs others.
So, from there I took a look at which hardware manufacturers seemed reliable. At least for the switches, these were going to be hard wired into my house. I didn’t want some sub standard manufacturer to have something short circuit in my wall and either a) stop working for no reason or b) catch on fire. The Wife Acceptance Factor (W.A.F) is in full effect here and if she has trouble using a light switch, my project was going to go out the window.
To that end, I chose some GE Switches and some non-hard-wired sensors. The switches, while “smart” act as normal switches. As long as there’s power, they work. The sensors are basically just stickers that don’t really do anything if you don’t have a controller (we’ll talk about that in a later post).
Installing the sensors was nothing. You peel the backing off the sticker and stick one half on the wall or door frame and one half on the door. Activate the sensor and you’re good to go.
Wiring the switches in was kind of annoying. They are large and barely fit into a standard gang switch box. Also, they require all 3 wires. Some “dumb” switches may not require any but the black wire and (hopefully) the green wire and they just interrupt the circuit. Luckily, my house had all 3 wires in the switch I wanted to replace. They were still a giant paint to try to fold all the wires and the huge z-wave switch into the box. There’s another switch in the same box that I’d love to replace, but there’s just no room for the wires to go. So, I may be stuck with that switch remaining dumb.
In the next post, I’ll talk about the controller and the server I’m using.
Hardware used for this post: