I wouldn't buy a house with such a system in it, and I doubt anybody else will, either. Who wants to become an expert on these systems just to turn the lights on? Not a chance.
I considered these systems when my house was built, and am very glad I didn't get them. I turn the switch on, the lights go on, I turn it off, the lights go off. I replace a bulb now and then.
That's it! I'm very happy with it.
But what I did do was run cat5 and RG6 to every room in a star configuration, which has paid off very very nicely. I did all that work myself because the electrician didn't understand words like "crosstalk" and I didn't want to find out after I moved in that the wires in finished walls didn't work.
Around 2010 I designed the "computer room" for a 3 story apartment building that had computers for the residents to use. It was all very basic. The only complexity was that the ethernet run was across the whole building and 3 stories from the 3rd story computer room to the first story utility room.
The day came when it was time to test it out. All the Ethernet lights came on, but throughput was on the order of less than a few kbps. I let the project manager know that something was wrong with the cabling.
He got back to me a week later. The electrician who ran the line ran out mid way and used wire nuts to splice another length of cable. The fix was to simply terminate each end correctly on a splice connector. IIRC they might have even just re-ran one single length.
But the instinct not to trust electricians to run CAT5/6 was 101% correct!
The same goes for telco technicians. Just as I've caught electricians wire-nutting UTP cables I've also caught telco technicians putting "Scotch Lock" splice connectors on cables to "extend" them.
The easy solution is to have the intelligence in the lightbulbs the way Philips, Osram and IKEA did on their Zigbee based systems.
I have all lights (100+) in the house on Zigbee but without changing any wiring. Only non standard is that I replaced all the wall switches with a variant that's electrically "always on" and sends a Zigbee command when pressed (and can be pulled out to access a traditional physical switch as a backup in case of full system failure). They fit the original Siemens outer wall plates that my house was built with so everything looks standard. Returning evening to non-smart in case I want to sell the place is an afternoon of work replacing the switches behind the plastic face plate with their old versions. Those are all in a box in the attic :-)
The benefits of smart lights for comfort are pretty big, auto-on lights by motion detection is great for bathrooms, storage rooms etc. Having the color temperature match outside and time of day is also much better than traditional dimmers. Voice control is useful in some situations (mostly when cooking or carrying kids or groceries). And being able to walk out the front door saying "Alexa, turn off all lights" is a great way to save energy and make things easy.
Can you please provide a name /brand of the switches you use?
Friends of Hue (Gira and others) with EnOcean comes close, but you'll typically bridge the switch AC wires, so there is nothing to pull out and manually control things as backup.
the electrician didn't understand words like "crosstalk"
Can you explain what the problem is? I also run cat5 (or maybe even cat6, don't remember) to every room, most even multiple times, just put it in walls/cailings/whatever worked and all 40 or so sockets work just fine.
I turn the switch on, the lights go on, I turn it off, the lights go off.
I run a star configuration for switches and light points, where all switches are on 12V DC and use a 'patchboard' to hook them to impulse relays which drive the lights. Still switch on/light on, but you can select which switch does what, easily hook up miltiple switches to multiple light points etc. Not domotica, but still much more dynamic than traditional build-once-change-never.
Crosstalk is when two wires are close together, one induces a voltage in the other (it's how transformers work). The trouble with house wiring is if you run a phone line parallel and close to an A/C line, it will induce a 60 cycle hum in the phone line, which will drive you utterly mad.
The electrician was installing the cat3 phone wires in the same holes as the A/C wires. It was guaranteed to induce a hum.
The correct approach is to keep the low voltage wires as far from the A/C as you can, and if they cross, keep the crossing at 90 degrees. Don't run them in parallel unless they are separated by feet (plural). If you have to, you can run them in grounded metal conduit as a shield.
I probably went overboard on this, but doing it inadequately meant 60 cycle humming on the phone lines and an utterly ghastly bill to rip the walls up and fix it.
He also was installing cat3 (POTS cable) and R59 cable (1970's cable TV stuff). I pulled that all out and threw it in the trash, putting in cat5 (cat5e and cat6 are better, but weren't available then) and quad-shielded RG6 cable.
Getting the best cable available cost maybe 20 or 30 dollars more, so it's crazy not to do it. The network and cable speeds have all increased dramatically since I installed it, and the cables have all worked like a champ.
Even the cat5 cables are happily carrying gigabit Ethernet.
I have a couple plugboards in the basement where all the wires terminate.
I did the whole thing for less than a grand. If an electrician had done it, it likely would have been 10 or 20x more.
I'm curious to understand the advantages/benefits of being able to reassign switches/lights. Surely a light/group-of-lights needs a switch/set-of-switches, but once it's done, what's the imperative for change?
40 sockets is pretty impressive. Running cat-something (I got CAT6) everywhere makes absolute sense though! Especially now that everyone and their dog is working from home, and I live in a typical nineteen-thirties Dutch street with terrace housing, not having to rely on wifi too much is pretty awesome.
I think by now I've got rid of all the R59 cable sockets and POTS stuff too except for one POTS socket in the cabinet that holds the fuse box. If anyone ever wants to reintroduce a wired telephone they can just reuse a CAT6 cable, but I doubt this will happen.
> I considered these systems when my house was built, and am very glad I didn't get them.
You don’t need an elaborate, complex system to get a pretty big benefit from a little automation.
I just built a home, and bought and had the electrician install Lutron Caseta light switches for most of the switches (just the ones we might want to automate, not switches like closets or bathrooms).
Doing this has allowed us to even just turn off lights that were left on without having to get up, or turn on some exterior lighting at sunset/off at sunrise.
Pretty easy to set up, just works, and no overhead/undoing if you want to just use them as normal switches.
> I did all that work myself because the electrician didn't understand words like "crosstalk" and I didn't want to find out after I moved in that the wires in finished walls didn't work.
You hired a bad electrician. Any good electrician knows you can’t run power and data in the same conduit or pathway. NEC requires a divider in any junction box that contains low-voltage and line-voltage power, and also requires separate conduits/pathways for low-voltage and line-voltage power (can’t use the same stud hole to feed both through)
Spend more money on the electrician, and they’ll be better at their jobs.
The low voltage in the house is completely separated. The wall outlets are widely spaced. It even comes into the house in a different location and a different trench.
> Any good electrician knows you can’t run power and data in the same conduit or pathway. NEC requires a divider in any junction box that contains low-voltage and line-voltage power, and also requires separate conduits/pathways for low-voltage and line-voltage power (can’t use the same stud hole to feed both through)
Sure, but aren't those rules for safety purposes and have nothing to do with crosstalk/interference?
Smart lighting only makes sense in niche cases. I use the same Z-wave switches in my 60s-era house for a basement guest bedroom where the light switch is bizarrely in a storage closet outside the bedroom. I have another Z-wave switch to turn on an existing front porch light at dusk. This spared me needing to install a separate photocell.
The main value for smart home is in monitoring. I mostly use it for flood and door sensors without having to pay for a Ring/ADT subscription.
About 70% of my lights are smart lights at this point, and I disagree.
They are super useful for things like adding "sunrise" light in a bedroom with few windows/north facing, great for situations where you have a non ideal arrangement of light switches (one of my living room lights is on the switch circuit that my entry stairwell light is on). I also am very affected by light color temperature, so being able to easily transition lights from cool white to warm at night is very helpful for my sleep quality.
Yeah the guy in the article went farther than I would. I have a lot of connected switches but they are still functional as dumb switches. If you moved into my house they'd all work like normal, you might notice they didn't feel exactly the same as an old-fashioned switch but when you push up they go on, down they go off. I'd of course let the buyer know they had options to connect them, but they could just forget about that and go on with their life.
I did the same thing twenty years ago, when my house was built. I ran 2 CAT5 and 2 RG6 to every corner of every room. Some areas got more. For example the garage has 12 CAT5 feeds distributed between three walls. Everything goes to a standard 19 inch EIA rack in the garage and is terminated and labelled on patch panels.
Rather than bring out the connections in each room, I use a toner to find the feeds and only bring out what I need when I need it.
Could you explain what the star configuration is please? I'm not familiar with it and am currently assuming that just means cables to each wall from the ceiling.
I stayed clear of smart appliances for a long time for the reasons I'm sure we're all well aware of. However, recently we had our central heating boiler changed and my partner was very keen on having Hive. It's almost useless. I can't believe how incompetently it seems to have been designed.
Essentially there are three parts, a receiver connected to the boiler, a network bride connected to the router and the thermostat connected to both.
Within the first week of having it installed we had times when we realised the heating hadn't come on as scheduled. Checking the display on the thermostat would show no signal. In effect the receiver on the boiler had disconnected from the thermostat and as such you have no heating. After several occurrences of this I broke down and moved the thermostat to the closest reasonable place I could.
The thermostat is now in the worst place in the house for taking a temperature reading but at least it vaguely heats the house up when I expect it to. However, it is now almost constantly disconnected from the network bridge which enables the "smart" part. The solution to this if I can ever be bothered is to run a network cable from the router to the same room as the thermostat.
Why it was designed like this is beyond me. Why not have the schedule stored on the receiver, at least in memory. That way if it lost contact with the thermostat at least it could put the heating on full during the schedule.
Why make the wireless bridge a separate part? If I could add my WiFi details to the thermostat I guarantee it would have a reasonable connection.
I have to say my experience with Hive has been nothing but exceptional. All the way from having it installed back in 2016 (when we moved in) to this day when it came on for an hour this morning. The controller is right next to the boiler in the eaves of my house and is connected via ethernet through a
TP-Link TL-PA9020P powerline adaptor. In all fairness the thermostat is very close to the receiver, in the landing, so maybe that's why it's never been an issue. I don't think I've ever once had a single issue with using the app, whether that's from downstairs or from the other side of the Atlantic. It will be the first thing on the shopping list when/if we ever move.
I've had a Hive since, I think, late 2013 and my experience is a little closer to the GP's. The Hive hub crashes and needs a hard reboot on a very regular basis, at least once per month, sometimes 4 times a week.
Thanks for the hint on ethernet over power. I can plug one in reasonably close to the thermostat and another close to the router and they'd be on the same ring main so should work pretty well.
Not all smart systems are terrible, I've the Honeywell evohome system and it has been flawless for the 18 months or so that it's been installed, bit it looks like a different strategy was used - the main thermostat/bridge/controller is linked via wifi, but everything else is run over a different RF standard, so all the TRV's, thermostats and the boiler controller talk to the main controller directly (iirc it's in the 900MHz range)
The main controller runs the scheduler and is the only device which reaches out to the internet (to sync with honeywell's cloud systems so you can control heating etc from an app remotely when away from home).
Other than the interface on the controller being a bit clunky, I've no complaints, even the batteries in the TRVs seem to be lasting well.
I have installed a Tado smart thermostat and it's nothing short of phenomenal.
I've done a setup once and now it just runs automatically. Can't remember the last time I've even touched the thermostat.
It shuts down when I leave home, it heats up when I'm on my way home. When it's a sunny day it let's the sun heat up the house in stead of using the heating.
It's almost recouped it's costs in the first year by just gas savings (as opposed to my time based thermostat).
Do you think your partner will opt for the less techie option next time or do they incurable gadget lust (like many of us have to fight within ourselves)
Good grief... who would sign up for such a thing? The biggest lighting system I worked on was Philips Dynalite. It's a gigantic RS-485 bus - you just make sure all the dimmers and light switch panels are on the segment. It can be over a kilometre long and you can control/reprogram everything from everywhere on that bus. The protocol is simple enough that you can bit-bang subsets of it from dumb devices. Do recommend.
I have a wifi access point in the house to supplement the lan, and so I don't have to use the data plan for my phone.
The durned thing needs to be power cycled now and then. No way I'm putting the lights on wifi. The wired lan is 10x more reliable, but even it needs the router rebooted. (I've had lots of routers. All needed rebooting.) Never had to reboot the lights or the power sockets.
That means you can't have multiple light switches on the same network without quite a bit of complexity, you can't detect what's on the network, you can't update firmware or do device setup over the network, and so on.
In stage applications that's not a problem because all the light switches are in one place - the lighting desk - and the lighting guy there can see all the lights at the same time.
I don't get it. What's the point in these systems? Genuinely. Why would I ever need this? Just like a "smart" doorbell, fridge, meter. I would love for someone to be able to explain the benefits to me over the normal, cheap, completely working "dump" version. The only "smart" device I own is a TV and it is crap, worse thing I've ever bought.
I didn't get it either but now i'm doing even more.
Our Lightsetup works really well and solves 'real' problems. In my corridor, there are 2 motion detectors and they switch those lights. At night less bright; That works flawless!
And that shows how nice it actually can be if it works.
I also use alexa quite often to switch between light settings; From Eating to watching TV to 'energize' where all lights on at 100%.
and it gets more interesting after i hooked up alexa to our blindes. I wanted to control them with a schedule anyway and now i can also use it thourgh alexa.
Honestly, i think alexa is a very interesting playground on how modern/future user interface might/will look like as it feels much more direct, nicer etc.
Heating is also quite interesting: Make sure to only heat in winter when the outdoor temperature is cold enough. Alert when co2 is to high in a room. Sync up the work schedule of my wife to heat the bath room at 4 in the morning for an hour.
What is the problem? The Problem is still complexity, cost and reliability. But this will become better every single day.
I'm replying to myself in an effort to reply generally to everyone who replied to me, thanks for your use cases.
I can see some of the reasons and benefits and to me, no offence meant, the seem pretty trivial, especially when you take into account the privacy issues.
I have dumb timers for lights I want on at certain times, dumb movement sensors for outside lights that only turn on at night, my boiler has a timer which I manually set if needed, and I've yet to see any actual benefit to a smart meter. I can read and calculate my usage.
My point is everything I need can be accomplished without network connectivity or providing multi-national tech companies with all my data. I don't need a digital assistant and don't want to talk to my lightbulbs.
As one of the other commenters said, you get all the problems of IT infrastructure for light bulbs and sensors. Hell if I wanted some automated stuff I'd look at a raspberry pi or Arduino and roll my own version (half joking, I'd definitely attempt it).
Regarding privacy issues, IMO if that's a problem you've screwed up big time. Stuff like lights should only use local control and not be tied into the cloud or at least it should be optional, and any lights should fall back to working like normal dumb lights if they lose contact with the hub.
When it comes to rolling your own devices with an Arduino or similar, this is much harder to do safely and in a code-compliant manner than you would imagine. Making your own sensors is fun and harmless, but making stuff that is hard wired into mains is a bad idea. It's not totally impossible to engineer a properly safe device if you really know what you're doing, but it'll probably end up costing more than a commercial device and won't come with the compliance testing marks.
I agree, however... even though I have a lot of effort sunk into my own home automation setup it's not for everybody and there are plenty of downsides.
I roll my own version on a NUC with some ESP8266 based sensors, but frankly I don't think many people care if multi-national tech companies know when their lights are on. I don't really, I roll my own more as a hobby.
I've found it to be pretty useful. My partner and I tend to go to bed at different times. I put pressure sensors under the mattress, and whenever one of us goes to bed the subwoofer in the living room turns off. Little things like that are pretty nifty.
As one of the general use cases, I'll hop in on the privacy note. That is, there are zero privacy issues from my end.
Nothing leaves my house for any of this. I can rip the internet out tomorrow and everything will keep working. None of the devices even have a route to the internet.
The Z-Wave stuff is all Z-Wave+ and is supposedly pretty secure in its own right, but is just general RF and talks to my controller which is plugged into my server via USB. None of this stuff can talk to the internet.
My light bulbs are 802.11, but they connect to a dedicated wireless network which bridges to my "IoT" VLAN.
My IP cams are all wired and connected only to my IoT VLAN.
A VM runs Home Assistant and Node-RED (both open source) which sit on my general LAN as well as the IoT LAN. That provides my interface and controller for all my smart home devices.
Another VM runs Blue Iris to act as my DVR for my IP cameras, do motion detection, etc.
All communication between everything is either done directly or through a MQTT broker running in a container only accessible on a bridge internal to the hypervisor.
All the VMs and containers run on a server running Proxmox sitting in the corner of my basement. The IoT VLAN does not even have a route out to the internet. DNS only resolves a couple internal hosts.
Basically this is "I already had a server running in my basement and I dug out an old piece of MikroTik gear". It's not gonna be simple for a non-technical person, but for most people on HN it's likely not a huge investment of time/money/etc.
There's no need to go roll your own interface for "how to communicate within your house". Z-Wave, 802.11, and ethernet all work perfectly well and provide you lots of great options to work with in existing hardware and existing physical and link layer technologies (cabling, PoE, switches, etc). They don't need to be insecure or privacy-violating unless you let them.
Note, this is what I use things but I also have dumb switches to control if things fail. I also dont put control in hard to reach places. I just use outdoor sensors + smart bulbs.
Use case 1: Open all lights in yard at night when exterior gate is open or motion detected. Shut off after set amount of time of no activity.
Use case 2: light in shed/basement/garage on when door is open.
Use case 3: control lights via telegram / get notifications as alarm system.
Use case 4: water sensors anywhere you can get a leak. (have been flooded while away)
Use case 5: you dont want to rewire the house but want to link multiple lights together.
Use case 6: you want to remotely enable lights outside from second floor to check what the dog is barking at.
I can go on.
What the guy did wrong was ignore failures and not have a way to deal with them
I'm building a stable and veterinary practice building for my wife (who is a horse vet), 22x10 m, 2 floors. She wants several types of lighting in the stable part which should be switchable from several locations. Switching a light source from 2 locations can be done easily, 3 is doable but more than that requires a separate switching circuit with momentary switches and a contactor to do the actual switching. It is here where a system like this, especially a wireless one can help by making it possible to have switches anywhere you want them without having to pull loads of cabling (which by regulation has to be mounted on the walls instead of in them in agricultural buildings). For now I've settled on 2 switching locations for most of the lighting so as to avoid any "smart" solutions, should she insist on having to be able to switch the "mood light" in the stable from the observation window in the office on the 2nd floor I'll have to go that way with all the problems that come with "smart" electronics on the countryside - power failures, lightning, etc.
For me it's a set of automations that make some of the minor inconveniences of life just sort of magically resolve themselves:
- Automatically closing the skylight shades after sunset (when they just let ambient city night glow in) and open them just before sunrise.
- Automatically opening the window shades just before sunrise.
- Turning on the overhead lights and increasing brightness in several stages during sunrise (my place can be a bit dark because I'm under the eaves, this helps the effect).
- Automatically turning off several light-producing devices (coffeemaker, Instant Pot, etc) via 'smart outlet' when I go to bed in a certain time window, then turning them back on when any light is turned on in the morning. (This second-order automation means they still have the same 'magical' effect even if I disable the other auto-lighting for a day because I desperately need to sleep in.)
- Automatically playing NPR in several rooms the first time I leave the bedroom on a weekday during a certain time window.
All the automation here happens entirely locally via HomeKit, and the only reason the system even needs an internet connection at all is so the Apple TV acting as a hub can get updated sunrise/sunset times. (For a totally self-contained system you'd probably want to grab a cheap iPad to act as the hub instead, wall-mount it, and put it in 'kiosk mode' locked to the Home app.)
For all of this, my Hue lights/smart plugs/motion sensors and the Apple and Sonos speakers have been completely reliable. The Hunter-Douglas skylight shades have been mostly reliable (maybe one or two failures over the course of a year, though I did have to get an RF repeater for that to work well).
The weak point is the window shades, which use generic rebranded functionality from a reseller because most of the industry of window coverings is awful and behind the times. Hunter-Douglas top-down-bottom-up shades are about the best replacement available at the moment for automation purposes (so you can adjust the exact amount of window covered for privacy purposes and do it multiple times per day in a way that would be a massive pain to handle manually), but awfully pricey.
I'm also considering rigging up a proper bed occupancy sensor (basically turning the whole bed into a giant scale with load sensors and triggering events on human-approximate weight being added/removed) to replace the bedroom motion sensor, but I've got one of those Ikea slat-bottomed bedframes that probably wouldn't work very well for that.
My wife often gets into bed with the baby. If the baby falls asleep before the light is off, she doesn't want to get up to have to turn the light off since it will wake the baby. Now she can just turn it off from her phone.
Kinda just expanded from there.
Now a good chunk of the regularly used bulbs in the house are "smart".
Basically what it means is that if you turn a light on, it turns on like a normal bulb (or you can do a quick flick off/on again to turn it on at a dimmer brightness) but you can pull your phone out and dim it / change the temperature / etc. Closer to bed time? Easy to dim the lights and make them super warm.
So that right there is already kinda useful for <$5/bulb. My workspace is a normal warm temperature at a reasonable brightness until I'm trying to do some soldering or something then I can instantly make it bright and white.
From there I expanded out into adding a few basic sensors. Combination motion/temperature/humidity/brightness sensors. So now when I get up for a piss in the middle of the night as soon as I walk out of the bedroom the hallway sensor sees that someone's there and that the hallway is pitch black and turns the hall light on as a red light at ~5% brightness.
When you walk into the baby's room in the middle of the night, same deal. Dim red light. If you go in in the daytime, bright warm light.
Did a similar thing with some of the basement too. Now as soon as I walk into one end of the basement to take the dog outside, do laundry, grab a tool, etc... the lights just come on. They stay on for a couple minutes after the last time motion is sensed and then automatically turn back off. Especially since half the basement is on a single light switch, this results in a lot less wasted power.
The lights in my office come on when I walk in if it's dark, and when I unlock my computer it shoots a message out over a MQTT broker which my automation takes as "someone is occupying this space now" and leaves them on. When I lock my computer, two minutes later if no motion is sensed it'll turn them off.
I don't know that I'd ever add 500 different controls to my house (not sure what I'd even use that many for...), but as far as I've taken it so far it's super convenient.
In the future I fully intend to get a smart thermostat (or replace my thermostat with some controlled relays) and use some "smart" air registers so I the temperature sensors I have can create a loop integrating the temperature sensing integrated in the motion/luminance sensors in most rooms with the heating to more precisely control the temperature throughout the house--if one room is already warm enough but the rest of the house is cold, can automatically close the vent to keep the temperature pretty consistent throughout the house.
> The lights in my office come on when I walk in if it's dark, and when I unlock my computer it shoots a message out over a MQTT broker which my automation takes as "someone is occupying this space now" and leaves them on. When I lock my computer, two minutes later if no motion is sensed it'll turn them off.
What did you do to send the message when the computer locks/unlocks? This is an exact use case I could make use of
I have added a Sonnoff mini with Tasmota to my light switch in my room. Whenever I cannot see my USB ports on my computer at night I just press a macro button on my keyboard, and without taking off my headphones I can see everything. Kinda dumb, but it makes me happy every-time I don't have to move my ass.
Nevertheless sometimes (once every 6 months maybe?) the Tasmota box looses connection with my WiFi network and I have to power cycle it via the breaker box to reset it.
Spend a whole post writing about the mistake it was to invest in an overly complex solution in search of a problem and conclude by doubling down and redoing it all over again but with Wifi instead. Perhaps the problem wasn't with the protocol, but with the fact that something that just works became a months long project worth thousands. What a rabbithole.
The ONLY wireless lighting system I will ever use is Lutron Caseta light switches.
They are magic and don’t require a neutral cable, unlike just about every other smart dimmer, which means they can be swapped in place of literally any light switch in any home.
If the Lutron hub is unplugged, the switches continue to operate as normal light switches.
They also operate as normal light switches at all other times. So no need to teach every guest how to control the lights.
They are HomeKit compatible, so you only have to deal with Lutron’s trash app when pairing new switches with the hub.
100%. I've been using Lutron Caseta switches & hub for over 5 years and have never once had a single issue -- no matter how minor. The dimmers work like normal even if the wifi is down, and they don't need internet in order to work with HomeKit. I've never once had a switch not work or fail to respond with HomeKit. I have friends with Z-Wave/Zigby/Phillips/etc and they are always talking about how they are finicking with Home Assistant or Smart Things, or how the lights all returned to full brightness after a power outage in the middle of the night.
I want to install my switches and have them work, always. If my wife even once complains, that's a total failure. If a guest can even tell that they are anything but normal dimmers, that's a failure. With my Caseta system, my wife has never complained -- only asked me to install more of them.
And h/t to HomeKit and Home.app. I've tried Google's version (Home) and it's absolute garbage in comparison.
Think it’s worth mentioning that the author is in the UK.
Unfortunately Lutron gear just isn’t compatible with our switches. Everything 240V rather than 110V, and to make things even more complicated our standard switch dimensions (and thus standard wall box dimensions) are different to both the US and EU. Meaning nothing physically fits either, unless you replaced every wall box with an imported wall box.
Lutrons stuff looks amazing, it just sucks that it’s completely not compatible with UK homes, or even UK culture. I think a lot of Brits would find Lutron’s designs very jarring.
What I'd really like to find is some variety of smart switch with a mode change between 'control the wall circuit' and 'leave the wall circuit always on and send commands over the network', so that the same switch hardware can be used everywhere but you can change the mode for specific circuits that have smart bulbs.
I have no idea how one would design this in an intuitive way, though.
They have a competitor whose name I can't remember that does the same thing.
If you never program the switch, it behaves just like a regular switch. If you program the switch, you can specify if it will trigger the relay, or just send z-wave commands. There's even a physical override switch you can pull out to cut power in case you have it programmed in "soft" mode.
The "red" product line doesn't require a neutral, either.
Works great for smart bulbs as long as you can set the hub up to do the control.
If you have z-wave bulbs (harder to find than zigbee, due to licensing), you can set up the z-wave pairing so that the switch controls the bulbs directly, so theoretically no hub required.
Wow, this guy is either willfully ignorant of ZWave technical realities, or just doesn't have as much knowledge in the realm as he purports to have.
Basically every gripe listed has to do with using old original ZWave devices. If you started a 150-node mesh today with strictly ZWave+ devices, an Aotec ZWave hub, and perhaps Home Assistant to control and automate it all, you'd have a much more consistently positive experience.
So I'm left boiling down the complaints to "I was an early adopter, so I got stuck with the crappy stuff, boo!"
Also, if you're paying >$50USD per common ZWave fixture (like a dimmer, stuff like pool controllers can be more), you're seriously doing something wrong.
Oh well, to each their own. I have a mesh of about 50 nodes across 2 stories, and it all works great. Can't remember the last time I had to turn a light on when I entered a room. Among many other nice touches, which I am fine expending a bit more effort to upkeep than normal 'analog' dumb homes.
OOI where are you finding ZWave dimmers for less than $50?
Here in the UK, £50 per device is about the going rate. Finding something for about £40 is pretty good going. But even then just doesn’t compete with a £10 Shelly.
The thing that stuck out to me in that article was complaining about failures.
I would think, if you have 150 components of anything, you're going see failures on a fairly consistent pace, especially as time goes by.
For example, I'm replacing LED lights that were supposed to last for decades every 6 - 18 months in my house, and they aren't even the smart kind.
The one thing I'm not happy about my small z-wave setup is the HomeAssistant upgrade cycle breaking things way too often. It's gotten better in the past year or so, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to see that happen again in the future. Definitely would not recommend HA for anyone who doesn't like tinkering.
At that scale, personally, I'd really want to just be looking at good dimmable LED bulbs, and put any 'smart' hardware purely into the wall switches, so that there are far fewer devices to worry about.
For Home Assistant, look at ZWave2MQTT. ZWave devices use that as their hub, Home Assistant is a client. Now restarting Home Assistant doesn't cause problems. I was ready to ditch ZWave or Home Assistant until I switched.
Due to regional frequencies ZWave products can cost a lot more outside the US. For example here in New Zealand due to the AU/NZ frequency region you'd be lucky to find a basic switch for less than NZ$80, which is around US$55. Typically they're over NZ$100.
On the plus side not using 2.4Ghz means they're a lot more reliable in urban areas.
I installed an automatic sprinkler system with several "regions". I struggled with that thing for years. Programming it required reading a hefty manual. The user interface was near the worst I'd ever seen (the worst is on my automated cat feeder). I was constantly repairing the lines, the heads, the valves, the control box. I'd winterize it, de-winterize it. The coyotes would chew on it.
Finally I simply turned it off and let whatever would grow without constant watering grow, and the rest died. Makes me a much happier man.
I've looked into automatic sprinkler systems with scheduling based on the weather or moisture sensors, but they to have too many failure modes: moisture sensors corroding, incorrect weather readings, blocked outlets.
I'm now planning to use a simple drip irrigation system. A long hose with nozzles plugged into the mains water that has to be manually turned on. It may not be automatic, but turning things on and off when I need them isn't the problem, like using light switches isn't the problem. There aren't any coyotes around here and the winters are mostly frost free, so I'm hoping this doesn't become a burden like the tech you mention!
I couldn’t understand how smart watering systems were so expensive.
I bought a TP-Link smart plug and a solenoid that defaults to off. It took 48v so I got a transformer, plugged it into the smart plug and wired up the solenoid.
Once this was done it was just a matter of making it smart.
I set it to water for 10 minutes after sunset in Home Assistant.
I’ve always intended it too hold off if it rains, but our weather forecasting is too inaccurate for that so have been messing about with soil moisture sensors, but haven’t had success yet.
You're right, a drip irrigation system is much better. You wouldn't have to run regions, either, just one system.
But watch out for squirrels and other fur-bearin varmints chewing on the pipes. I'd consider copper pipes. I was thinking about digging up my whole sprinkler system and replacing it all with copper pipes, but then just opted to abandon the whole thing.
This is something that silicon valley gets right. Hardware isn't easy for inexperienced companies and there are a lot of companies out there that make excellent reliable hardware. It's all pointless though if that hardware is hard to use. There's sometimes bad engineering from Silicon Valley hardware startups, but at least the design is usually user oriented and has been iterated on.
The cat feeder invented all their own cute icons, but what those icons are for cannot be divined without the manual. Lose the manual, and you might as well throw the machine away.
It's a freakin' catfeeder, jeez. It should just work.
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I considered these systems when my house was built, and am very glad I didn't get them. I turn the switch on, the lights go on, I turn it off, the lights go off. I replace a bulb now and then.
That's it! I'm very happy with it.
But what I did do was run cat5 and RG6 to every room in a star configuration, which has paid off very very nicely. I did all that work myself because the electrician didn't understand words like "crosstalk" and I didn't want to find out after I moved in that the wires in finished walls didn't work.
The day came when it was time to test it out. All the Ethernet lights came on, but throughput was on the order of less than a few kbps. I let the project manager know that something was wrong with the cabling.
He got back to me a week later. The electrician who ran the line ran out mid way and used wire nuts to splice another length of cable. The fix was to simply terminate each end correctly on a splice connector. IIRC they might have even just re-ran one single length.
But the instinct not to trust electricians to run CAT5/6 was 101% correct!
Electricians also almost always use the wrong colors when wiring speakers with something like a 16/4. I have ran into this a lot.
I have all lights (100+) in the house on Zigbee but without changing any wiring. Only non standard is that I replaced all the wall switches with a variant that's electrically "always on" and sends a Zigbee command when pressed (and can be pulled out to access a traditional physical switch as a backup in case of full system failure). They fit the original Siemens outer wall plates that my house was built with so everything looks standard. Returning evening to non-smart in case I want to sell the place is an afternoon of work replacing the switches behind the plastic face plate with their old versions. Those are all in a box in the attic :-)
The benefits of smart lights for comfort are pretty big, auto-on lights by motion detection is great for bathrooms, storage rooms etc. Having the color temperature match outside and time of day is also much better than traditional dimmers. Voice control is useful in some situations (mostly when cooking or carrying kids or groceries). And being able to walk out the front door saying "Alexa, turn off all lights" is a great way to save energy and make things easy.
At the moment I have standalone lamps with Sonoff D1 dimmer and halogen (yes, really) bulbs that can actually be dimmed 0-100%.
Your house is massive or your castle is very tiny. Either way, that’s an usual amount of lightbulbs.
Friends of Hue (Gira and others) with EnOcean comes close, but you'll typically bridge the switch AC wires, so there is nothing to pull out and manually control things as backup.
Can you explain what the problem is? I also run cat5 (or maybe even cat6, don't remember) to every room, most even multiple times, just put it in walls/cailings/whatever worked and all 40 or so sockets work just fine.
I turn the switch on, the lights go on, I turn it off, the lights go off.
I run a star configuration for switches and light points, where all switches are on 12V DC and use a 'patchboard' to hook them to impulse relays which drive the lights. Still switch on/light on, but you can select which switch does what, easily hook up miltiple switches to multiple light points etc. Not domotica, but still much more dynamic than traditional build-once-change-never.
The electrician was installing the cat3 phone wires in the same holes as the A/C wires. It was guaranteed to induce a hum.
The correct approach is to keep the low voltage wires as far from the A/C as you can, and if they cross, keep the crossing at 90 degrees. Don't run them in parallel unless they are separated by feet (plural). If you have to, you can run them in grounded metal conduit as a shield.
I probably went overboard on this, but doing it inadequately meant 60 cycle humming on the phone lines and an utterly ghastly bill to rip the walls up and fix it.
He also was installing cat3 (POTS cable) and R59 cable (1970's cable TV stuff). I pulled that all out and threw it in the trash, putting in cat5 (cat5e and cat6 are better, but weren't available then) and quad-shielded RG6 cable.
Getting the best cable available cost maybe 20 or 30 dollars more, so it's crazy not to do it. The network and cable speeds have all increased dramatically since I installed it, and the cables have all worked like a champ.
Even the cat5 cables are happily carrying gigabit Ethernet.
I have a couple plugboards in the basement where all the wires terminate.
I did the whole thing for less than a grand. If an electrician had done it, it likely would have been 10 or 20x more.
I think by now I've got rid of all the R59 cable sockets and POTS stuff too except for one POTS socket in the cabinet that holds the fuse box. If anyone ever wants to reintroduce a wired telephone they can just reuse a CAT6 cable, but I doubt this will happen.
You don’t need an elaborate, complex system to get a pretty big benefit from a little automation.
I just built a home, and bought and had the electrician install Lutron Caseta light switches for most of the switches (just the ones we might want to automate, not switches like closets or bathrooms).
Doing this has allowed us to even just turn off lights that were left on without having to get up, or turn on some exterior lighting at sunset/off at sunrise.
Pretty easy to set up, just works, and no overhead/undoing if you want to just use them as normal switches.
You hired a bad electrician. Any good electrician knows you can’t run power and data in the same conduit or pathway. NEC requires a divider in any junction box that contains low-voltage and line-voltage power, and also requires separate conduits/pathways for low-voltage and line-voltage power (can’t use the same stud hole to feed both through)
Spend more money on the electrician, and they’ll be better at their jobs.
Edit: I run electrical work
Similar to how close an electrical outlet can be to a sink, there are rules about how close a data cable can be to a current-carrying cable.
Sure, but aren't those rules for safety purposes and have nothing to do with crosstalk/interference?
The main value for smart home is in monitoring. I mostly use it for flood and door sensors without having to pay for a Ring/ADT subscription.
They are super useful for things like adding "sunrise" light in a bedroom with few windows/north facing, great for situations where you have a non ideal arrangement of light switches (one of my living room lights is on the switch circuit that my entry stairwell light is on). I also am very affected by light color temperature, so being able to easily transition lights from cool white to warm at night is very helpful for my sleep quality.
Rather than bring out the connections in each room, I use a toner to find the feeds and only bring out what I need when I need it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_topology#Star
Each endpoint connects directly to the hub, rather than as a ring, daisy-chain, tree, or mesh.
Essentially there are three parts, a receiver connected to the boiler, a network bride connected to the router and the thermostat connected to both.
Within the first week of having it installed we had times when we realised the heating hadn't come on as scheduled. Checking the display on the thermostat would show no signal. In effect the receiver on the boiler had disconnected from the thermostat and as such you have no heating. After several occurrences of this I broke down and moved the thermostat to the closest reasonable place I could.
The thermostat is now in the worst place in the house for taking a temperature reading but at least it vaguely heats the house up when I expect it to. However, it is now almost constantly disconnected from the network bridge which enables the "smart" part. The solution to this if I can ever be bothered is to run a network cable from the router to the same room as the thermostat.
Why it was designed like this is beyond me. Why not have the schedule stored on the receiver, at least in memory. That way if it lost contact with the thermostat at least it could put the heating on full during the schedule.
Why make the wireless bridge a separate part? If I could add my WiFi details to the thermostat I guarantee it would have a reasonable connection.
The main controller runs the scheduler and is the only device which reaches out to the internet (to sync with honeywell's cloud systems so you can control heating etc from an app remotely when away from home).
Other than the interface on the controller being a bit clunky, I've no complaints, even the batteries in the TRVs seem to be lasting well.
I've done a setup once and now it just runs automatically. Can't remember the last time I've even touched the thermostat.
It shuts down when I leave home, it heats up when I'm on my way home. When it's a sunny day it let's the sun heat up the house in stead of using the heating.
It's almost recouped it's costs in the first year by just gas savings (as opposed to my time based thermostat).
Notice over the whole article he talks about the how, but not really the why?
The durned thing needs to be power cycled now and then. No way I'm putting the lights on wifi. The wired lan is 10x more reliable, but even it needs the router rebooted. (I've had lots of routers. All needed rebooting.) Never had to reboot the lights or the power sockets.
That means you can't have multiple light switches on the same network without quite a bit of complexity, you can't detect what's on the network, you can't update firmware or do device setup over the network, and so on.
In stage applications that's not a problem because all the light switches are in one place - the lighting desk - and the lighting guy there can see all the lights at the same time.
Our Lightsetup works really well and solves 'real' problems. In my corridor, there are 2 motion detectors and they switch those lights. At night less bright; That works flawless!
And that shows how nice it actually can be if it works.
I also use alexa quite often to switch between light settings; From Eating to watching TV to 'energize' where all lights on at 100%.
and it gets more interesting after i hooked up alexa to our blindes. I wanted to control them with a schedule anyway and now i can also use it thourgh alexa.
Honestly, i think alexa is a very interesting playground on how modern/future user interface might/will look like as it feels much more direct, nicer etc.
Heating is also quite interesting: Make sure to only heat in winter when the outdoor temperature is cold enough. Alert when co2 is to high in a room. Sync up the work schedule of my wife to heat the bath room at 4 in the morning for an hour.
What is the problem? The Problem is still complexity, cost and reliability. But this will become better every single day.
I can see some of the reasons and benefits and to me, no offence meant, the seem pretty trivial, especially when you take into account the privacy issues.
I have dumb timers for lights I want on at certain times, dumb movement sensors for outside lights that only turn on at night, my boiler has a timer which I manually set if needed, and I've yet to see any actual benefit to a smart meter. I can read and calculate my usage.
My point is everything I need can be accomplished without network connectivity or providing multi-national tech companies with all my data. I don't need a digital assistant and don't want to talk to my lightbulbs.
As one of the other commenters said, you get all the problems of IT infrastructure for light bulbs and sensors. Hell if I wanted some automated stuff I'd look at a raspberry pi or Arduino and roll my own version (half joking, I'd definitely attempt it).
When it comes to rolling your own devices with an Arduino or similar, this is much harder to do safely and in a code-compliant manner than you would imagine. Making your own sensors is fun and harmless, but making stuff that is hard wired into mains is a bad idea. It's not totally impossible to engineer a properly safe device if you really know what you're doing, but it'll probably end up costing more than a commercial device and won't come with the compliance testing marks.
I agree, however... even though I have a lot of effort sunk into my own home automation setup it's not for everybody and there are plenty of downsides.
I've found it to be pretty useful. My partner and I tend to go to bed at different times. I put pressure sensors under the mattress, and whenever one of us goes to bed the subwoofer in the living room turns off. Little things like that are pretty nifty.
Nothing leaves my house for any of this. I can rip the internet out tomorrow and everything will keep working. None of the devices even have a route to the internet.
The Z-Wave stuff is all Z-Wave+ and is supposedly pretty secure in its own right, but is just general RF and talks to my controller which is plugged into my server via USB. None of this stuff can talk to the internet.
My light bulbs are 802.11, but they connect to a dedicated wireless network which bridges to my "IoT" VLAN.
My IP cams are all wired and connected only to my IoT VLAN.
A VM runs Home Assistant and Node-RED (both open source) which sit on my general LAN as well as the IoT LAN. That provides my interface and controller for all my smart home devices.
Another VM runs Blue Iris to act as my DVR for my IP cameras, do motion detection, etc.
All communication between everything is either done directly or through a MQTT broker running in a container only accessible on a bridge internal to the hypervisor.
All the VMs and containers run on a server running Proxmox sitting in the corner of my basement. The IoT VLAN does not even have a route out to the internet. DNS only resolves a couple internal hosts.
Basically this is "I already had a server running in my basement and I dug out an old piece of MikroTik gear". It's not gonna be simple for a non-technical person, but for most people on HN it's likely not a huge investment of time/money/etc.
There's no need to go roll your own interface for "how to communicate within your house". Z-Wave, 802.11, and ethernet all work perfectly well and provide you lots of great options to work with in existing hardware and existing physical and link layer technologies (cabling, PoE, switches, etc). They don't need to be insecure or privacy-violating unless you let them.
HomeAssistant seems to be the most popular open source "smart devices" manager.
Use case 1: Open all lights in yard at night when exterior gate is open or motion detected. Shut off after set amount of time of no activity.
Use case 2: light in shed/basement/garage on when door is open.
Use case 3: control lights via telegram / get notifications as alarm system.
Use case 4: water sensors anywhere you can get a leak. (have been flooded while away)
Use case 5: you dont want to rewire the house but want to link multiple lights together.
Use case 6: you want to remotely enable lights outside from second floor to check what the dog is barking at.
I can go on.
What the guy did wrong was ignore failures and not have a way to deal with them
- Automatically closing the skylight shades after sunset (when they just let ambient city night glow in) and open them just before sunrise.
- Automatically opening the window shades just before sunrise.
- Turning on the overhead lights and increasing brightness in several stages during sunrise (my place can be a bit dark because I'm under the eaves, this helps the effect).
- Automatically turning off several light-producing devices (coffeemaker, Instant Pot, etc) via 'smart outlet' when I go to bed in a certain time window, then turning them back on when any light is turned on in the morning. (This second-order automation means they still have the same 'magical' effect even if I disable the other auto-lighting for a day because I desperately need to sleep in.)
- Automatically playing NPR in several rooms the first time I leave the bedroom on a weekday during a certain time window.
All the automation here happens entirely locally via HomeKit, and the only reason the system even needs an internet connection at all is so the Apple TV acting as a hub can get updated sunrise/sunset times. (For a totally self-contained system you'd probably want to grab a cheap iPad to act as the hub instead, wall-mount it, and put it in 'kiosk mode' locked to the Home app.)
For all of this, my Hue lights/smart plugs/motion sensors and the Apple and Sonos speakers have been completely reliable. The Hunter-Douglas skylight shades have been mostly reliable (maybe one or two failures over the course of a year, though I did have to get an RF repeater for that to work well).
The weak point is the window shades, which use generic rebranded functionality from a reseller because most of the industry of window coverings is awful and behind the times. Hunter-Douglas top-down-bottom-up shades are about the best replacement available at the moment for automation purposes (so you can adjust the exact amount of window covered for privacy purposes and do it multiple times per day in a way that would be a massive pain to handle manually), but awfully pricey.
I'm also considering rigging up a proper bed occupancy sensor (basically turning the whole bed into a giant scale with load sensors and triggering events on human-approximate weight being added/removed) to replace the bedroom motion sensor, but I've got one of those Ikea slat-bottomed bedframes that probably wouldn't work very well for that.
My wife often gets into bed with the baby. If the baby falls asleep before the light is off, she doesn't want to get up to have to turn the light off since it will wake the baby. Now she can just turn it off from her phone.
Kinda just expanded from there.
Now a good chunk of the regularly used bulbs in the house are "smart".
Basically what it means is that if you turn a light on, it turns on like a normal bulb (or you can do a quick flick off/on again to turn it on at a dimmer brightness) but you can pull your phone out and dim it / change the temperature / etc. Closer to bed time? Easy to dim the lights and make them super warm.
So that right there is already kinda useful for <$5/bulb. My workspace is a normal warm temperature at a reasonable brightness until I'm trying to do some soldering or something then I can instantly make it bright and white.
From there I expanded out into adding a few basic sensors. Combination motion/temperature/humidity/brightness sensors. So now when I get up for a piss in the middle of the night as soon as I walk out of the bedroom the hallway sensor sees that someone's there and that the hallway is pitch black and turns the hall light on as a red light at ~5% brightness.
When you walk into the baby's room in the middle of the night, same deal. Dim red light. If you go in in the daytime, bright warm light.
Did a similar thing with some of the basement too. Now as soon as I walk into one end of the basement to take the dog outside, do laundry, grab a tool, etc... the lights just come on. They stay on for a couple minutes after the last time motion is sensed and then automatically turn back off. Especially since half the basement is on a single light switch, this results in a lot less wasted power.
The lights in my office come on when I walk in if it's dark, and when I unlock my computer it shoots a message out over a MQTT broker which my automation takes as "someone is occupying this space now" and leaves them on. When I lock my computer, two minutes later if no motion is sensed it'll turn them off.
I don't know that I'd ever add 500 different controls to my house (not sure what I'd even use that many for...), but as far as I've taken it so far it's super convenient.
In the future I fully intend to get a smart thermostat (or replace my thermostat with some controlled relays) and use some "smart" air registers so I the temperature sensors I have can create a loop integrating the temperature sensing integrated in the motion/luminance sensors in most rooms with the heating to more precisely control the temperature throughout the house--if one room is already warm enough but the rest of the house is cold, can automatically close the vent to keep the temperature pretty consistent throughout the house.
What did you do to send the message when the computer locks/unlocks? This is an exact use case I could make use of
Nevertheless sometimes (once every 6 months maybe?) the Tasmota box looses connection with my WiFi network and I have to power cycle it via the breaker box to reset it.
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They are magic and don’t require a neutral cable, unlike just about every other smart dimmer, which means they can be swapped in place of literally any light switch in any home.
If the Lutron hub is unplugged, the switches continue to operate as normal light switches.
They also operate as normal light switches at all other times. So no need to teach every guest how to control the lights.
They are HomeKit compatible, so you only have to deal with Lutron’s trash app when pairing new switches with the hub.
I want to install my switches and have them work, always. If my wife even once complains, that's a total failure. If a guest can even tell that they are anything but normal dimmers, that's a failure. With my Caseta system, my wife has never complained -- only asked me to install more of them.
And h/t to HomeKit and Home.app. I've tried Google's version (Home) and it's absolute garbage in comparison.
Unfortunately Lutron gear just isn’t compatible with our switches. Everything 240V rather than 110V, and to make things even more complicated our standard switch dimensions (and thus standard wall box dimensions) are different to both the US and EU. Meaning nothing physically fits either, unless you replaced every wall box with an imported wall box.
Lutrons stuff looks amazing, it just sucks that it’s completely not compatible with UK homes, or even UK culture. I think a lot of Brits would find Lutron’s designs very jarring.
I have no idea how one would design this in an intuitive way, though.
They have a competitor whose name I can't remember that does the same thing.
If you never program the switch, it behaves just like a regular switch. If you program the switch, you can specify if it will trigger the relay, or just send z-wave commands. There's even a physical override switch you can pull out to cut power in case you have it programmed in "soft" mode.
The "red" product line doesn't require a neutral, either.
Works great for smart bulbs as long as you can set the hub up to do the control.
If you have z-wave bulbs (harder to find than zigbee, due to licensing), you can set up the z-wave pairing so that the switch controls the bulbs directly, so theoretically no hub required.
I do enjoy Caseta's smooth dimming and "nice touch" switch controls however.
Basically every gripe listed has to do with using old original ZWave devices. If you started a 150-node mesh today with strictly ZWave+ devices, an Aotec ZWave hub, and perhaps Home Assistant to control and automate it all, you'd have a much more consistently positive experience.
So I'm left boiling down the complaints to "I was an early adopter, so I got stuck with the crappy stuff, boo!"
Also, if you're paying >$50USD per common ZWave fixture (like a dimmer, stuff like pool controllers can be more), you're seriously doing something wrong.
Oh well, to each their own. I have a mesh of about 50 nodes across 2 stories, and it all works great. Can't remember the last time I had to turn a light on when I entered a room. Among many other nice touches, which I am fine expending a bit more effort to upkeep than normal 'analog' dumb homes.
Here in the UK, £50 per device is about the going rate. Finding something for about £40 is pretty good going. But even then just doesn’t compete with a £10 Shelly.
I've also bought Zooz switches, but wouldn't recommend them. Inovelli has had major issues with stock in the past, but otherwise makes a good product.
I would think, if you have 150 components of anything, you're going see failures on a fairly consistent pace, especially as time goes by.
For example, I'm replacing LED lights that were supposed to last for decades every 6 - 18 months in my house, and they aren't even the smart kind.
The one thing I'm not happy about my small z-wave setup is the HomeAssistant upgrade cycle breaking things way too often. It's gotten better in the past year or so, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to see that happen again in the future. Definitely would not recommend HA for anyone who doesn't like tinkering.
On the plus side not using 2.4Ghz means they're a lot more reliable in urban areas.
Finally I simply turned it off and let whatever would grow without constant watering grow, and the rest died. Makes me a much happier man.
I'm now planning to use a simple drip irrigation system. A long hose with nozzles plugged into the mains water that has to be manually turned on. It may not be automatic, but turning things on and off when I need them isn't the problem, like using light switches isn't the problem. There aren't any coyotes around here and the winters are mostly frost free, so I'm hoping this doesn't become a burden like the tech you mention!
I set it to water for 10 minutes after sunset in Home Assistant.
I’ve always intended it too hold off if it rains, but our weather forecasting is too inaccurate for that so have been messing about with soil moisture sensors, but haven’t had success yet.
But watch out for squirrels and other fur-bearin varmints chewing on the pipes. I'd consider copper pipes. I was thinking about digging up my whole sprinkler system and replacing it all with copper pipes, but then just opted to abandon the whole thing.
It's a freakin' catfeeder, jeez. It should just work.