i absolutely love the extra space in my new house not to mention the
exquisite decor but the problem is that it was built back in the 90s when smart
meant a mechanical sprinkler timer and a
hard-wired intercom marco
polo that ain't gonna cut it for me
but when i looked into expanding beyond this with smart lighting and smart
sensors honestly speaking there are so many
different technologies and ecosystems and brands that contribute to some or
more of them that frankly it was pretty overwhelming even for a
tech savvy person to the point where i pretty much had to dedicate one of my
staff members to figuring this stuff out
so together we're gonna be showing you guys how we plan to use off-the-shelf
commodity z-wave devices to achieve my wildest smart home dreams ridge wallet
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before you begin your smart home journey you've got to figure out what exactly
you want to automate or smartify from there you'll need to do
research into the available products that can achieve your goals for instance
if you want to install smart light switches so that you can have your
lights turn off when you leave your house there are going to be a lot of
options with a key differentiating factor being their communication
standard or what they use to talk to each other and to the internet now
currently the entire smart home market is in a bit of a confusing state due to
a standard called mater it's a project that's backed by some of the biggest
companies in the world with the intention of standardizing the
communication between smart devices the problem is that
matter isn't out yet and we still don't know what it's going to look like or
what it's going to mean for existing communication standards so for now we're
going to say it doesn't matter
that leaves us with the big players wi-fi zigbee and z-wave now wi-fi is the
one you're probably most familiar with it's super fast but it requires
connected devices to maintain an active connection with a wi-fi access point
that uses a ton of power so it's not suitable for battery-powered devices
like this one not that we'll be using anything like
this because screw replacing batteries if you know
what i mean wi-fi is also what's known as a star
network which means that all of the devices have to be within range of a
central access point rather than being able to mesh off of one another it's
also worth noting that depending on how baller your wi-fi access point is adding
20 or 30 smart devices can start to seriously hurt your wi-fi performance
which brings us to zigbee and z-wave these are both mesh style networks
meaning that devices within the network can mesh between each other through
low-energy radio waves rather than requiring all of the devices to connect
to that central hub this means they have better range excellent battery life and
they're more resilient than wi-fi based networks the downside is that they are
way slower not that that really matters in a
residential application even if we were taking multiple hops all the way from
the basement to the upper floor of this house we're still talking milliseconds
of latency which isn't to say that they're both the same though there are a
few main differences between zigbee and z-wave products for starters the z-wave
alliance requires that any z-wave product goes through a very stringent
certification process that requires the manufacturer to stick to standardized
commands and security protocols this basically means that z-wave devices
from various manufacturers are way more
likely to just work with one another and do so securely
it also means though that z-wave compatible products tend to be more
expensive zigbee on the other hand is fully open
and doesn't require any certification that means that most zigbee stuff is a
fair bit cheaper it just might not all work together they also
operate on different frequencies z-wave is around 900 megahertz while zigbee
operates in the 2.4 gigahertz range theoretically this gives zigbee the
upper hand in terms of bandwidth but since most devices are barely sending
any data just on or off it usually doesn't make a ton
of difference now there's anecdotal evidence that says
that zigbee will not mess with your 2.4 gigahertz wi-fi but since it's already
such a congested band i didn't want to take that risk and since all the devices
that i wanted to use are z-wave ready it was the better choice for me
there's still one issue though the hub
or hubs the thing is a device like your
smartphone can't natively communicate with z-wave or zigbee devices so you
need something to bridge the gap and this right here is the aotek z-stick 7
which is the latest generation z-wave technology which means better power
efficiency as well as better range not to mention convenient backwards
compatibility now nothing would prevent you from using a z-wave and a zigbee hub
and marrying those devices on the same smart home overall network using
something like this raspberry pi running home assistant and in fact there are
hubs like the smartthings hub that natively support both but it can add an
extra communication step so we haven't felt the need to dabble with any of that
we're sticking with z-wave this concludes the scripted portion of this
video goodbye teleprompter all right Jake
let's yolo this thing shall we okay hey that was the breaker
so i've heard you're supposed to lick both your fingers uh-huh
and then put them up my butthole well okay
after that you lick them again oh so we're on different subreddits yeah
there is a neutral it's in there boys very nice
okay was this on or off when it doesn't matter oh boy it doesn't matter oh
shoot balls um i don't have the little
pokey jabby you don't need a pokey jervy i do need a pokey jabby oh you need a
pokey jeffy could you get the thing out hold on hold on no push it in a bit
before you pull yeah there we go mint bud what's up andy
hi how you doing now because this is a smart switch we can't just wire our two
black wires up to the two black screws and call it a day it actually requires
the neutral wire which is gonna be this silver puppy right here so we're gonna
wire that up to these white wires now we've also got a
fourth connection for travelers that's for a three-way ah that's for a
three-way switch perfect oh good so this is three-way compatible yeah i think you
need their like specific add-on switches but yeah you could do three-way again
ladies and gentlemen this is not what we would recommend
uh but we're just doing this to kind of test it out today
so we're just gonna jam both of the wires under the screw so they'll make contact that way hold on i think i can
loosen it a bit more how much do you trust your handiwork
uh enough to test it right now and then
immediately put the other switch back on properly and then have a qualified
professional do this again later
hey huzzah okay so we've got our line and our load and
then we've got normally we would use our mouret and a
wire chunk to go to our neutral here but we didn't we just put them both there uh
just ignore that we're not even going to screw that back in so
nice actually we should screw it back in so no one gets burned
and boom yeah all right cool it's so cute yeah
stop it stop it
another cool way we could have checked if power was running shout out to fluke
is with the volt alert setting on their multimeter so check this out right
right cool huh what do you want a tutorial or
something no i just i want to see how does it pop up in home assistant if
you're not familiar with it home assistant is a piece of software that
allows you to connect basically any smart home ecosystem to another smart
home ecosystem and then set up automations based on the data that you
receive from each one it's super cool
and theoretically our switch is going to show up
pretty much like that actually before we do that we kind of need to set up the
hub now technically i kind of did this on the background but if you need to do
this yourself all you got to do is install the z-wave js add-on into home
assistant if you have home assistant running in a docker container you're not
going to have add-on support so you're going to have to do this in a separate container but if you have it on a rasp
like we do it's really easy to install you basically go to the add-on store type in z-wave js and install there's
two versions technically one that's built right into home assistant and has
less configuration and then there's the fully featured fully fledged
web gui one which is what we're gonna use because it is way nicer look at this
you can see everything that is super cool so
i don't see our switch yet though because we haven't hooked it up yet so
by default nothing's going to be configured you're going to have to pick your usb device we have it there you're
going to want to set a network key and then you should be able to see your
controller ours is the 700 series space controller it's the z6 gen 7 whatever
it's in there we can see it's live we can see it's happy then you want to add
your devices so you want to add the switch yeah to add a z-wave device it's
called an inclusion so we're gonna go in the controller and tell it i wanna do an
inclusion now go click both the buttons on there at the same time i'm running i
think that's the way you do it uh
oh it worked it worked turn it back on how's that okay device found sweet
so now that it's found the device okay it shows up like unknown af so oh wow
that was quick never mind okay so it interviewed the device it figured out
what the device can do what it's called and we can see in here
basic switch binary switch
target status oh oh nice and snappy target status on
it's a little slow because these are fluorescent lights like that was
basically instantaneous oh were you trying to are you trying to host right now yeah i'm trying to host a video oh
sorry here you go geez should we play with some other device
absolutely i already got this one out of the bag oh this one i already set up too
but i mean the process is the same basically z-wave devices usually have a
action button it's called so in this case if you got this brand new you plug
it in start your inclusion and you get you some action you click the action
button and it just does it yep you're a smart home enthusiast so that's the only
action you're getting jesus don't include that in the video okay jesus
okay go plug it in so i could action myself here with the button but i'm
gonna action you for you Jake's gonna action me so look mom no hands do you
always ride your bicycle and show these wow okay that did work really well
now this is a yee light it's a smart light we could be cheating right now but we're not we're not shooting here's the
three home assistant proof
next i'll show you guys something that would have been super handy to have when
the contractors accidentally plugged the drain for the air conditioning unit
that's up in the attic this right here is a moisture sensor and what we can do
is we can say hey if you detect any moisture
turn off some device like say for example the air
conditioning unit cool right
at 50 bucks it's a lot cheaper than these drywall repairs
another really cool thing that i want to use extensively is motion sensing now
you can get switches that have motion sensors in them that'll just turn on for
a certain amount of time and then turn off but with home assistant we can make
it so much smarter these ge switches
that we're using have both the light switch on and off and the motion sensing
component independently addressable through home assistant so we can create
all kinds of fun little integrations for example here in the theater room we
could tell this switch hey if you don't see anyone move for
let's say two hours turn off all the lights and while you're at it make sure
the air conditioning is off and turn off the tv to save power dads love that kind
of of course not everyone wants to buy all new smart switches so for those folks
check this out we actually turned off the motion sensor
that was built into the switch and instead we're using one of these simple
little jobbies this is an aeotech i believe it's a six in one sensor it's
powered by usb or battery so it absolutely sips power and it'll tell you
temperature humidity motion
i can't remember but there's six of them oh it's uv vibration which will be
useful for tampering and then also light so it can tell not just if there's any
light but it can tell how much light there is so you could tell it for
example hey look if it's a bright sunny day outside there's already a lot of light
in the room don't turn on the lights and conveniently this ge one that i'm
planning to deploy also has that functionality so i probably won't need
many if any of these oh and one thing that's nice is they have a wider field
of view than some of the ones that are built into the switches here's something cool a lot of these
aeotech devices and for that matter a lot of smart devices have extra sensors
that you can pull to get extra data so for example you can see the multi-sensor
six that we're about to show you a demo with in the mechanical room is measuring
23.3 degrees celsius while that water sensor that we had in the upstairs
hallway is at 31.7 i feel bad for the contractors here
i was like i would i told them i was like i'll pay for you know internet in
the house you got internet i'll run the you know the hvac for you guys while
you're working but then they broke it like what am i
i tried for our last trick aotech also makes a
whole house energy monitoring solution and we're just going to open this up
real quick and see sort of how scary it looks
and if it's too scary then we're going to have brian the electrician hook it up
oh it's actually not that scary everything is everything is cheap here
why don't you take the whole thing off properly i'm trying it's hitting the breaker yeah this is really clean they
did a great job i mean i don't it's not that i like hanging out in here
this is not my this is not my like
happy place how are you supposed to do this aotech yeah way to go aotech you know we were
you were doing real well up until this point in the video okay that looks
probably like it'll work i guess i mean what the heck could this thing even do
so this will monitor your power and then what if your power goes over a certain
amount you could get like oh it's working oh is it working yeah oh cool so guess
how much power your whole house is using let's go look i mean right now
hold on okay let me think let me think let me think because the hvac's not
running range isn't running okay i'm going to say
the whole house there's not any lights on either it's going to be like
4 amps yeah actually almost spot on 600 640
watts oh that's freaking awesome
you know what here we could turn on this microwave okay ready
is it bad to run an empty microwave i have no idea refresh what do we got 750
hold on what do we got oh 2 000 watts holy crap now i can't
leave this here because as part of the home renovation we're pulling out this
125 amp service and we're going to replace it with a 200 amp service or
maybe even more because we actually want to put a couple electric car chargers in
the garage but that's a project for another day make
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account at leno.com Linus if you guys enjoyed this video go
check out our hvac video where we got a proof of concept running for how we're
going to use home assistant to control multi-zone air conditioning with just a
dumb ac unit mind you i think we're whoops
thanks Floatplane appreciate it you guys are the best yeah i have time now