Automation / sensor setup from scratch for a holiday house

L1011

I've got a fairly complete (heating, smoke/CO alarms, lights, smart sockets, assistants) Nest, Google Home & Ikea Tradfri setup in my own gaff, but I now need to figure out what to do for a holiday house that will be used for most of the summer plus a few times a year

Its got a modern-ish oil central heating system, with as far as I can remember a heating zone and a hot water zone - so Nest v3 territory; but what I want to add otherwise is a very mixed bag and some of it is stuff I don't have experience with:

• Smart sockets
• Smoke alarms
• Humidity sensors (possibly with the ability to fire a smart socket when a certain % is exceeded)
• Lights
• Blinds
• Oil tank level sensor
• Powered vents (maybe)
• Alarm or at least some form of motion sensors (even less likely - its really not somewhere with a crime problem)
• Post recovery alerting of power outages. Could put a cheap UPS on the devices and work this out from Powerchute or equivalent; but I definitely need something that will come back up on AC returning

I'll be getting in some form of permanent internet, probably 4G but with a proper router, and I can add a Pi or old laptop or something as a controller if that works out best. I'm competent using Linux but have never used any of the HA products before.

I don't think there's a single vendor solution here, but does anyone have ideas of what would be a simple way to achieve this?

reklamos

It really depends on how deep you want to got down the rabbit hole. All this can be done but as you pointed out there is no single vendor solution at the moment and if there will be it will be expensive one. I prefer not to get vendor locked in and do not not use any cloud services. You can do all of this with HA and WiFi and/or Zigbee sensors/devices.

For smart sockets I would go with sonoff/shelly as long as you are not going to connect devices that sip a lot of power.

There are zigbee/wifi smoke detectors from Xiaomi but I have not used them

Plenty humidity sensors around. At home I use BLE ones from Xiaomi in all rooms but there zigbee and wifi also

For lights I would go with either wifi or zigbee bulbs instead of smart light switches as most houses are wired without neutral

Have not used blinds so cannot recommend

Do not use oil but I do measure water level in fish tank. The best thing that works is the one you stick outside the tank. The float one works ok until it gets stuck. For this you would need to create a device based on esp8266 and make it talk to HA. Not that difficult.

I use aqara motion and sensors and sonoff door/window sensor. All on zigbee running very well for me. You could also set IP camera. There are cheap TOPO ones in amazon that integrate with HA, they could work as motion sensors and you can also rotate them.

HA is very resilient when it comes to power losses I had multiple ones and it always booted up fine. If you use old laptop then just make sure it has battery with some juice and you will not need separate UPS. You could also use to power G4 dongle from the laptop. If you get a separate router then you need to think about small UPS.

For router I would recommend Mikrotik instead of the shelf ones. It is not your plug and play device but it does everything. You can setup VPN tunnels and then connect to the location from any device. Or you could create always on IPsec tunnel between your house and summer house and constantly see what is happening there.

If you choose to run HA on PI then get small SSD for it. It will be faster and more reliable. I used to run HA initially on PI but SD cards would not last(know problem).