Too many different systems?

sekond

We've acquired various different smart home devices over the years without really thinking it through, and now potentially have an issue with too many systems and an inability to get everything to work together properly (or expand things further).

We have:

Alexas (mostly Echo Dots, one Echo show) - bedrooms, kitchen, sitting room, garage (plus an echo auto that isn't set up yet). One appears to be on my husbands account, but as we have amazon household, it doesn't seem to impact hugely, other than it seems to think we live somewhere in the US and frequently gives a completely wrong weather forecast.

Kasa/TP link: One smart plug that's attached to a lamp and one bulb that never gets used

Ikea smart lights: over counter in kitchen. Never managed to get them to connect to Alexa, but should try again. Have the gateway, but mostly just use the remote.

Lefant robot vacuum cleaners - one upstairs and one downstairs. Connected to the Alexa for voice control, app on my phone. My favourite things in the house.

Random smart led strip lights - teenager's room. App on her phone. Can't seem to get it connected to Alexa.

Random smart bulb - (no idea what brand) it's in the bedroom, husband insists it really only needs to be used when we are away to make it look like there's someone home. It isn't connected to Alexa, and the app is on my husbands phone. Just gets used as a regular bulb. I'd like to set it up for routines etc.

Blink camera - not yet set up. Indoor camera that we'll likely put in one of the upstairs rooms, pointing outside.

Climote - 2 zones plus water. App on my phone only, and don't find integration with Alexa particularly intuitive, but have got around that with routines.

What I'd like:

More lights, and more ability to control them. (Added complication of husband who doesn't like the idea of the switches being 'on' all the time, but we can work with that!)

Possibly an alarm system with some smart integration. I know I don't want smart locks, but voice control etc could be useful.

The ability for everyone to control things - and it not being solely my job to have things on my phone etc.

More smart home stuff generally. Other than liking a good gadget, I like the simplicity of voice control and routines. Possibly some more smart heating (particularly with WFH and being in the spare room all day). Definitely need a few more smart plugs too.

Questions:

Should I be trying to get everything all on one system? e.g. get rid of the random bulbs and switch to just the Ikea system? (although teenager would disown me if I took away her LED lights).

We seem to be having problems reaching the maximum number of devices on the router. Would consolidating all the bulbs help there? And will adding more bulbs make it worse?

Is there a way to enable everyone to control things easily? Came up against an issue with the Alexas that you can only have 2 adults in a household, and they don't seem to do teen accounts that would allow teenager some control/access. We have a fairly ancient ipad mini - I had some thoughts of making that the smart home hub but not sure if it is up to it.

Or am I just overthinking it all, and just need to muddle on with what we are doing for now?

ablelocks

nterested in replies to this - i keep meaning to do something similar, although we don't have as much variation in devices.

I know nothing about homekit, but was wondering if that could be the central control, and like you have an old ipad that could be put to use - How To Turn Your iPad Into Smart Display | Digital Trends

ted1

A lot if the random devices work with the smart life or Tuya app. Which in turn works with Google home or Alexa. You should be able to consolidate them.

bk

I suspect we will see a lot of change over the next year as the Matter standard launches.

A device that supports Matter, should work across Google Home / Alexa / Apple Homekit, as they all will support it.

It will take a while, but yes, I suspect eventually everything will move to that standard. Many existing devices will be updated to support it.

I think Homekit is quiet good, but at the moment it is limited in the devices it supports, but that should change with the rollout of Matter.

I won’t rush into it, but in a years time I suspect I’ll consolidate my most frequently used devices around Homekit and Matter. While still keeping compatibility with Google Home, etc

I’m glad I went all in on Philips Hue for lighting, it works extremely well, very reliable and doesn’t use Wi-Fi, so it takes the strain of too many devices off of the Wi-Fi router. It already works well with Homekit (and everything else) and the Hub will be updated with Matter support.

I don’t have some Wi-Fi devices too, plugs, etc. and obviously IP cams, but I try not have too many.

Also it helps to have a good Wi-Fi router that supports lots of devices.

I suppose there isn’t really a good answer for this yet, but We may start to see things improve.

reklamos

This is the main reason why I stay away from any cloud based systems as they all trying to do their own thing and even though Google/Alexa trying to unify them, it does not always work. I am not sure what how you came to a problem on too many devices on router. Any proper should have no problem handling multiple devices. I would guess it is DHCP pool that got filled and that can be easily fixed. I have close to 50 wifi devices in my house and no problem at all. On top of that there multiple zigbee and BLE devices.

If you want to use cloud then I would recommend to limit the number of different clouds as it is much easier to manage.

IoT been trying standardize for a while. We have IFTTT, zigbee, zwave, WiFi etc. Having a standard does not mean manufactures will use it as all of them want to lock you into their own eco system so you buy only their devices/services.

bk

"This is the main reason why I stay away from any cloud based systems as they all trying to do their own thing and even though Google/Alexa trying to unify them, it does not always work"

I use over a dozen cloud services and to be honest it is mostly fine, I haven't had many problems, if any.

The only issue really is routines, if you create a routine in GH for instance, it won't work with Alexa, etc. In the past we had the likes of Stringify to help with that, but now that is gone.

"I am not sure what how you came to a problem on too many devices on router. Any proper should have no problem handling multiple devices. I would guess it is DHCP pool that got filled and that can be easily fixed. I have close to 50 wifi devices in my house and no problem at all. On top of that there multiple zigbee and BLE devices."

Most consumer wifi devices are limited to just 32 devices per band. This is certainly true of most crappy ISP supplied routers, but also even some expensive ones like Netgear! Updating your router that supports more devices per band, 128, 256, etc. can help fix this problem.

BTW you mention you have 50 wifi devices. It is possible you have this 32 device limitation but just haven't hit it yet. Remember it is 32 devices per band and most wifi routers have two bands, 2.4GHz and 5GHz, so your 50 devices could be spread across both bands and thus not quiet hit the limit yet. That is the case for me, though I'm about to replace my rotuer with a new one to avoid the issue altogether.

Obviosuly Zigbee, Zwave and BLE are separate and thus don't run into this particular limitation.

"IoT been trying standardize for a while. We have IFTTT, zigbee, zwave, WiFi etc. Having a standard does not mean manufactures will use it as all of them want to lock you into their own eco system so you buy only their devices/services."

While true, it does seem to be about to change with Matter and maybe Thread. It seems pretty much every major (and most minor) companies in this industry are supporting it. Apple, Google, Amazon, Philips, Ikea, Samsung SmartThings, Tuya, Aqara, Zigbee Alliance, etc.

Obviously we will need to wait and see, but there seems to be real momentum behind this now and most companies now seem to realise that the market will only grow if they can make it as easy as Wifi.

reklamos

Well the first thing anyone should do is to replace the router given by ISP :)

I got mikrotik and yes it is dual band and I have laptops and phones sitting on 5GHz but majority of IoT devices are on 2.4GHz as this is what they support and since they are not chatty especially when you block their traffic to the cloud, it works perfectly fine.

The amount of data that all these devices trying to send outside made my decision to not use any cloud service. I am am self-hosting and running Home-assistant and I can control it remotely. Yes, do not have voice control but neither I need one. At the same time I know that nobody is listening to my conversations.

bk

Ah, with your Mikrotik, you are already doing better then 99.99999% of people 🙂

I mention it, because it is unfortunately a very common issue that I see lots of people run into. Even with relatively expensive Netgear routers.

BTW Matter might interest you as it is also designed to work locally and Home Assistant are also adding support for it and Thread and it should make life much easier to add new devices to Home Assistant with it.

reklamos

Here is another reason no to use cloud service

https://www.msn.com/en-in/money/topstories/alexa-down-amazon-smart-voice-assistant-users-experience-outage-worldwide/ar-AAT0eaV

bk

Absolutely, even though I use cloud based products, rather then HA, I was careful to make sure that the ones I bought, would all continue to work if my internet or cloud was down.

So my Philips Hue lights, thermostat, etc. all continue to work fine with internet down. Obviously you lose voice control and remote access. But routines continue to run, light switches still turn them on/off, etc.

sekond

Thanks for all the thoughts, although I think I lost the ability to follow some of this conversation very soon into the replies! And I suspect that is why I, like a lot of people, end up using those cloud services, because we either don't have the knowledge or inclination to get into "setting up" a system, want the automation to be simple and intuitive, and so go with one of the major players in the hopes that it will all work together (and in fact in our case, accidentally really, as our first Echo was free with the climote when we switched gas providers).

What I think I'm getting from this, if I don't want to completely re-do the system and go non-cloud based is:

• look at changing the router to see does that sort out our issue with the devices
• Maybe stick with the same families of devices that we have already - e.g. if we're adding more lights, go with the ikea ones for now
• Investigate Tuya to see if I use that to consolidate some of the devices, and how it might work with the Alexas.
• Wait and see what happens with Matter - and maybe resist the urge to get more different devices until that has come along a bit further.

afatbollix

I stuck to groups of what they do. Easier than remembering which bulb is in each room.

All lights are Ikea,

Heating is Hive

Security is Eufy

That way if I want to do something I know what app to go with. Wife mostly uses Alexa tho. So I do get a txt every once and a while to do something.

wait4me

I am closely following this as my home network is having issues since Christmas brought more devices into the house.

bk: You said: "I would guess it is DHCP pool that got filled and that can be easily fixed. I have close to 50 wifi devices in my house and no problem at all".

Any pointers on how you sorted this?

wait4me

Just to add - I have gone down the route of purchasing a new router thinking that the router was the issue.

reklamos

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118541255#Comment_118541255

as @bk mentioned the problem may as well be your router if it was provided by ISP. Hopefully new one works ok.

Hellrazer

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118541255#Comment_118541255

What I did was buy a cheap mesh system and used that for all the smart devices.It gives out a different SSID than my Virgin router.

So my setup at the minute is.

Heating - Amazon smart plugs - got 10 of them on adverts for 50 euros!! - Alexa turn heating on/off or if Im out of the house Alexa app to turn it on.

Lights are all using smart plugs but theyre grouped in the alexa app by room as in "turn front room on" etc.

Garden lights are the same with a smart plug.

I used to have a mix of systems Home / Amazon but switched everything over to Amazon.

I have a ring doorbell and 2 tapo cameras - again linked through alexa app so I can view the cameras on the Echo show.

Bit all over the place but it works for me.