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Comment by pkulak | Hacker News Reader

Most of my stuff is ZWave which is 100% local (big Zooz fan, and I hear that Inovelli is just as good). I have a bunch of Lutron switches too, and a couple Hue bulbs. Both of those will technically phone home, but you can cut off their WAN access and they still work just fine. I control everything with an old Mac Mini running Home Assistant.

The trick is, before you buy anything, look it up on Home Assistant. If its "class" is "local push", you're golden:

https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2016/02/12/classifying-th...

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You’re lucky or do Zwave in a small way. I spent a lot of money converting my last home to zwave and found tons of problems with it; incompatibility between the different devices from the same manufacturer; inconsistent implementation of standards by device type, etc. I am having a way better experience with Lutron Caseta (different problem is that I ran out of space on a single hub at 75 devices).

The other big problem with smart home is that every company wants to own the ecosystem. The technical term for that is “greedy bastards”. It’s not cloud; it’s cloud lock-in that’s the problem as I see it. This is the source not only of reliability problems but also of compatibility and interoperability problems.

When I started on my IoT journey I adopted a hard requirement that everything must “fail normal” - I don’t want a call in the middle of the night for tech support while I’m traveling on business, because my family can’t turn on the lights. Everything in my house fails normal- if the cloud or the internet goes away, the house becomes a dumb house and you can still turn on/off anything with a switch.

> The other big problem with smart home is that every company wants to own the ecosystem

Nah, standards assist everyone. Thus Matter[0] is becoming a thing. It will be supported by pretty much everyone (Amazon, Apple, Google, Samsung SmartThings and the Zigbee Alliance).

"Fail normal" is a good thing to keep in mind nevertheless.

I am quite skeptical that "Matter" (formerly CHIP?) will fix anything.

https://xkcd.com/927/

Agree 100%. If I cut the Ethernet to my router with garden sheers, none of my automations run and I'm left with a bunch of normal light switches and locks, like any other house.

And I have about 20 ZWave devices. They've been super reliable, but, it's a small house, so I can't speak for what would happen if I quadrupled. My Caseta stuff has been just as reliable.

I have the same experience as you, but I use Zigbee stuff (a bit more future-proof and open, ZWave is proprietary). I also love the Sonoff line of devices with Espurna or Tasmota. Everything has been rock solid.

I have a similar experience with ZWave, and definitely recommend Inovelli (I'm also a Zooz fan).

I had everything on HA, but at the time they were changing _everything_ way too quickly for me. After the last time I'd lost my entire Zwave network setup, I figured it was a great time to try something now.

So, now it's a single ~1k line javascript file that handles all my automation, built atop zwave2mqtt (hoping to move to zwavejs soon - maybe over the holiday). It's simple, solid, and very easy to maintain.

I could use a UI, and occasionally dream of building one, but honestly I generally forget the place is automated. It all just sorta works.

That is exactly what I want to do for the same reason. Any chance you would be willing to share your JS code?

I'm not comfortable sharing the whole thing, since it's very specific to my house. But I may be able to come up with a much lighter version that could be shared.

No idea when I'll find the time, but if you want to email me (check my profile), I'll reach out when I find the chance to do so.

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