Smart Home Devices to Help You Manage Your Home’s Humidity

The Smart Home Revolution: Automating Your Rental Apartment

Imagine walking up to your apartment building on a hot summer evening and using your phone to unlock the main building entrance. You get to your apartment door and automatically, the door unlocks, the lights turn on, the AC is running, the ceiling fan is on, and the blinds are closing for an evening of privacy. Just a few years ago, having all of this happen automatically would have been nearly impossible for a layman to accomplish, let alone on a budget in a rental apartment.

Fortunately, the technology needed to accomplish this is now readily available and getting cheaper every month. I know this because I’ve done it in my rental apartment that was originally built in the 1940s. Read on to learn how I turned my humble abode into the ultimate smart home, and how you can do the same.

Overcoming the Limitations of Ecosystem-Bound Smart Devices

Before I dive into the specifics on how I automated my apartment, I think it’s important to set some general context on the state of the smart home industry. There have been several recent developments that have opened the door to cheap and sophisticated smart homes.

You can now buy good smart bulbs for less than $10 each, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Wireless locks, motion sensors, thermometers, blinds, switches, and many other devices have all become incredibly inexpensive as companies try to lure new customers into their ecosystem with low-cost hardware. Many of these devices are now wireless and last for years on a single battery, making them viable to retrofit in a rental without issue.

Until recently, the only easy way to automate your home was to either 1) buy into a single ecosystem of products (e.g., Philips Hue) and use their proprietary app, or 2) rely on Google Home, Alexa, or Apple’s HomeKit to act as the connective tissue between all your smart devices. Unfortunately, neither option is great. If you rely on a product ecosystem, you’re severely limited by what devices are available. And while the home automation systems created by Amazon, Google, and Apple do a decent job on the device integration front, they have some significant drawbacks.

First, they are all voice-first, meaning if you want the ability to use physical switches to control devices, you’re basically out of luck. After attempting to control my house with just my voice, I realized that switches are a surprisingly elegant solution. Second, these systems have relatively limited abilities for creating automations that use a wide variety of triggers or rely on sophisticated conditional logic. And third, if the internet goes out, local device control is iffy at best.

Discovering the Power of Home Assistant

The good news is that there are now several systems that allow you to 1) interface with nearly any smart device on the market regardless of the manufacturer, and 2) easily build sophisticated rules that synchronize and control devices based on logic you define. The biggest and most established player in the independent home automation space is Home Assistant (HA).

HA is a free and open-source software that is most commonly run on a Raspberry Pi. Technically inclined people are the most common users, however, it is making great progress at becoming accessible to a wider audience. If you’re interested in trying out HA, here’s a great getting started video.

My Smart Home Journey: Automating Every Aspect of My Rental Apartment

Now that we’ve covered all that, how should you get started on your home automation journey? I recommend first identifying what your dream smart home would look like and work backward from there. For inspiration, here’s some of the things I’ve been able to accomplish by automating my apartment:

• Automated Lighting and Blinds: My apartment’s lights and blinds automatically turn on and off based on the time of day, occupancy, and ambient light levels. This helps me save energy and creates a cozy ambiance.

• Personalized Climate Control: The temperature and humidity in each room are monitored and adjusted to my preferences, ensuring I’m always comfortable.

• Enhanced Security: My door locks, security cameras, and motion sensors work together to keep my home secure, even when I’m not there.

• Proactive Air Quality Management: Sensors track air quality, and my HVAC system automatically adjusts to maintain optimal indoor conditions.

• Energy Efficiency Optimization: By closely monitoring my energy usage and production (I have solar panels), I’m able to maximize my home’s efficiency and reduce my utility bills.

There’s much more I’ve been able to accomplish, but this hopefully gives you a good idea of what’s possible when you take the smart home plunge. If you’ve decided you want to pursue creating a smart home, below are a few of the questions that you’ll want to consider as you plan out your home automation journey.

Choosing the Right Smart Home Solution for Your Needs

There are many ways you can make your home smart, some requiring much more effort than others. Controlling your devices is the crux of home automation, so asking yourself the following questions will help uncover what solution is best for your needs:

• Voice Control or Physical Interfaces?
  If you want the ability to control your devices via voice, you’ll have to invest in getting an Alexa-enabled speaker, a Google Assistant-enabled speaker, or an Apple HomePod Mini. If you’d like to have your devices controlled by buttons or simple motion sensors but no sophisticated automations, then you have two main options: go with a more basic smart home system or leverage Home Assistant’s integrations with physical interfaces.

• Simple Automations or Advanced Rules-Based Control?
  If you’re looking to create sophisticated rules-based automations, use a wide variety of sensors (buttons, motion, light, temperature, etc.), and/or mix and match devices from nearly any smart home company, then Home Assistant is likely the way to go. This gives you the most flexibility and control, but it does require a bit more technical know-how.

• Usability for Others in the Household?
  Remember that others will likely need to be able to use the lights, devices, and features in your house too, so I encourage people to have intuitive physical buttons in addition to their other control mechanisms. I learned this the hard way when my cat sitter had no idea how to use my house.

Navigating the World of Smart Home Wireless Protocols

Let’s say you’ve decided to go down the Home Assistant path – good choice! This is where things get exciting but also sometimes a little overwhelming. I’ve broken out some of the most common questions and provided general guidance to help you navigate this tricky part of the process.

Smart devices need to communicate wirelessly, and there are currently a few different technologies commonly used to do this, each with their own benefits and drawbacks. This topic could be an article in itself, and to make things more complicated, the world of smart home tech is currently undergoing a big change with the release of a new protocol called Thread.

It’s a confusing landscape, but systems like Home Assistant make things much simpler because they do not force you to exclusively use one wireless technology over another. Instead, you can make your decision based on what’s available and what makes sense for your specific application.

Personally, I use a mixture of Zigbee and WiFi devices with my Home Assistant setup. Most of my lights, sensors, and switches are Zigbee, and I have a few lights, relays, speakers, and locks that use WiFi. If new devices come out that use a superior wireless technology, I’m confident Home Assistant will be able to quickly handle them.

Many people don’t like the idea of their lights, locks, etc. being connected to/reliant on the internet due to security and/or reliability concerns. Unfortunately, these concerns are valid, as there are many stories about smart home devices ceasing to work when their parent company has issues (looking at you, Wink). If you have a flaky internet connection, avoid devices that don’t work locally.

The rule of thumb is: You’ll need to do some investigation and soul-searching to decide what is best for your needs. Since most of my devices run on Zigbee and I use Home Assistant to control them, I could unplug my router and/or Philips Hue could go out of business, but my home would continue to function. Running devices locally also has the added benefit of improving device responsiveness, which is one of the biggest issues you’ll encounter if you decide to go down the Home Assistant/Habitat path.

Ensuring Device Compatibility with Home Assistant

There are many options, and not all of them will work. If you’ve decided upon Home Assistant, the first place to check is Home Assistant’s integration database. It is a great resource that lists out compatibility across a wide variety of device types.

Home Assistant has excellent device support, and as long as you stick to mainstream brands, you’ll most likely find your devices will work with very little effort. And when you do bump into questions, there is a thriving Home Assistant community on Reddit and their forums, so you’re never far away from help.

Wrapping Up: The Joys and Challenges of the Smart Home Journey

Making your home smart is a really fun and rewarding hobby, but also can be time-consuming to set up. As you can probably tell, I’ve tried to boil down hundreds of hours worth of work into a single article. If you’re looking for a simple plug-and-play option that won’t take much time, stick to the basics with Amazon, Google, or Apple’s smart home offering.

But if you’re excited about the prospect of putting in the work to build your own ultimate smart home, there has never been a better time than now. Good luck, and may your home be as intelligent as you are!

PS: Yes, if I ever move, it’s going to suck, but everything I’ve done to my apartment is 100% reversible and could all be put back in the span of a long day. If you’re curious about exactly what I used to automate my apartment, you’re in luck.

Taking Smart Home Automation to the Next Level: Optimizing for Energy Efficiency

For my new house, I’ve gone all out, and that includes making it smarter than I am. Not exactly a hard feat. From windows that automatically shade themselves to reduce unwanted heat gain into the house, to ensuring my airtight house doesn’t suffocate me in my sleep, I’ve been going a little overboard on adding smarts to pretty much everything I can – and I’m still not done.

While I recognize that going nuts with smart home tech isn’t for everyone, at the heart of what I’m doing is about saving energy and ultimately money, which is a pretty universal desire. So with that in mind, let me take you on a journey into my Mensa-level home to hopefully inspire some ideas for smart tech additions to your own home.

Automating Window Shades for Maximum Energy Savings

So let’s not waste any time here – first one up, and the thing I planned on from the very beginning phases of the project, was smart shades on every window of the house. I’m not going to lie and say I did this purely for the energy gains. They’re insanely cool. Even my wife has said it feels like we’re living in some kind of sci-fi future house when all the windows in a room open or close in sync.

But the real power of smart home technology is in the automations. The house can take care of itself, even if nobody is around. I’ve got some light sensors in various rooms in the house, even outside the house. A good example is my office. The sun is blinding in the mid-morning hours of the day, but how the sun tracks in the sky changes throughout the year. And on overcast days, it’s not a problem at all.

Well, I’ve got an automation that will automatically close the side-sun-facing window if the light level coming into the room is over 2,000 lux. Then another automation raises the blind automatically around midday when the sun is out of direct view of that window. I also have a Tempest weather station outside which takes its own light level readings. I just recently set up an automation that takes its lux level reading to help determine if it’s an overcast day or not at my house’s exact location.

If it’s overcast, windows will stay open during the day. If it’s super sunny, certain windows will drop at certain times to help shield the worst of the sun coming in. It’s going to take some tweaking over the coming months to make sure it’s adaptable enough to change with the seasons. In the winter, getting a little extra heat from the sun into the house can be a benefit, so I’d want to keep all the sun-facing windows open. But in the summer, I’d want to keep them closed to keep the house cool.

The ultimate goal for my house is to achieve net-zero energy production over the course of the year. I have solar and home batteries, and implementing smart home tech like this can help with that goal. Is this excessive? Yeah. Necessary? No, but shading windows at various times of the day and year can have a big impact on energy efficiency. One study from the Illinois Institute of Technology found a 25% reduction in heating and cooling energy consumption with automated motorized shades.

The actual amount will vary based on the type of covering. For instance, a honeycomb shade will provide more insulating punch than a roller shade. In my case, we already have triple-paned, tilt-turn style windows that are extremely energy-efficient. Because of that, I didn’t think there’d be a sizable difference between the two, so we opted for roller shades around the house.

For full transparency, Lutron did help me out with some of these shades and switches, but the reason I wanted to go with Lutron was my personal experience with them over the past five or so years. In my old house, my Lutron Caseta light switches and remotes were the most reliable smart home tech in my house – period. And so far, it’s exactly the same thing this time around.

Automating Lighting and Presence Detection for Energy Savings

Speaking of controlling light into the house, there’s the lights inside the house combined with presence detection. Actually, this is much more than just lights, but automating lights and devices turning on and off depending on what’s happening in the house.

I have motion sensors, millimeter-wave presence sensors, and Bluetooth beacon tracking working with our Apple Watches throughout the house. Yes, my house knows what room I’m in. The person-specific presence tracking is all in Home Assistant and locally controlled. That powers some automations that turn on key devices in my office when I walk into the room for the first time during the day, like my computers, speakers, and lights if it’s dark.

But with person-level presence tracking, if my wife comes into my empty office, it’s not going to flip on my computer’s speakers since she never uses this computer. You can really dial it in. And yes, it’s a major convenience factor, but it can also be a nice energy saver too. Whatever is controlled by a smart light switch (I’ve got Lutron Caseta switches all around the house) or smart outlets, they can help cut the phantom drain of electricity when nobody is around to use those devices.

This is extra true in my home studio, which is really only used when I’m recording videos. When that’s not happening, every device in this room gets switched off completely, with the exception of the handful of smart outlets themselves. A side benefit of smart switches is being able to easily reconfigure your house too. I’ve already bought a bunch of extra Lutron Pico remotes and added them to areas where my wife and I found that we missed not having a physical light switch. You can’t nail light switch locations 100% of the time before actually living in a house.

For instance, an island light dimmer next to one of the kitchen entrances, or in my home office next to one of the doors. It’s kind of the “desire path” principle. You can think you’ve got all of the pathways figured out in a new public park, but inevitably, you’ll find worn-down pathways forming through areas of the park you didn’t anticipate.

Automating Air Quality and Ventilation for a Healthier Home

An often overlooked area of our homes is air quality, but not in my house. I may have gone a little overboard. I’ve got air quality sensors in all the major rooms of the house that track temperature, humidity, particulate matter, and CO2 levels. It’s that last one I was really interested in tracking because this is a very airtight house.

I was trying to figure out how to turn my house’s dumb energy recovery ventilator (ERV) smart when fate intervened. Someone from Shelly reached out to me on my Discord server with a solution that fit the bill. This isn’t a sponsorship, but they did send me this Shelly Plus 1 relay that I hooked up to my ERV.

I was blown away by the versatility of this thing. If the CO2 levels get too high in any room, I’ve automated the system to put my ERV into boost mode for 20 minutes. Or to boost things if the humidity level in the bathroom gets above 80%, which is handy when taking a shower. The lungs of my house are now fully automated.

I also have air filters in various rooms throughout the house because I have pretty bad allergies. All of these are also linked into the system to automatically ramp up if air quality dips below any threshold I’ve set for their room. And kind of linked to that, I’ve also set up an automation to automatically ramp up the ERV if the kitchen range hood fan is switched on when we’re cooking. That helps to get the smells and particulates created from cooking out of the house more efficiently.

How I did that leads right into the next aspect of