What Smart Home ecosystem?

Google stuff here. No bridges or anything, just a few mini nest speakers and some Google enabled TVs

Everything controlled by voice. Smart bulbs and sockets etc. works flawlessly 

My Sonos soundbar has the Google stuff built in too and voice controlled

The answer to all your questions is Home Assistant, the only question then is how far down the rabbit hole do you want to go?

I’m not sure there’s really any one size fits all system, the beauty of home assistant is it lets you tie all those disparate systems together and make them talk. For example I recently got a new smart doorbell to replace my ring doorbells, but I was quite happy with the ring chime, which would only talk to ring. Via HA I can detect when the new doorbell is pressed and then make the ring chime play a sound.

+1 for Home Assistant. I have automations that link VW, Hypervolt and Octopus to get round an annoying feature of the Intelligent Octoous Go tarrif. You're expected to leave the car ready to charge as soon as it's plugged in and it then takes a couple of minutes for Octopus to register the car, plan the charging schedule and then take control to stop the charging - and in the meantime my house battery is getting hammered at 7kW. You can stop the charge manually once the VW app realises it's charging which can also take a couple of minutes. So with HA I can get round that and just have buttons to set up charging to 80% or 100% and everything else is taken care of.

I also have a routine to control lights when we're away - rather than a random schedule that can sometimes leave all the lights off I have it set so each light is on for a random time between say 10-90 minutes but when it turns off it checks if any other lights are on and switches one on if necessary (and before a "bedtime" threshold)

I too started using Home Assistant last year just to be able to monitor and use the home battery slightly more intelligently. Since then though it's been so incredibly useful it's had its hardware upgraded from a raspberry pi to a mini PC, and I have a Nabu Casa subscription so I can use it remotely.

• Now I only need the HA app instead of loads of separate apps for a whole range of things (this in itself is fantastic).
• The HA app can be better than the "proper" apps for a load of stuff, like remembering logins, sending image snapshots from security cameras that don't do it themselves, and is vastly more configurable.
• A lot of it works locally, so if the internet goes down a lot of it will still work even if the "proper" app wouldn't.
• Communication between totally different things, like HA can make the thermostats for the gas central heating control some electric heaters on smart plugs when electricity is cheaper than gas (which it knows about as well...)
• It can remind me to plug the car in when the battery is low and it's not already plugged in; it also stops the house battery discharging into the car.
• Last night I forgot to put the dishwasher on, so earlier I made HA tell me at midnight if the dishwasher isn't set in case I've forgotten 🤣 

I’ve been playing with home assistant this year. Running on an iSG max tablet thing. So far using a mixture of Shelly relays hidden behind normal light switches and a load of ikea zigbee devices which are great value. No need for the ikea hubs and no need for any of the devices to connect out to the internet. 

the iSG device has been a great introduction to home assistant, now I know what I’m doing I’ll probably move to an installation on a mini pc and control it with tablets 

An other one for HA - Takes a bit of setup if you don't use something pre-built but guides are easy enough to follow.

I'd never lock myself into something from one of the big tech providers, they are notorious for ending support at the drop of a hat and interoperability is patchy.

Read the title, came here to add a vote for Home Assistant! I have all sorts of controls - lights, heating, sensors, switches, alarm, windows, car charging all on different apps.  Stumbled on Home Assistant and it's been amazing. Suddenly the eco system doesn't really matter.  It can all be integrated and play together, and rules set.

It's running on a Raspberry Pi 4 that sits in the cellar and through intelligent scheduling of other devices, saves more electricity than it consumes.

I connected a Zigbee dongle (recommend the SLZB-06 from Ali Express) and devices create a mesh through the house. IKEA bulbs and plug sockets form the core.

Everything is now in one app and I'm adding Automations to take care of a lot of day to day tasks (get the office ready, only on a work day, when I'm home, for example) and made some really simple dashboards.

Google is the Halfords Apollo of smart home tech. Just don’t go there 🤣 
Apple HomeKit is actually pretty good but if you were an Apple household you’d be using it already! And it’s not much use if you’re not full Apple. 
obviously the correct answer is Home Assistant 😀

I've asked this before but it's information which won't stick in my brain for some reason.

Migrating to HA, do you have it running in tandem with the existing apps, or do you move things across?   Every time I change something I get told off for "faffing with it again" so any changeover will have to be seamless.

Also, will the Zigbee stick replace the Hue hub or is that 'special' in some way?  (The only Zigbee devices I have (I think) are Hue bulbs, all the rest is Wi-Fi.)

Migrating to HA, do you have it running in tandem with the existing apps, or do you move things across? 

either. In your specific situation, I'd probably keep using e.g. the Hue hub & app if this will increase the WAF.

The proprietary hubs are "special" in that they all use their own implementation of Zigbee which is why you need one per ecosystem - optionally you can replace (all of) them with a single Zigbee stick but this will mean the individual app can't communicate with the devices anymore (only through Home Assistant). Or, you can keep the hubs and use them with both their own apps & HA.

if you do go down the HA route the Zigbee stick is a good investment anyway as it's generally cheaper than even one proprietary hub and obviously allows you to use loads of different brands of device, from the same app (plus let said devices all talk to each other).

Potentially Matter could change all, or none, of this. No idea, not gone down that road yet!

Useful, thank you.  As it stands, the only reason I can see to replace the Hue hub is to free up a port on my switch (I really should have got a bigger one).

From what I've read of Matter, it's introducing more problems than it's solving.  But I haven't looked at it for a while so that might be fixed now. 

As it stands, the only reason I can see to replace the Hue hub is to free up a port on my switch

All the different Zigbee protocols use the same frequencies (as does 2.4Ghz wifi) so I guess the less of those networks you have competing, the better. It also functions as a mesh so having more devices on the main Zigbee network makes it stronger! Using HA from your phone also allows local control of Zigbee devices, whereas if you use the Hue app then that has to go through their server so is dependent on that, plus internet connectivity etc.

I’m using the Apple home automation, but it can be a pain. It occasionally turns off the wrong item when you are using voice control. For the family it’s not that easy to use via Siri as they just want to say turn the bedroom light off which is ok if you only have one room but doesn’t work well if all the bedrooms have individual names you need to address them by. There’s also no log to show who interacted with which item to it makes debugging who turned something off hard.

May look at a similar setup using the pi

For hue led strips, you need the hue hub for the dynamic scenes to address the led strip segments as different addressable segments, HA only sees them as a single unit to display a single colour. That may or may not impact you, but it was a reason I kept my hue hub, however I "call" the hue light system from HA.

IMO for the op, I would just start with just a single hub to do what you want from a manufacturere, HA is a realy steep learning curve if you only want to do something simple, so I would start with the simple and if you want to do more later then add complexity then.

Home Assistant is very good. You don't need to be tied to the big names, because there is a huge range of sensors, switches, lights and smart devices available from other suppliers now, and HA essentially allows you to connect all of these and combine them to do whatever you like, usually without having to use the proprietary supplier hubs. Being able to mix and match stuff, without committing to a single eco-system, is a big advantage.

I've been running my heating using HA on a Pi for 5 years now, using individual temperature sensors and smart radiator valves in each room to allow better control than a traditional single point thermostat, and it has been very reliable. I've done a few other wee automations to turn on lights automatically when I'm in the garage, check if the doors are locked and built a controller to turn on a dumb washing machine at night when the cheap electricity rate starts. After some discussions about how much time everyone in the house was spending watching TV, HA is also now logging everyone's time (it has an integration for smart TVs) and it was interesting to see the results! These automations use a variety of bits and pieces from several different manufacturers, but all co-ordinated by HA.

But...as others have mentioned above, you need to be prepared to tinker a bit to get HA working. If you enjoy that sort of challenge you'll have a great time with HA. If you want to achieve useful home automation results with minimum effort and then get on with doing other things, it will probably do your head in! The good news is that getting started doesn't require a huge financial commitment, so if you try it and find it's not useful for you it shouldn't be a huge waste of money, and it's easy to grow your system if you decide to keep going. 

Posted by: zilog6128

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All the different Zigbee protocols use the same frequencies (as does 2.4Ghz wifi) so I guess the less of those networks you have competing, the better.

Yeah, but, the only Zigbee devices I have to my knowledge are three Hue bulbs in one room.  And maybe the (garbage) Hive thermostat perhaps?

Thanks, I’ll look through all this at some point.

I don’t want another hobby though so maybe home automation isn’t for me - just wanted something quick and easy 🙈