Taking a page out of Apple’s book, I realized I’m going to be writing about this regularly, so the naming will reflect that from now on. If you’d like some historical context, please see my previous posts on the subject. If you’d like to see all of the data on a spreadsheet, I recently updated Mike and Joyce’s Smart Home Inventory.
We recently completed a major home renovation, which gave us the chance to rethink everything. For context, we added an addition, completely rebuilt the kitchen, and modernized the existing footprint of the house.
Lights
Before we even started the renovation, we knew we wanted to standardize the lights on Hue. We had a couple of Kasa smart wall switches that we used with regular “dumb” bulbs, and replaced them with Philips Hue bulbs instead.
We purchased a large number of Hue Slim Downlight 6 Inch bulbs and installed them throughout the house. We kept our floor and table lamps to add additional lighting, as well – those were already using standard Hue bulbs. For outdoor lighting, we kept our Hue floodlights, but added an Econic Outdoor Wall Light for the side door and two Impress Outdoor Wall Lights for the new back patio.
Previously, the only way to control all of the lights was via HomeKit scenes (which would turn on the lights at certain times of the day) or via our phones. This made it difficult for guests to use our house. We had a Hue dimmer switch in the bathroom, but that was it. With the remodel, we took the opportunity to replace every light switch in our house with those dimmer switches. We worked with our contractor to wire in every smart light as “hot” so they couldn’t accidentally be switched offline. The only way to cut power to the lights entirely is via the breaker, but that’s fine.
Although each Hue dimmer switch comes with a 1-gang wall plate, in some rooms, we needed 2-gang or 3-gang switches – bathrooms, for example, have vent fans that require a manual switch. Other rooms have multiple sets of lights that should be controlled separately.
We got lucky – a couple of vendors on Etsy make wall plates for exactly this purpose. Shout-out to JECreationFactory and TrueHueDesigns for their excellent work and customer service.
At some point, we realized we were going to exceed the number of devices that could be supported by a Hue bridge (which is limited to 50 lights and 12 accessories). We bought a second bridge and did our best to balance lights and accessories across both bridges, but the experience was clunky.
Towards the end of the summer, the long-rumored Hue Bridge Pro was released, which bumped the limits to 150 lights and 50 accessories. We bought it immediately, and it has worked very well for us. For full details about the differences between Hue bridges, see their documentation.
We moved our light strips from our two front windows to inside / underneath our new kitchen cabinets, thanks to Litcessory and some diffusers. Unfortunately, that meant no spooky lights for Halloween this year. Hue is slowly coming out with new lightstrips, so we’ll take a close look at those for 2026.
As for the other lights – we left the basement and attic “dumb” for safety reasons. We added a shed to our backyard, and that also has a dumb light. We still have our Nanoleaf panels – we took them down for the construction and haven’t yet reinstalled them.
We replaced all of the ceiling fans in the house, too. I wanted to make them smart, but that didn’t quite work out. We went with inexpensive “fandeliers” (yes, seriously) that can be controlled via Bluetooth and an iOS app. However, we quickly found out that pairing a fan with one phone would break the pairing with another, so we scrapped the idea of using the app. I had hoped that we could use a Bond Bridge to add the fandeliers to our Wi-Fi network and HomeKit, but we discovered too late that they were incompatible. So, we just use the physical remotes, which have been fine. Maybe someday, we’ll be able to turn on / off the fans based on the temperatures in each room.
Locks / Sensors
Now that we’ve added two new doors onto our house (we replaced the side door and added French doors to our patio), we decided to revisit our smart locks. Despite Yale / August’s support being consistently terrible, we’ve grown attached to the lock on our front door. We purchased two Yale Security Assure Lock 2 locks for the other doors, and like them even better for a couple of reasons: they have physical buttons (rather than a touchpad), and they don’t require a module to be connected to AC power. Since we’ve never actually used the physical key for the front door, this time we opted only for the keypad instead of the keypad / key combo of our v1.
Before deciding to stay with Yale / August, I spent a bunch of time looking into alternatives. Apple’s implementation for HomeKey involves physically tapping your phone or watch onto a lock, but that’s not always convenient for us. We also had contractors entering the house each day, so adding them to HomeKey just wasn’t feasible. The Yale / August locks support Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, can automatically unlock when we come home, and can automatically lock after a set amount of time. They also have sensors to determine if the door is open, and send us an alert if that was not intentional. The PIN pads allowed us to set unique codes for the contractors, alerting us in the process if someone had entered the house.
Decreased battery life is the only downside to the new locks. The 4 AA batteries die very quickly – maybe a month or two after they’ve been replaced. I tried switching to rechargeable batteries, but those last about a week or two. Although it’s easy to buy AA batteries in bulk, I wish I could reduce the amount of waste (not to mention the time changing the batteries).
On the subject of sensors, we have a Hue motion sensor at the top of the stairs. This triggers a HomeKit scene at night that turns on the lights downstairs. This is helpful for when we’ve started turning off lights for bedtime, but realized we needed to go downstairs for some reason. I call the scene “Midnight Snack.” 🍪
We added a second heating / cooling unit in the attic, which required a second thermostat. We’ve been very happy with the Ecobee thermostat downstairs, so it was an easy decision to add a second one upstairs. Our HVAC contractor was concerned about compatibility, which was difficult to determine, but I’m glad we were able to get it figured out. Both thermostats show up in the Ecobee app, and they work well. We bought some more room sensors for the additional rooms in our house, so the climate can be adjusted based on room occupancy.
We also added a couple of door sensors, both from Ecobee. The shed has a door sensor to alert us if the door is opened or closed (no smart lock at the moment, so the sensor is the next best thing). For our new bedroom closet, we use a door sensor to turn on / off the Hue recessed light based on whether the door is open or closed.
In hindsight, I wish we hadn’t gone with Ecobee door sensors, though. Each sensor is added to the thermostat, which is then added to HomeKit. If a thermostat is having connectivity issues with HomeKit, then the sensors just don’t work, which is frustrating. We have four Apple TVs as home hubs, but all had to be wireless due to the construction, so the Ecobee thermostats weren’t always able to reach the Apple TVs. This knocked the sensors offline, which meant that opening the closet door wouldn’t turn on the light. Eventually, I’ll probably replace the Ecobee door sensors with ones that connect directly to HomeKit or Matter, cutting out the thermostat altogether.
We still have three Airthings Wave air quality sensors, along with their bridge. All are still going strong, and we rely pretty heavily on the air quality notifications. They’ve done a ton of development on their app, and I’m honestly pretty happy with it. Although our devices are a few years old, I’m glad they’re still supported. The data has been very useful, and we plan to buy more.
Our Withings body scale still works great, nearly 13 years after purchasing. I weigh myself every day, it connects to their cloud service via Wi-Fi, and writes the data back to the Health app on my phone. I’ve looked at replacement scales, but honestly, there’s no point – this one does exactly what I need, nothing more, and functions perfectly. The only tricky part is that when the batteries are low enough, it’ll take readings, but it won’t send them anywhere. When I notice the app isn’t updating, I just have to swap the 4 AAA batteries (it takes rechargeables just fine).
Lastly, we still have an Eve Degree temperature sensor in the attic. It’s been great for keeping tabs on how hot / cold it is up there. Unfortunately, I have lost it – with all of the HVAC construction, it looks like it’s been misplaced. Weirdly, I can still connect to it, but without the ability to have it make noise, I have no idea where it is. I hope to find it someday.
Valves
We’ve mostly been happy with our Moen water leak detectors and shutoff valve. Moen had a couple of outages for their Flo service this past year, which was frustrating – the app has no way of notifying customers what’s happening, and they didn’t sent any emails before, during, or afterwards. This is a problem when every leak detector sends multiple urgent alerts that it’s offline, as we now have about a dozen of them. We’ve had to turn to the r/plumbing subreddit to see if other customers have this issue.
Moen has been working on a new app for a while now, but we haven’t been asked to migrate just yet. The old app is very outdated, and doesn’t support features like time-sensitive notifications, multitasking, or running natively on macOS / iPadOS. I’m hopeful that the new app is more modernized.
As part of the renovation, we added two new bathrooms, one of which included a shower. We opted to add a Moen Smart Shower, and I’m really glad we did. The shower displays the exact temperature of the water, there are buttons to switch between the overhead and handheld sprayers, and you can pause / resume as needed. Although it doesn’t have an anti-scald valve, the functionality is built-in because you’re specifying the exact temperature you want. Since the controller will not function without power, we bought Moen’s backup battery kit (which uses a bunch of D batteries) to keep the shower online in the event of a power outage.
There have been a few downsides to the smart shower, though. It integrates directly with HomeKit, but the process of getting it into HomeKit is extremely difficult. It’s very picky about Wi-Fi networks, and uses a completely different app (the U by Moen app, which hasn’t been updated in years). I’ve had to factory reset the controller multiple times, and eventually just gave up on using the smart features. I haven’t been able to fix the time on the controller, either, so we’ll need to buy a clock for the bathroom. When I finish my shower and press the power button to turn it off, it frequently crashes and reboots itself over and over again. I emailed Moen support, who asked me to call instead, and I just haven’t had time.
Plugs
We have a few Kasa smart plugs (connected through Matter!) and they’ve been nice in a pinch. Although we don’t use them for lighting anymore, they’re perfect for random devices like a noise machine in the bedroom.
I’m very glad we moved away from WeMo, as Belkin announced they are discontinuing support for all WeMo devices on January 31, 2026. It’s a shame they backed out of their promise to support Matter, and instead chose to abandon their customers with their (soon to be) useless products.
Speakers
We already had Sonos speakers in every room, and we calculated that we’d only need a few more after the renovation was complete. Unfortunately, due to the tariffs, IKEA and Sonos announced the end of their partnership – we rushed to the store immediately afterwards and bought everything we needed right away. IKEA’s speakers were both functional and affordable, and I’m very glad we have two stores within driving distance. I’m sad that we won’t be able to see what else would have come from this collaboration.
Shortly afterwards, Costco had an excellent sale on Sonos soundbars and subwoofers. In the living room, we paired those with two IKEA bookshelf speakers, mounted to the walls – giving us surround sound for the first time in our house. It’s been an experience to watch our favorite movies with even more immersion.
Each speaker is also in HomeKit, which wasn’t very useful until we started a trial of Apple Music (we’re probably going to switch away from Spotify for reasons). Now, we can tell Siri to play a particular song, album, or artist on all of the speakers in a particular room, without having to name each individual speaker. When selecting music I intend to AirPlay, my phone also suggests the correct speaker based on proximity, which is pretty neat.
Sonos had a bunch of issues last year, when they forced all users to install a newer, more barebones version of their app. We lost access to the alarms that we had set, which was incredibly frustrating. Fortunately, the CEO was replaced with someone way more competent, and the lead designer responsible (who called the move “courage” at the time, echoing Apple) left the company. Since then, the app has just gotten better, and we’ve found things to be much more stable. Sonos pledged not to release any new products in 2025, and instead spent the year improving both their products and their relationship with the community. We’re very happy with our Sonos speakers and will continue to buy more.
Cameras
This has been a tough one to maintain. We’ve long avoided Amazon or Google due to privacy concerns (which have since proven to be true), and have opted to stick with Arlo instead. Initially, it was because Arlo supported HomeKit, but they eventually stopped doing that with newer cameras. The past few years, it’s been mostly about the high cost of switching and lack of serious competition.
To access recordings, Arlo had a fairly affordable subscription fee. I don’t remember what it cost initially, but as of a few years ago, it was $99/year. It has steadily increased every year. Finally, last year, they raised the subscription fees to the point where we just cannot continue, at $230/year. They gave existing customers a one-time discount to $160/year. That was the last money they will ever receive from us.
Just over two years ago, I replaced our NAS with a custom-built Unraid server, and I’m still happy with that decision. Given Synology’s recent hostility towards their customers, I also replaced our Synology network stack with Ubiquiti / Unifi, and that’s worked even better than I had hoped. The next logical step is to replace the cameras with Unifi ones and opt out of subscriptions entirely. I’m planning to complete that before the end of the year – more on that in the future post.
Vacuums
Nothing has changed there. We still have our Roborock S5 vacuums and have no complaints. We’re hoping to replace those eventually. For now, I replaced a bunch of parts, so they work like new.
Curtains / Blinds
Something else I’ve wanted for a long time: automated curtains and blinds. We spent a bunch of time looking at these – IKEA seems to be the most affordable, with Lutron being the most expensive, but neither were really what we were looking for. Anything we could afford were the “honeycomb” or flat shade style, which block the entire window.
We eventually came across SwitchBot’s products, the Curtain 3 and Blind Tilt. Both can be purchased with solar panels, and if you buy their hub, you can connect them all to HomeKit via Matter. We’re using the curtain robots in our bedroom, and the blind robots in our living room. They’ve made a huge difference in our daily routine – in addition to the lights, our “good night” scene closes the bedroom curtains, and our “movie time” scene closes the blinds in the living room to reduce glare on the TV screen. They’re completely hidden by curtains and valances, so most people wouldn’t even notice them.
Appliances
As part of the kitchen remodel, we bought almost all new appliances. In an inescapable part of life in 2025, all of them are smart. We actually set out to buy dumb appliances, but it’s practically impossible to do that now.
We went with GE. After a lot of reading, we found both LG and Samsung have terrible reputations when it comes to longevity. We’re hopeful that our GE induction cooktop, range hood, wall oven, speed oven, and combo washer / dryer last a very long time, both as usable appliances and with the smart features. Honestly, it’s been nice to have “laundry is finished” notifications, especially since the combo unit is like loading a dishwasher: you put your dirty clothes in, and a few hours later, they come out clean. We absolutely love it.
The GE appliances support a bunch of other smart features, but we don’t use any of them – frankly, I couldn’t even get some features to work. For example, you’re supposed to be able to use your phone to scan the barcode on food packaging, and the microwave or oven will automatically set itself based on the instructions it downloads from the internet. For the life of me, I haven’t yet figured out how to do that, so I’ve had to manually cook my chicken nuggets. ☹️
HomeKit / Home Assistant
As anyone that uses HomeKit knows, not everything is supported. Matter is going to make that better, but in the meantime, what do you do? I’ve used Homebridge in the past, and have had Home Assistant running in a Docker container for a long time, too. Both have broader support for devices than HomeKit, and can be used as a bridge to add those devices back to HomeKit.
For example, Matter recently added support for robot vacuums. Roborock supports that natively with some of their vacuums, but you have to buy new hardware for that. However, I can add our existing robot vacuums to Home Assistant using this integration, then using the HomeKit Bridge, add those into HomeKit. Those GE appliances I mentioned earlier? Same thing, they can be added to Home Assistant, then HomeKit. Moen water leak detectors? Those, too – they even show additional information, like the humidity wherever they’re located, and I can build automations based on that information.
We have four Apple TVs, and all are enabled as home hubs for HomeKit. When we started our renovation, we boxed up three of them, and wired the fourth in the basement to ensure it’d always be connected – without it, nothing in HomeKit would be functional. When the renovation finished, and we reconnected the Apple TVs, everything in HomeKit became horribly unstable. Old devices we had deleted suddenly reappeared, renamed devices reverted back to their old names, and devices that were moved between rooms (because they were physically located somewhere else now) moved themselves back to their old rooms. This happened several times, without warning. It was jarring for lights to drop out of their scenes, or not respond at all.
At some point, we built a Google Sheet of all of our HomeKit devices, scenes, and automations. This proved useful, as each time HomeKit blew up, we could manually reconstruct it again. At one point, I completely tore down our HomeKit home and rebuilt it, but still found it was unstable. One morning, we woke up and found all of the Hue lights were ungrouped, removed from their scenes, and were located in the basement (where the Hue bridge is located). I had enough.
At MacDevOps:YVR 2024, our team won Hack Night, and my two teammates generously decided to have me take home the prize: a powerful mini PC generously donated by Protectli. Up until this point, I hadn’t found a use for it, but now, I knew exactly what I was going to do with it: move my Home Assistant install to physical hardware. Initially running as a Docker container, I then tested with a VM in Unraid. That worked well enough, but I wanted it to be separate from the rest of my homelab – since it’s running the house, it had to be rock solid. Home Assistant’s excellent backup and migration system allowed me to move the same install across a container, a VM, and ultimately the mini PC.
At this point, I haven’t given up on HomeKit, but it’s serving a different purpose now: everything is added to Home Assistant first, then ported over to HomeKit via the bridge. This includes devices that support Matter or HomeKit, such as Hue or SwitchBot. We can continue to use Siri or our phones’ proximity to trigger scenes and automations. Even our scenes are now built in Home Assistant and populated in HomeKit, since I don’t trust that HomeKit will preserve our data. At least with Home Assistant, I know there are backups, because I set them up myself. 😉
There has definitely been a learning curve, but the increased stability has proven that this move was the right one.
The Future
As I mentioned, the next thing on my list is to replace the Arlo cameras with Unifi ones. Our Arlo subscription ends in January, so there’s a little bit of time. We’ll need to have our contractors back out to run additional CAT 6, since all of the new cameras use Power over Ethernet (PoE). I can’t wait to have cameras that don’t require recharging!
Soon, Hue is going to add support for migrating a secondary bridge into the Bridge Pro, which will free up an ethernet port on one of the switches in our basement. It’ll be nice to have things further consolidated.
I’m still fine tuning our Home Assistant / HomeKit setup, but I’m nearly there. The last big thing is adaptive lighting, since I can’t use Apple’s (because the lights are actually in Home Assistant and are bridged into HomeKit). The integration includes a ton of options, but I’ve found the documentation somewhat difficult to understand.
And finally, I’ve been running Home Assistant from the Compact Flash card that was included with the Mini PC. I’ve seen a few Reddit threads that mention that this will eventually fry the card, so I bought an M.2 SSD to use instead. I need to find time install that, then move Home Assistant OS (HAOS) to the SSD.
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