Nice, a new house. We’re going to redo all the electrical wiring. In my current house, I have Philips Hue everywhere with wireless dimmers on the walls. Now I thought, let’s take a step forward in technology.
All lights: Matter over Thread, connected to Homey Pro of course. On the walls: push switches from, for example, JUNG, or a smart switch that fits into JUNG, Gira, etc.
This switch should have the following features:
Permanent power supply (never replace a battery again and also acts as a Thread router)
Fits in a JUNG frame or sits behind a JUNG push button (JUNG can also be Gira or Niko)
Controls the lights via Matter over Thread, wirelessly, because the lights themselves are already smart
But I can’t find this anywhere. Either they’re wireless and don’t fit in a frame, or they do fit but are for dumb lights, like Ecodim.
Hi Peter,
I understand what you’re saying, but right now I have everything fully set up with Hue and it works about 98% fine.
1% because occasionally a light stays on, and 1% because sometimes I have to press the switch twice to turn on all the lights.
My idea now is to pull all the switch wires anyway, just in case I ever want to make the house “dumb” again, but then work with permanently powered Matter-over-Thread switches. However, I can’t find those anywhere.
P.S. This reminds me that in the past there also weren’t any good built-in switches for Philips Hue, until Friends of Hue came along.
General instability of Thread Border Routers (even worse when combining multiple TBRs in a network, though that’s not supported by Homey Pro); instability of Thread devices; and for Homey Pro specifically, it’s use of multi-PAN Zigbee/Thread on a single radio, which mostly discouraged nowadays and is not great if you also have more than a few Zigbee devices.
Basically the only somewhat stable setup I’ve found (after tinkering with Homey Pro, Apple TBR, etc.) is using HA with ZBT-2 (exposing devices to Homey through the HA community app, the official app is too limited). And even then, adding an IKEA ALPSTUGA yesterday knocked out another Thread + Matter device out of the network (ironically also IKEA).
We have had Hue for ~10 years, I don’t think we ever had a problem. I have used non-Hue Zigbee and Z-Wave for a while now and rarely have problems. Thread + Matter has been nothing but problems.
Stick with what works, let others be the beta testers.
So, I haven’t found a switch that fits behind a Jung frame with Matter over Thread. But besides a Thread network, I also have a regular Wi-Fi network and a Homey Pro. Now I’m thinking of the following setup:
Matter over Thread lights (like Ikea)
Jung momentary push button 531u
Behind it: Shelly i4 Gen3
Homey with flows
The idea: a Matter over Thread network, also suitable for other devices like magnetic contacts. As few hubs and bridges as possible.
Possible downside: I have the impression that Matter over Thread is still experimental, and of course, that’s not the case with Hue.
The CO2 sensor is not really great, see my post here for a comparison against SenseAir S88 and SwitchBot Meter Pro CO2 (presumably SCD4x):
The CO2 sensor is really noisy (it’s not an NDIR sensor), frequently going up/down as much as 80 PPM in a few minutes, which does not work well for threshold based actions (and makes reading from the display pretty useless). For CO2 measurements, a SwitchBot Meter Pro CO2 is much better IMO (and only slightly more expensive when it goes on offer again), has a much more usable display and can work on batteries with a 5 minute interval.
The KAJPLATS bulb has worked ok-ish for me (a lot of dropouts early on, but with my simplified Thread network it seems stable), but I am probably going to replace it with a Tradfri bulb that I still have (bought some Zigbee devices before they went out of stock ) or Hue. Devices that everyone in the household uses, they cannot be ‘usually stable’, they have to be ‘always stable’. I’ll probably keep the Eve Plug, the Timmerflotte and the Alpstuga as a small Thread + Matter network to keep track of Thread + Matter development. But I won’t use it for anything critical for the time being.
Aside from all this, Thread + Matter is a privacy nightmare in the making. Thread 1.4 requires all border routers to support NAT64 and assignment of global IPv6 addresses (not just IPv6 ULA addresses). I am pretty sure that soon some vendors will use it to do analytics improve device experiences. I mean, the Thread 1.4 white paper is pretty literal what this means:
Thread devices can now seamlessly connect directly to cloud services, enabling remote control, monitoring, and over-the-air firmware updates.
In my new home, I would have a smart fuse for each room.
Possibly several in rooms like the kitchen with a lot of power-consuming equipment.
This is to monitor power consumption and be able to turn off the fuse automatically if the fire alarm triggers.
Every light in the room would be physically connected to a switch, but smart, and a presence sensor in each room.
Then you can physically press the light if something with the smart house were to fail.
The worst thing for the rest of the family is not being able to press a button if something were to fail. Fine for the person who made it, you usually know what needs to be done, but the rest of the family gets very irritated.
I would also install pull pipes for speakers in each room for notifications if there were something + music.
And fire alarms connected with cable but also smart.
Plugs over windows for smart curtains.
Enough outside connectors for Christmas lights on all sides. Can use smart plugs here.
And make a cabinet where everything is controlled from in the same room as the fuse box where you can control everything from with enough outlets (min 6) for wifi, homey, internet, etc.
And make enough conduit so that the nodes from wifi can have wired internet, wifi nodes are not good. I use ASUS WIFI Mesh wired with 2 nodes. Works almost perfectly, should have had 1 more on one side of the house.
Most likely i have forgotten something but if i am building a new house i would think about this for months
To be honest, I would not rely too much/solely on smart home devices for safety. What if your smart hub decides to catch fire? Or if Homey Pro decides to show the dreaded red ring when the house is on fire? IMO a smart hub should always be an add-on/extra when it comes to safety. For core safety you should probably use core safeguards like proper circuit breakers, residual current devices and arc detection fuses (the latter sadly do not seem very common in Europe yet?):
But I don’t think anyone is a safety expert here, probably best to ask an electrician or fire safety expert.
Of course, then a smoke sensor to disable power when smoke is detected is a nice extra failsafe.
Also, if you have a cooking top or heater that burns any kind of fuel, do not forget a CO alarm. For some reason most people have smoke alarms, but no CO alarms. I think Bosch has some good smoke + CO + CO2 detectors (all-in-one). We only use a dumb CO alarm, we are full-electric, but we have it just in case someone in a neighboring apartment manages to have a leaking heater or pipe.
Thats way all the alarms should be wired together. So all go off no matter what. The one reporting fire turns off the fuse for that room and lights on in the rest of the house.
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