Our smart HUF HAUS has woken up

Finally, there's news from our smart house-building project. It has been quiet here on the blog for a long time. That wasn't just because we moved into the house, but also because our daughter was born in the meantime. So many events at once do throw your personal schedule for creating content into disarray. So what has been finished in the meantime?

I'm doing the complete KNX setup of the Gira environment in the X1 and S1 myself. Even though I had never worked with it before, it works surprisingly well and intuitively. At this point, I can highly recommend Kai's YouTube channel - SplendidMinds and the accompanying Facebook group. I really got help with everything there. His large app store of his own, with countless free extensions, is brilliant too. So his commitment and his contribution to the Gira community deserve a very grateful mention here!

So far, I've set up everything except the Philips Hue topic. Unfortunately, the lights don't yet behave the way I want them to, but it'll get there. A little money-saving tip: I use a Philips Hue Bridge 2.0, but bought all the Zigbee bulbs from Paulmann instead. Top quality and a bit cheaper than the original Hue products. I bought all my bulbs on Black Friday and got a 30% discount.

When you build a HUF HAUS, you sit down with HUF's lighting planners during the planning process. However, their partner supplier (at the time we built) didn't offer any smart products at all. On the other hand, the lamps were all incredibly expensive. We now have more intelligence in our lamps, but at a much more attractive price. I think more needs to happen on the supply side here in the future.

The entire home network is built on Ubiquiti products (Unifi). Here, too, I watched a lot of YouTube videos for the setup. Dennis's YouTube channel deserves special mention. I sat down with him digitally beforehand and discussed my basic architecture. A big thank-you to him as well for his commitment. His videos are brutally honest, which is why I valued his opinion so much.

The server rack now holds a 48-port PoE switch, the Dream Machine and a Synology NAS in a RAID array. The whole rack is connected to the backup power provided by the house battery. I took care of procuring, installing and setting up the hardware myself. HUF doesn't do that – their scope ends at the building's service connection point. At this point, I'd like to point out once again that my personal effort to get a fiber-optic connection installed really paid off! If it had been up to Deutsche Telekom and their standard process, there would now be an old-fashioned copper cable in the house.

At the beginning, I had toyed with the idea of running network management and monitoring on a Raspberry Pi. I have to admit that I'm glad I didn't and do everything with the Dream Machine instead. It's simply an excellent compromise between flexibility, convenience and the time needed for maintenance. I just don't have the time anymore to build and maintain everything myself down to the smallest detail. Things simply have to work now – something that probably everyone with a child can relate to.

Besides pure network management, I also handled all the surveillance technology via the Dream Machine and Unifi products. I swapped the originally planned and super expensive Gira 106 door intercom system for a G4 Doorbell Pro. I get more smart features for less money. For example: with the Gira 106 system, you quickly end up at €6,000 with fingerprint, camera and microphone. The G4 (for €280) also has an extra camera, higher resolution, NFC and Bluetooth.

My Synology NAS has really paid off. I don't just use it as a data dump for all the data from the house, but also to model and visualize it. All my Docker containers run on it as well. A small tip: when buying a Synology NAS, make sure it supports container management. The cheaper entry-level NAS models don't allow container management. You can read here which models support it.

I forward the data from the Gira X1 to InfluxDB, from where it is visualized in a Grafana dashboard (also a container). A big thank-you here to Matthias as well, who runs a great YouTube channel about home automation.

Paperless-ngx now runs on the NAS too. It's open-source software for the paperless office. It wasn't on my agenda at all before, but now all our documents are simply managed there and tagged, indexed and backed up using AI. Access is either via PC or, the smart way, via mobile phone.

I won't go into too much depth about security. It wouldn't make sense to explain all the security mechanisms – then everyone would know them ;-) What you can see from the outside, though, are the various cameras. By default, they are equipped with person detection. All feeds are stored for a certain period of time.

What I'm planning is to run AI-powered image recognition on the home server that continuously analyzes the images. Depending on the object, certain functions are then to be triggered via the KNX system. For example, turning on the light or triggering an alarm. For this, I came across Frigate NVR – it can later also be integrated nicely into Home Assistant. Also a free open-source project. The whole thing then becomes truly intelligent, and you avoid installing “dumb” motion sensors.

Energy management is an incredibly exciting topic, but also time-consuming. I installed the Sunny Smart Home Manager. It currently records the energy consumption and generation data. I have to say that Sunny isn't exactly covering itself in glory here, because the whole thing feels a bit out of date. For example, I can't set up a simple way to retrieve the data. That requires an (unnecessary) workaround via a file server. Why, Sunny? You also need different apps to interact with all the Sunny services. That, too, completely misses what customers need.

For the future, I'm planning to use Tibber to be able to respond more flexibly to electricity market prices.

In summary, almost everything is running as planned for now! Yes :-) What's really time-consuming now is the fine-tuning to round everything off and connect it all better. I somewhat underestimated the effort for that, but the manufacturers really don't make it easy either. The big goal of eventually having everything in one environment will take a little more time. I'll keep you posted.