New House - Suggestions

[cfrudolphy]

Hi All

I am an avid reader of forum posts and in the past have asked and received some excellent advice from others on the forum.

I have been using Homeseer 3 for a little over a year now on an older Win10 box in a home I have lived in for the last 33 years. My wife and I decided that we needed to downsize (don't need 4 bedrooms and 2-1/2 baths just for us and a couple of dogs). The house is up for sale and we are looking at smaller used homes, some of which will need a significant amount of work to make it right for us. This give me the opportunity to plan a home automation system from the ground up.

This will be a one story home in the neighborhood of 3 bedrooms, 2 baths and about 1500 sq ft. Homes in Texas like this will typically be built on a slab and have an accessible attic, making structured wiring easier. With that said following is what I want to try to control and the components I already have. Note I can build a custom more powerful computer if necessary.

1.) One Central Point of entry for internet/TV service, i.e. server room.
2.) Additional Electrical outlets to power items with battery backup
3.) Server Rack
4.) Managed Switch to distribute ethernet
5.) Use of Power over Ethernet for at least IP Cameras and Arduino.
6.) Server/Servers for Services listed
7.) Every room wired for ethernet with small un-managed switches when needed for a room for Smart TV, Smart DVD player, AV Receiver, etc.
8.) All IP cameras wired POE

Services
1.) HomeSeer - Harmony Hub and Alexa (Echo & Dot)
a.) Media Center management with Whole House Audio - Thinking about using either a ClearOne Gentner XAP800 or RasberryPI/HiFiBerry Dac/Max2Play/Squeezbox. Also have Harmony Hub.
b.) Door Lock and Sensors on exterior entry doors - Have 1 Schlage BE469 Z-Wave Door Lock
c.) Garage Door Control
d.) Lighting Management
e.) Climate Management - Have Honeywell Z-Wave Thermostat
f.) Occupancy Management - Have IP Cameras & Aeon Labs Multisensor & Everspring Motion Sensor
g.) Irrigation - Using an Arduino solution now that works great for timing & duration. Want to integrate rain sensor/soil moisture at some date.
2.) Blue Iris for POE IP Cameras - Have 1 interior and 1 exterior Foscam Camera now and will add more.
3.) Network Files/Media Files/DLNA server
4.) Centralized backup

My HomeSeer system now looks like this:

HomeSeer Version: HS3 Standard Edition 3.0.0.318 (Windows)
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 10 Home - Work Station
Number of Devices: 296
Number of Events: 47
Plug-Ins Enabled: BLShutdown:,BLUPS:,UltraMon3:,HSTouch Server:,BLBackup:,Arduino Plugin:,SDJ-Health:,weatherXML:,Z-Wave:,MQTT:,BLLock:,MediaController:
Processor Type and Speed: Intel64 Family 6 Model 15 Stepping 13 at 2.24 GHz

I sure would appreciate anyone's opinion on any particular part of my list as to best practice to setup and run, including suggestions for components etc.

I am particularly interested in Media Management/Whole House Audio. This seems to be a very complicated endeavor depending upon your needs and wants. I will say this that while I have read many positive things about Sonos that is more than I want to spend. I already have a nice media center consisting of a Samsung 42" LCD Display, Yamaha RX-479 AV Receiver, Panasonic Smart Bluray Player, Roku, and a Wii for our living room. A 48" Samsung Smart LCD TV, Panasonic Smart Bluray Player, and a Samsung sound bar with wireless sub-woofer in the master bedroom.

I want to thank all that have responded to my posts for help in the past and I look forward to your advice moving forward.

Chuck

[integlikewhoa]

Scrap the foscam's and make room for sonos and wired alarm panel for all the doors, windows and motions.

[cfrudolphy]

New House

OK, you like Sonos over the less expensive solutions. I assume because of ease of setup and integration with Homeseer. Thanks for your opinion.

You like an alarm system again over the do it yourself way. Whose alarm system do you use and does it integrate into Homeseer?

Again thanks for posting!

Chuck

[integlikewhoa]

OK, you like Sonos over the less expensive solutions. I assume because of ease of setup and integration with Homeseer. Thanks for your opinion.

You like an alarm system again over the do it yourself way. Whose alarm system do you use and does it integrate into Homeseer?

Again thanks for posting!

Chuck

Hard to say if sonos is the more expensive solution or not depending on the number of rooms and amount of sound. There is always a cheaper solution but how well does it work? Turning on and off amps takes time. Making an announcement with say harmony remotes swaping an input on a tv reciever to make an announcement over the same speakers that you listen to surround sound doesnt work as well as having a "play 1" in each room. Now when you get into things like a sonos play bar I think its way over priced.

Sonos is really easy to use and intergrates well with alot of things. Its not the only solution though.


Im not sure what the do it yourself way is, but I use my own alarm system I bought and installed it myself. I broke a sweat a few times and it felt very do it yourself as i was pulling the wiring. I use GE/caddx nx8-e but honeywell and dsc are very popular with homeseer. There is a plugin for the caddx as well as others. All zones dont use batteries, react fast, dont sleep, and show up in homeseer like any other zwave sensor but more reliable.

Enjoy

[tenholde]

I vote for SONOS if you can afford it.

Same for alarm, ElkM1, if you can afford it.

Stick with Windows for server. I'm looking at using a laptop.

tenholde

[Rvtravlr]

Don't scrimp on wire quality for your ethernet runs.

[panda2297]

I echo a lot of the responses here in Sonos. I tried other solutions before and while they did indeed work. They were not close to the 100% reliability of when I move to Sonos.

In regards to the ethernet, you mentioned coverage to all your rooms. One thing that I would make sure is that you have ethernet to the doorbell. That way you can go with an Ethernet doorbell solution like DoorBird.

[Pete]

One Central Point of entry for internet/TV service, i.e. server room.

On a new one story home build here put a closet in or around the center of the home and wired for satellite on one side of the home and Internet on the other side of the home. Most of the wiring was in the attic.

Before DIYing the cabling did pencil in the home construction drawings what I wanted and where. The GC quoted me a price of around $15,000.00 USD without any termination for the low voltage wiring. This price was an add to an already included in the base price of alarm wiring (with no terminations). Thinking he just used regular high voltage adds as a base for his numbers. That said I just bought the cable and asked the contractor if I could do it at night or on a weekend. Did the cabling on a weekend starting on a FRI night and was done by SUN. After completion of the home build went originally to the Alarm panel company that installed the alarm cables asking them to terminate all of the ends and add an alarm panel with some bells and whistles. That quote was $8000.00. (which freaked me out a bit) I purchased an OmniPro 2, terminated all of the alarm wires and connected them to the OmniPro 2 panel. Baby steps wise over the course of a few months and a day here or there or whenever I had time.

Two story post construction built server room (section) and wiring section. Build a chase from the basement to the attic around center of home. Wired first floor from basement and second floor from attic.

While in the attic put in a cat walk, electric chandelier lift and ran extra catxx for stuff in the attic. (original WAP was in the attic).

It was much more difficult to fish and terminate cabling with closed walls than in the new house build with open walls and it took a lot longer.

I would make a one wire run a day project doing it a little bit at a time. (fishing wire from the wiring panel to the chase start in the basement, then main floor, then second floor and finally the attic). One CCTV run went from outside brick to the garage attic, up to the main attic, then down the center of the house chase.

Electric panel went to more fuses with less loads on them. Surge protection inside panel and outside by AC compressor. Ground tweaking.

Irrigation - Using an Arduino solution now that works great for timing & duration. Want to integrate rain sensor/soil moisture at some date.

Gutted a new Rainbird installation here using the box. That said I was present when it was being installed and asked and got new PVC for LV / HV wires to the edges of the property. (CCTV et al).

I ran catXX to the rainbird box from the then location of the Homeseer server and used that for a long serial link to two Rain8Nets. Later built a Dockstar Debian box to run mcsSprinklers inside of the old Rainbird box. Connected some sensors to the configuration (water meters, digital rain sensor, weather station data indirectly polling the data).

Audio here using Russound. Before Russound did wire 16/4 and 16/2 and catxx to each location for speakers and used the Leviton Chopin system. The speaker wire was more expensive than the catXX for me. I would probably do this again. Did it initially before any automation such that it was on the top of my list.

Many times here I refer to the following set of documents posted on Cocoontech. It is old but still valid today. Well stuff like may be you want to automate your blinds type of stuff.

Wiring Your House 102 checklist

[Kerat]

New House - Suggestions

I am very lucky, I am surrounded by people on this forum and in person whom have been doing home automation far longer than I have. I have had the benefit of learning from them an not making the same mistakes.

HOME AUTOMATION:
1. If you are using a wireless based control of your lighting (Zwave, zingbee, etc) I would advise pick a high central location for your transceiver and build a good mesh network out from there.

2. The other optimal alternative is to run two network attached transceivers on opposite ends of your house. You would need another network run, to connect them to your LAN, and I would recommend DHCP IP reservation for them as well. You could then use your central HS3 windows server to control them.

NETWORKING:
1. Don't skimp on your Cat5e/Cat6 cabling. Get good cabling. Use nicer wall jacks and a good patch panel to tie everything into. Doing it right the first time will save you later if you need to work or diagnose problems.

2. Pick a high quality firewall. They are a little more work to implement, but they will have far better performance and do a better job protecting your home.

I went with a PFsense firewall, and built it in a mini PC with 2 NICs. PFSense has a ton of features configured that do most of the heavy lifting of protecting and securing my network. SOHO routers are easy to setup but their firmware is often less than optimal for securing your network imho. There are good alternatives out there that can be loaded on these routers (TOMATO, DD-WRT).

3. Centrally managed wifi. I would go unifi for your wifi. Run a specific network drop in the middle of your attic just for a unifi UAP-AC-LITE UAP-AC-PRO UAP-AC-HD. The controller software (Mac, Linux, and windows compatible) isn't required to run 24x7, but is nice to have when you want to make changes. The alternative is to use their smartphone client.

4. Managed POE switch Cisco SG200 SG300 "P" model or unifi US-24-250W/US-48-500W.

5. Here I setup the passive unifi controller software on a Raspberry Pi I had laying around.

WHOLE HOME AUDIO:
SONOs is designed to be competitive with the total price to have WHA installed in a home. Here I'm looking at a monoprice or Russsound. Understand that this is conventionally a substantial investment. There is a lot of expense tied to the panels, wiring, and quality speakers, and installation. You can cut a good deal of this out if you are willing to put in some leg work.

SECURITY CAMS:
I am Leary of IOT devices for security reasons. I would recommend creating a segregated internal subnet only LAN for your ip cameras and configuring them to only access your NVR in the specific inbound port required. This will protect your home network from remote code execution on the IP CAMS.

What's more I would recommend further disallowing the ip camera LAN from having any internet access to keep them from phoning home, traversing the home firewall with a vpn, or becoming compromised via hacking attempts from the public Internet.


HOUSE ALARM:
Here, I'm working on parting together a DSC based unit. My plan is to tie in door/window sensors to all exterior entry points, motion sensors in the main areas, and glass breakage in the living room, kitchen, and basement family room. Lo
I'm going to tie it into my home automation with an envisalink network interface and the plugin.

MEDIA CENTER:
I'm currently using EMBY for my media center. It is pretty sweet for streaming my content. I have a MINI PC in my living room that also plays content. I have a third unit that was running Kodi with an Emby plugin that I am working on switching over to emby. We round it out with Emby clients installed on our smartphones, and kid's tablets.

We took a family vacation a few months ago and it was pretty sweet to have all of our children's shows readily available on their tablets.

Recently, I added live tv usingn an HDHomerun prime. Now Emby also functions as a DVR.

I am considering also testing a standalone DVR system like media portal or nextpvr.

IRRIGATION CONTROL
Here I have a Rachio, and a rain bird rain and freeze sensor. It works flawlessly.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[sidepipe]

Just to re-iterate what people have said above... don't scrimp on the cabling. Use Cat7 if you can, make it as future proof as you can because one thing you won't want to do is re-wire later.

I personally use HDBT to distribute all sources from my media rack to the whole house - whilst it's expensive and you may not want it yet, if you do in the future you'll need good cabling in place. It's nice to be able to see any source in any room in UHD though

[ufd108]

You sound fairly tech savvy so one suggestion I would make is to use a managed switch between the router and your wiring. Managed switches have many advantages, but the main reason I have managed switches is to create VLANS. This way I can isolate traffic. With so many IoT devices these days, and most of them having piss-poor security (look at the attack that took down Dyn recently; DoS attack launched from IoT devices), this allows me to keep things that have no business in my personal files out of the core of the network.

Also allows me to assign higher priority to all my devices than the wife's devices . She's not a techie so she'll never know!!!!

[ahuefner]

Automation Planning

If you plan to house equipment such as switches, cable amps, security controller, etc. in your central panel and you intend to recess the panel in the wall, make sure it backs up to conditioned space and not exposed on the rear to high temps that exist in the summer in unconditioned areas. You also need to plan for space around the panel to locate wireless items such as the Wifi router, zwave controller, battery backup unit, etc.

Future proof as much as possible. A large part of TV is likely to become internet based in the future. Put lots of bandwidth between your panel and the wall locations for TV. Put power receptacles behind each TV location. I agree with hardwiring windows, doors, and motions used for security. You can use wireless motions for lighting automation. Beyond the standard items, I put in a zwave controlled far end circulation for instant hot water(requires 3rd line) activated by motion detectors in each bath. Once it runs, I lock it out for 15 minutes to save on pump cycling. I also have a whole house automatic Generac generator and have zwave monitoring for generator start and stops, and for general fault contacts provided by the generator. I recommend door lock control and garage door. I use an ELK M1 security controller and have the interface for the Zee S2 which lets me use the wired security inputs for automation actions as well. I wanted one voice so I use the ELK for all voice and have the Zee sending tasks to the ELK to announce Automation related voice statements. Also plan for integrating your Smoke and CO detectors into your security system to send external notifications.

[ghostrider1111]

I know this is an older post but I have 2 recommendations.

1. 1 1/2 inch pvc minimum with sweeping 90s (as few as possible) from your server room to each of your media locations (tv, sound system, etc.). Helps for the future proof and extra wiring you may not have thought about.

2. Look at media devices that connect to your devices natively. What I mean by this is either selecting a platform (echo dots with fire tv, google home platform, etc.) or selecting your devices (cameras, sound systems, etc) for cross platform access. This way you can have voice command through the newer technology to view those devices directly as well as controlled with homeseer.