$200 Smart Home & Everything You Can Do With It 

I would recommend a Xiaomi gateway and several sensors (doors, motion, plugs...). They're great to start and compatible with other products like Home Assistant if you want to get geek.

I started with some smart socket extensions(model with USB connection) and old phones with Google Assistant. Mainly to control/activate some cheap electrical heaters with their own thermostat. Now each room is only heated to the set temperature on the heater and only during the practical living times. Bedroom night, livingroom day. The old gas heater was consuming too much and failing. And has the nasty disadvantage that it uses only one thermostat but needs to control your whole house. While you usually only use only 2 or 3 rooms during any given period of the day. Everybody is switching off the lights when leaving the rooms, but nobody switches off the heating for this room! Now I cancelled the gas line and stopped paying for the meter-rent, yearly inspections, administration costs etc. All in all my total energy bill has gone way down. And no investment needed for a new kettle. For my shower and water tap I use a sub 110 EURO electrical heater. Which is activated by a flow controller. So also no more loss of water before the temperature reaches the tap and heats up walls and floors. Not to forget that it all switches off automatically when nobody is in the house. By the way. Sockets are near the floor level. So I added a 1 meter USB cable to feed my mobiles and stuck them to the wall with magnet holders/stickers. Giving me a clear reception of an always on Google Assistant and option to bypass routines. And also sort of a night light for the nightly toilet strolls without waking up your partner by switching on the full lights. Next on my list were lights. But as I have many halogen lights I can only switch on/off. That is how I started to experiment before diving into the deep. And I am glad I did as I realised that many suppliers offer a basic kit with their own dedicated HUB. And then only later you will realise that you are fully brand restricted. So I then decided to buy only Assistant certified products.

Tbh if I was you and wanted to do things on a budget I’d go with a raspberry pi3 running home assistant and a sonoff rf bridge flashed with tasmotta for 433hz integration... you can get a lot of very cheep 433 sensors like door/window sensors motion sensors and more...I was buying sensors from AliExpress for a few quid each then adding smart plugs and bulbs and flashing them with Tuya convert.. node red and home assistant can do so much more than using Alexa routines but you can still add a few echo devices if you want to use voice control as well as the home assistant phone app

I'd recommend home-assistant/node-red then you don't need either the Xiaomi gateway nor smart things. Buy a usb cc2531 ZigBee stick and use zigbee2mqtt. You can use all the Xiaomi aqara sensors. Everything's local and no gateways needed.

Blink XT2 WiFi cameras. Excellent bits of kit that work very well with Alexa.

Thanks! I agree that other RU-vidrs shouldn't use the wake words. Maybe one day they will catch on.

ok...why

@@dymondwillow2 when you watch a video where the person doesn't do that, it'll trigger your device which can be really annoying, especially if you have several and they all start running different commands before you can cancel them

Smart Home Solver your a saint

Every video I saw now, they all censed it lol

Thanks!

Thanks Hugh! I appreciate it!

this is where the K.I.S.S factor comes in.. keep it simple stu-

dis :D

Significant ostrich?

@garbanzobeans significant otter, got it.

Yess lad

Thanks! It's good to slowly build out your set up so it isn't too overwhelming.

I'm glad to hear you enjoyed the video! Those are some great ideas for automation! Thanks for sharing.

What are you doing on our patch, you mingin' dog bUtches?! 😁

We have govee too, that style of light is just ubiquitous

Govee owns minger. We have govee in the us too.

Can you share the link from where you bought them?

Thanks I appreciate it! That's a great suggestion and I will do a video like that soon. I have some ideas of devices that I could recommend but I need to test a few more before making that video. That way I can feel confident in my recommendations.

@@SmartHomeSolver I would be highly interested in this idea of categorizing smart home devices by durability and expected life span. Additional video idea: How to build a smart home in a rental house or apartment. The goal would be to implement solutions that are easily removed and transported to another rental when you move. I suspect the “Renter’s Smart Home” video could help open the smart home market to a lot of people who feel locked out because they don’t own the place they live in.

Thanks Brett!

@@SmartHomeSolver is the blink mini a good camera and how water proff is it you can show my name idc

Haha well don't get overwhelmed. Just take it slow. Think of something you might want to automate. Set up one device. Try it out. You can always move the sensors or change it up.

I know, I can’t wait 😊 🤞🏽

@@mannychinchilla how did you know hes a programmer for wyze 😡

Jim Bob 😂....... Jim I am your father

@@mannychinchilla 😱😱🥺

Jim Bob since we just became best friends can your dad get me one of those new outdoor Wyze cams for freeeees thanks

What I would say as an update, is that you should get an Aqara G2H or any of their hub cameras and their sensors, since Wyze had their security controversy and Wyze Sense is discontinued anyways, and that Lifx’s parent company is in administration, so maybe avoid them (see pinned r/Lifx threads).

Thanks for the tip!

That's great to hear! Thanks!

How do you go across a sink/window in kitchen with the strip? They say they can be cut but will the cut strip still work? Just got the same light strip...

Thanks Shane!

Thanks I appreciate it!

I agree most rooms should have motion sensors because it's very convenient. At 5:41 you can see a screenshot of the Alexa Routine to have this work. You will need some type of Echo device like an Echo Dot. A motion sensor, here I'm using the Wyze Sense motion sensor because they are very inexpensive and a smart light switch or bulb. In the Alexa app create a new Routine and I did a video a while back on Alexa Routines ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-QuByECkIXZs.html

Thanks!

I don't know if I have done one with just like that. I don't have a room dedicated to gaming or a theater room right now. But that's a good use case and I could show how to do that. I appreciate the suggestion!

Yes they are great for making lights smart without replacing every bulb!

Thanks! I am always uploading videos of the newest tech I'm using. I was also thinking about doing another video for those with a higher budget. Great idea though.

Smart Home Solver I didn’t realise this video was so recent (I thought it was older for some reason). Anyway I’ll be copying some of the stuff you have, with some tweaks to suit my needs. I have a ring doorbell, Yale conexis, Alexa TV with ambilight, Philips hue bulbs, and Hive, so far. And oh a Yale home alarm.

Yes this is a new update. Wyze sensors can work with IFTTT but with Alexa routines it's much faster and way easier to use than IFTTT.

@@SmartHomeSolver Thanks for the vids. I read reviews on the WYZE products and the door-windows sensor get some poor reviews like, short distances to hold connections, hyper battery usage, works until you need it and so on. Have you found the magic to make these items work as they should or do you find them "touchy" at times ?

I did run into an issue but it was something that I created myself. I had the Wyze Sense bridge attached to the Wyze Cam Pan and the camera was mounted on an outlet. The issue was the short cord that came with the outlet mount couldn't provide enough power for the bridge and the camera so the Wyze Sense would go offline occasionally. Once I switched the bridge to another camera everything started working again. So my guess is something like that might be happening to other people.

Thanks for subscribing! I appreciate it. That's great feedback, I'll have to think about something like that for future videos.

They are just one light strip cut in half. I added connectors amzn.to/2OIf2bt to the first half of the light strip to connect a wire, similar to this amzn.to/2K9pjfS and the end of that wire connects to the second half of the light strips. That way there is only one power source for both sides.

I appreciate you sharing it! I have the Echo Flex in my bathroom right now with the motion sensor but the garage is a great place for it.

Can the Google Home Mini do the same as Alexa dot?

@@M1H4D they operate almost the same. Ive got both... google sounds better, but the dot is better for setting up routines with other devices and in home intercom

@@Jluda05can you give me an example of what type of routines are better on Alexa? I also heard Google home is much easier to setup and set the routines.

@@M1H4D sure thing... So I have the wyze sense in my home that lets you get notifications to your phone when a door is open or motion. With Google it's integrated, but only allows to do so much. I have a routine setup where Alexa will say the front door is open, which Google doesn't have that option yet.

@@Jluda05 that makes sense, I got a free Google home mini from Spotify Premium, so I'm already using that, and since I use that for my master bedroom can I integrate alexa aswell and have it in the living room? For this more advanced "door open" voice notifications? Also, does alexa work with any of the Multipurpose Sensors from Smartthings to know the door was opened? I'm new to this the Smart Home space, thank you for your help!

You'll likely need apps to set up each product. Then if you want to automate everything within one app (like SmartThings or Alexa), you can use just that app to create automations or routines. Once everything is all set up, you'll be able to mostly use your voice to control everything if you want, or even have things work on their own.

Thanks!

I have a few videos comparing: light strips: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-fZ1pgsbHGhI.html and bulbs: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-osauwVoP4a8.html Hopefully those help you find what you are looking for.

Not right now with Google Assistant routines. Google is about to push some updates that hopefully will allow that though.

I'll check that out. Thanks for the suggestion!

It's not the friendliest device out there but fully open software AND hardware should be celebrated. It supports MQTT, IFTTT, HomeKit (through HomeBridge), its own Blynk app and a basic web interface with a simple toggle/open/close HTTP GET API available. It also supports add-on modules for temperature/humidity. Hopefully ConnectedHomeIP can make these sort of devices as good as the commercial offerings in the future.

Thanks for the sub!