The FINAL Tour of my Flat's Home Network & Smart Home Setup! 

Cameroon, will you install pinkyblue lights in your new place ?

Thanks! As for the switches, with this setup, the multi-gig switch is essentially acting as the aggregation switche as all ofther switches are connected to this one - they aren't really daisy chained. Adding in a dedicated aggregation switch would just move the single point of failure - in a HA enterprise environment you'd have redundant aggregation switches. While I could definitely uplink all of the switches to the OPNSense firewall, the issue with this is that now any LAN traffic between the switches would then need to be forwarded by the firewall's CPU which is significantly slower than a switch chip. For a small setup such as this, you'd probably be better off actually daisy chaining the switches and then connecting both the first and last switches on the chain back into the firewall to form a ring then use STP to block ports to prevent a loop forming. That way, if any switch in the chain were to fail, the others would still have a route back to the firewall.

@@camerongray1515 makes sense! Didn’t even consider a ring, that’s a clever solution!

Thanks! Everything is generally unscripted except for sometimes having a quick checklist of things I need to remember to cover. Although, this does result in an absolute tonne of outtakes and parts needing re-recorded several times before I get them how I want the!

I would love to know too. Looking forward to the new house setup

They're separate, this is the sort of scenario where while I could separate the storage, it would just add additional complexity and points of failure for no real benefit. Sure in an enterprise environment where you have highly available SAN storage and a large number of VM hosts and want to easily migrate and failover VMs between hosts then networked VM storage can make sense, but not when it comes to a single VM host and a single NAS. Nothing is encrypted on these machines themselves, any particularly sensitive files can still be encrypted individually. The offsite backups are however encrypted before transmission using Rclone's "Crypt" feature as the offsite backup server isn't in a completely secure location and other people do have physical access to it.

Very good question! The install in the house will have a bunch of differences, some due to simply having more space to work with but also some based on learnings from the flat (and other installs I've done since). I'll probably keep thinking of more of these so will try to cover them in future videos. - Everything will now be in one large rack in a central location rather than being split across two and the rack will be far away from any living areas so I no longer need to worry about noise. All of the HDMI distribution kit will also be centralised. - A rack deep enough to mount full size servers, this was partially a space issue in the flat but the deepest rack I had was 600mm deep so could only mount short depth servers which made things awkward. I'll instead be using a full 1000mm deep rack so that I can fit full size servers if I want to. - Wiring in a way that that I'm not reliant on smart technologies long term. For example, yesterday I was installing downlights in the kitchen. Long term I'll be installing smart bulbs so can easily zone lights however I want them, but I still pulled in a pair of separate feeds to allow me to physically switch two different zones of lights separately. I also pulled in a cable from the light switch to be used for future under-cabinet lights. I could have easily not done this and instead relied on smart switching, but pulling the cable means I can revert back to traditional switching at a future date. - Wired alarm system - The wireless system in the flat was great, but the PIRs would sleep after they detected motion to save battery which was fine for alarm purposes but meant that they couldn't really be used for home automation tasks. - Keeping "core" cable routes accessible as possible. Of course there will always need to be cables that run through finished walls or under hard to remove flooring materials, but I plan to keep the main runs that carry the majority of cables as accessible as possible (in trunking inside cupboards, high up in the attic above any future loft boarding, under carpeted floors instead of hard ones) - this will make pulling in future cables an easier, less destructive process. - Ideally a dedicated RCBO for "core infrastructure". Like, the flat, the new house still has a split load consumer unit (because apparently spending a tiny bit more on RCBOs is way too unreasonable for an expensive new house!). This meant that if I were to trip an RCD, I'd also knock out the servers and network kit. I'll probably convert this to a fully RCBO board in the future (thankfully Hager boards can be converted without being fully replaced) and will then put the network kit on a dedicated RCBO so it's resilient against needing to turn a circuit off, or accidentally tripping something. I'll also install a UPS in the rack and may even look into using the UPS to feed a couple of sockets around the house for certain equipment. - I also want to spend more time testing and prototyping things before installing them. This was also a bit harder to do in the flat due to having such little space to work with meaning that i often had to install things and then set them up which resulted in things getting rushed and never quite working as well as I wanted them to. In particular, I want to really focus on figuring out the control of the HDMI distribution system, I had it working but it was always a little bit clunky and intermittent.

@@camerongray1515 Thanks for the comprehensive and interesting answer!

@@camerongray1515 Its a real shame about the split load board, our new build house from a few years ago was split load as well. Would of thought all RCBO would be mandatory by now, I guess they didnt put in an SPD in either which would be nice to have. Regarding UPS, I have seen some people go down the route of using seperate Inverter and batteries usually used for solar/off-grid for a more cost-effective UPS equivalent (especially if you want to support other household loads), but not sure if you can enable safe-shutdown on servers with kit like that.

​@@TomMorris1Probably the classic case of builders saving money wherever they can...

I ended up swapping from that setup to TrueNAS just to keep things simpler, the flexibility of expansion was nice with mergerfs/snapraid but I just feel more comfortable with the data integrity protection and "set and forget" nature of TrueNAS. It just wasn't going to really be an exiting enough project to make a video on.

Yes, the cabinet and all network cabling were left behind although the networking equipment came out (except the patch panel and PDU). I also left the alarm system (but removed the UART to Ethernet adapter), removed the in-wall touchscreens since they wouldn't work without my Home Assistant server and swapped all of the smart switches back to regular switches. I'll be releasing another video shortly showing the process of taking everything out and getting the place ready for a "normal" person to move in.

@@camerongray1515 I bet the neighbours will be pleased with a "normal" person.

I ended up needing to return it (updated the original video with a pinned comment but didn't have time to make a dedicated video on the issue) - I found that occasionally the OpenTherm connection on the Heatmiser would drop until the hub was restarted, this only happened once every couple of months or so however what made this issue worse was that when the OpenTherm comms dropped, the boiler would run the heating continuously at full power. The same would happen if the OpenTherm cable was completely disconnected, Viessmann couldn't get to the bottom of this either. The problem was that with both of these issues combined together, it meant that once every couple of months the heating would just suddenly turn on continuously at full power and I'd only realise when it became unbearably hot inside which could have been a disaster had it happened while I was away on holiday meaning I had to start switching the boiler off while away which defeated the point of having a smart thermostat! Ultimately Heatmiser agreed to a return so I opted to just do that and put the Nest back. Time will tell what I end up going for heating controls wise in the house - I have a lot more rooms now and insulation between them is pretty good, so maybe something with smart TRVs.

I did switch to Heatmiser but ended up needing to return it (updated the original video with a pinned comment but didn't have time to make a dedicated video on the issue) - I found that occasionally the OpenTherm connection on the Heatmiser would drop until the hub was restarted, this only happened once every couple of months or so however what made this issue worse was that when the OpenTherm comms dropped, the boiler would run the heating continuously at full power. The same would happen if the OpenTherm cable was completely disconnected, Viessmann couldn't get to the bottom of this either. The problem was that with both of these issues combined together, it meant that once every couple of months the heating would just suddenly turn on continuously at full power and I'd only realise when it became unbearably hot inside which could have been a disaster had it happened while I was away on holiday meaning I had to start switching the boiler off while away which defeated the point of having a smart thermostat! Ultimately Heatmiser agreed to a return so I opted to just do that and put the Nest back. Time will tell what I end up going for heating controls wise in the house - I have a lot more rooms now and insulation between them is pretty good, so maybe something with smart TRVs.

They're a fairly generic product from AliExpress sold under a bunch of different brands. They tend to be advertised as "Tuya Touch Panels" or similar with a model number of "T6E". However, it's hard to link specific models as manufacturers seem to be swapping between the Android versions I had here and Linux based devices which look identical, and work the same when it comes to the Tuya Smart Life side of things, but they can't be modded to run Android apps in the same way that the Android ones can so if you're looking for them, be very careful to make sure the one you buy runs Android and not Linux. In particular, the ones that advertise "Alexa Built-In" appear to be the Linux ones.

Any procedures how to turn it to HA terminal?

No issues with it at all, I'll still continue to recommend, install and cover it on this channel. I just wanted to try out something different to ensure I can be balanced and cover various available options. I feel like a lot of home networking content on RU-vid has become so UniFi focussed that it often compltely ignores all of the other options that exist out there.

Lol I saw your comment before I started the video. Didn’t understand what that was about but realised as soon as I played the video 😂😂😂😂

He's not drunk !

I always ask myself why they need so much hardware. Home automation and iot doesn't need much bandwidth. Cameras a bit, but nothing crazy. Even a nas can be done for much less. I would need that kind of hardware only for some production software for my company, but I prefer to run them in cloud or serverless for reliability reasons

I absolutely don't *need* half of this hardware, but it's something I enjoy playing with - many hobbies are not based around a specific "need" for anything. I also run a RU-vid channel which is primiarly based around this sort of stuff, nobody is going to watch a channel that talks about plugging a Hue bridge into their ISP's router and running everything over WiFi! People who care enough about this sort of thing enough to watch RU-vid videos on it want to see more advanced setups, there are already tonnes of channels out there covering consumer smart home setups. I want to do something different. Then on top of that I get the benefit of having a fast and reliable network (which is particularly important with two people working from home most days), a NAS that can easily handle the extremely large video files I work with for this channel and a home automation setup that offers many nice "quality of life" improvements. I'm now in my new house and haven't yet got around to installing any of this stuff so I'm now sitting with most devices connected over WiFi (with a single powerline adapter to wired-only devices in my studio which performs abysmaly) and no smart lighting or home automation kit - it's definitely something that I really miss now that I don't have it and will be installing it all (and more) again as soon as I have time and space in my video schedule.

@@camerongray1515 thank you very much for the honesty! I work from home as well (I don't have a video production company, but yes, speed is important) I have a good connection (fiber optic) and 2 routers. Because I move often I don't have a NAS but I have my harddrive synced with Google Drive (a few terabytes of space). And when I travel for more than 2 weeks I bring a Google home and some smart appliances (i.e. light bulbs, some smart plugs and a Chromecast for the TV) and I think I can achieve 80-90% of the comforts I have at home. Of course when in a few months I will move in my first owned home I am planning to have all my smart home automation with the KNX standard all wired without wi-fi smart plug and smart lights. But yes, for the network I still think that 2 switches and a wi-fi mesh would be more than enough for my needs. I also have a small proxmox server (an old PC) but that is to test some software before using it in production (all on cloud that is more resilient).

@@camerongray1515 In your new place will you put a budgie in the cludgie ?

So how does electricity move around your home?

@@thenullco your question has nothing related to do with my comment...

They're from the MK Dimensions range - MK retractive grid plus modules in an MK Dimensions grid frame. That said, I don't think I'll be going with them in the new place as the MK retractive switches are really stiff to press, even with one of the two springs removed.