 I absolutely love the extra space in my new house, not to mention the exquisite decor. But the problem is that it was built back in the 90s when smart meant a mechanical sprinkler timer and a hardwired intercom. Marco Polo! That ain't gonna cut it for me. But when I looked into expanding beyond this with smart lighting, smart sensors, honestly speaking, there are so many different technologies and ecosystems and brands that contribute to some or more of them that frankly, it was pretty overwhelming, even for a tech savvy person, to the point where I pretty much had to dedicate one of my staff members to figuring this stuff out. So together, we're going to be showing you guys how we plan to use off-the-shelf commodity Z-Wave devices to achieve my wildest smart home dreams. Ridge Wallet has redefined the traditional wallet with its compact frame and RFID blocking plates. Keep your wallet bulged down and use offer code LINUS to save 10% and get free worldwide shipping. Before you begin your smart home journey, you've got to figure out what exactly you want to automate or smartify. From there, you'll need to do research into the available products that can achieve your goals. For instance, if you want to install smart light switches so that you can have your lights turn off when you leave your house, there are going to be a lot of options with a key differentiating factor being their communication standard or what they use to talk to each other and to the Internet. Now, currently, the entire smart home market is in a bit of a confusing state due to a standard called matter. It's a project that's backed by some of the biggest companies in the world with the intention of standardizing the communication between smart devices. The problem is that matter isn't out yet, and we still don't know what it's going to look like or what it's going to mean for existing communication standards. So for now, we're going to say it doesn't matter. That leaves us with the big players, Wi-Fi, Zigbee and Z-Wave. Now, Wi-Fi is the one you're probably most familiar with. It's super fast, but it requires connected devices to maintain an active connection with the Wi-Fi access point. That uses a ton of power, so it's not suitable for battery powered devices like this one. Not that we'll be using anything like this because screw replacing batteries, if you know what I mean. Wi-Fi is also what's known as a star network, which means that all of the devices have to be within range of a central access point rather than being able to mesh off of one another. It's also worth noting that depending on how baller your Wi-Fi access point is, adding 20 or 30 smart devices can start to seriously hurt your Wi-Fi performance. Which brings us to Zigbee and Z-Wave. These are both mesh style networks, meaning that devices within the network can mesh between each other through low energy radio waves rather than requiring all of the devices to connect to that central hub. This means they have better range, excellent battery life, and they're more resilient than Wi-Fi based networks. The downside is that they are way slower. Not that that really matters in a residential application. Even if we were taking multiple hops all the way from the basement to the upper floor of this house, we're still talking milliseconds of latency, which isn't to say that they're both the same though. There are a few main differences between Zigbee and Z-Wave products. For starters, the Z-Wave Alliance requires that any Z-Wave product goes through a very stringent certification process that requires the manufacturer to stick to standardized commands and security protocols. This basically means that Z-Wave devices from various manufacturers are way more likely to just work with one another and do so securely. It also means though that Z-Wave compatible products tend to be more expensive. Zigbee on the other hand is fully open and doesn't require any certification. That means that most Zigbee stuff is a fair bit cheaper. It just might not all work together. They also operate on different frequencies. Z-Wave is around 900 megahertz while Zigbee operates in the 2.4 gigahertz range. Theoretically, this gives Zigbee the upper hand in terms of bandwidth. But since most devices are barely sending any data just on or off, it usually doesn't make a ton of difference. Now there's anecdotal evidence that says that Zigbee will not mess with your 2.4 gigahertz Wi-Fi. But since it's already such a congested band, I didn't want to take that risk. And since all the devices that I wanted to use are Z-Wave ready, it was the better choice for me. There's still one issue though. The hub or hubs. The thing is, a device like your smartphone can't natively communicate with Z-Wave or Zigbee devices. So you need something to bridge the gap. And this right here is the AEOTech Z-Stick 7, which is the latest generation Z-Wave technology, which means better power efficiency as well as better range, not to mention convenient backwards compatibility. Now nothing would prevent you from using a Z-Wave and a Zigbee hub and marrying those devices on the same smart home overall network using something like this Raspberry Pi running Home Assistant. And in fact, there are hubs like the SmartThings hub that natively support both, but it can add an extra communication step. So we haven't felt the need to dabble with any of that. We're sticking with Z-Wave. This concludes the scripted portion of this video. Goodbye, teleprompter. All right, Jake, let's YOLO this thing, shall we? Okay. Hey, that was the breaker. So I've heard you're supposed to lick both your fingers. Uh-huh. And then put them up my butthole? Well, okay. After that, you lick them again. Oh, so we're on different subreddits. Yeah. There is a neutral. It's in there, boys. But, uh, Very nice....for wire? Okay. Was this on or off? It doesn't matter. Oh boy, it does matter actually. Oh, shoot balls. Um, I don't have the little poke-jabby. You don't need a poke-jabby. I do need a poke-jabby. Why do you need a poke-jabby? Get the thing out. Hold on, hold on. No, no, don't. Push it in a bit before you pull. Yeah. There we go. Oh, mint buds. Sup, Andy? Hi. How you doing? Now, because this is a SmartSwitch, we can't just wire our two black wires up to the two black screws and call it a day. It actually requires the neutral wire, which is going to be this silver puppy right here. So we're going to wire that up to these white wires. Now, we've also got a fourth connection for Traveler. That's for a three-way. Ah, that's for a three-way switch. Perfect. Oh, good. So this is three-way compatible. Yeah. I think you need their, like, specific add-on switches, but yeah, you could do three-way. Again, ladies and gentlemen, this is not what we would recommend, but we're just doing this to kind of test it out today. So we're just going to jam both of the wires under the screw so they'll make contact that way. Hold on. I think I can loosen it a bit more. How much do you trust your handiwork? Uh, enough to test it right now and then immediately put the other switch back on properly and then have a qualified professional do this again later. Hey. Huzzah! Okay. So we've got our line and our load, and then we've got, normally we would use our morette and a wire chunk to go to our neutral here, but we didn't. We just put them both there. Just ignore that. We're not even going to screw that back in. So, nice! Actually, we should screw it back in so no one gets burned. And boom. Yeah! All right. Cool. It's so cute. Yes. Stop it. Stop it. Another cool way we could have checked if power was running, shout out to Fluke, is with the volt alert setting on their multimeter. So check this out. Right? Right? Right? Cool, huh? What do you want? A tutorial or something? No, I just, I want to see how does it pop up in Home Assistant. If you're not familiar with it, Home Assistant is a piece of software that allows you to connect basically any smart home ecosystem to another smart home ecosystem, and then set up automations based on the data that you receive from each one. It's super cool. And theoretically, our switch is going to show up pretty much like that. Actually, before we do that, we kind of need to set up the hub. Now, technically, I kind of did this in the background. But if you need to do this yourself, all you got to do is install the Z-Wave JS add-on into Home Assistant. If you have Home Assistant running in a Docker container, you're not going to have add-on support, so you're going to have to do this in a separate container. But if you have it on a Raspi like we do, it's really easy to install. You basically go to the add-on store, type in Z-Wave JS and install. There's two versions, technically. One that's built right into Home Assistant and has less configuration, and then there's the fully featured, fully fledged Web GUI one, which is what we're going to use because it is way nicer. Look at this. You can see everything. That is super cool. So I don't see our switch yet, though. Because we haven't hooked it up yet. So by default, nothing's going to be configured. You're going to have to pick your USB device. We have it there. You're going to want to set a network key. And then you should be able to see your controller. Ours is the 700 series base controller. It's the ZStix Gen 7, whatever. It's in there. We can see it's alive. We can see it's happy. Then you want to add your devices. So you want to add the switch? Yeah. To add a Z-Wave device, it's called an inclusion. So we're going to go in the controller and tell it, I want to do an inclusion. Then go click both the buttons on there at the same time. I'm going, I'm going, I'm running. I think that's the way you do it. Uh... Oh, it worked. It worked? Turn it back on. How's that? OK, device found. Sweet. So now that it's found the device, it shows up like unknown AF. So, oh, wow, that was quick. Nevermind. OK. So it interviewed the device. It figured out what the device can do, what it's called. And we can see in here, basic switch, binary switch, target status. Oh, nice and snappy. Target status. On. It's a little slow because these are fluorescent lights. Like that was basically instantaneous. Were you trying to host right now? Yeah, I'm trying to host a video. Oh, sorry. Here you go. Geez. Should we play with some other devices? Absolutely. I already got this one out of the bag. Oh, this one I already set up too. But I mean, the process is the same. Basically, Z-Wave devices usually have a action button, it's called. So in this case, if you got this brand new, you plug it in, start your inclusion. And you get you some action. You click the action button and it just doesn't. Yep. You're a smart home enthusiast. So that's the only action you're getting. Jesus. Don't include that in the video. Jesus. OK, go plug it in. So I could action myself here with the button. But I'm going to action you for you. Jake's going to action me. So look, Ma, no hands. Do you always ride your bicycle and show these? Wow. OK, that did work really well. Now, this is a yee light. It's a smart light. We could be cheating right now, but we're not. We're not cheating. This is through home assistant. Proof. Next, I'll show you guys something that would have been super handy to have when the contractors accidentally plugged the drain for the air conditioning unit that's up in the attic. This right here is a moisture sensor. And what we can do is we can say, hey, if you detect any moisture, turn off some device like, say, for example, the air conditioning unit. Cool, right? At 50 bucks, it's a lot cheaper than these drywall repairs. Another really cool thing that I want to use extensively is motion sensing. Now, you can get switches that have motion sensors in them that'll just turn on for a certain amount of time and then turn off. But with home assistant, we can make it so much smarter. These GE switches that we're using have both the light switch on and off and the motion sensing component independently addressable through home assistant. So we can create all kinds of fun little integrations. For example, here in the theater room, we could tell this switch, hey, if you don't see anyone move for, let's say, two hours, turn off all the lights and while you're at it, make sure the air conditioning is off and turn off the TV to save power. Dads love that kind of shit. Of course, not everyone wants to buy all new smart switches. So for those folks, check this out. We actually turned off the motion sensor that was built into the switch. And instead, we're using one of these simple little jobbies. This is an Aeotech. I believe it's a six in one sensor. It's powered by USB or battery. So it absolutely sips power and it'll tell you temperature, humidity, motion. I can't remember, but there's six of them. Oh, it's UV vibration, which will be useful for tampering and then also light. So it can tell not just if there's any light, but it can tell how much light there is. So you could tell it, for example, hey, look, if it's a bright sunny day outside, there's already a lot of light in the room. Don't turn on the lights and conveniently this GE one that I'm planning to deploy also has that functionality. So I probably won't need many if any of these. Oh, and one thing that's nice is they have a wider field of view than some of the ones that are built into the switches. Here's something cool. A lot of these Aeotech devices, and for that matter, a lot of smart devices have extra sensors that you can pull to get extra data. So, for example, you can see the multi sensor six that we're about to show you a demo with in the mechanical room is measuring 23.3 degrees Celsius. While that water sensor that we had in the upstairs hallway is at 31.7. I feel bad for the contractors here. I was like, I told them, I was like, I'll pay for internet in the house. You got internet. I'll run the HVAC for you guys while you're working. But then they broke it. What am I? I tried. For our last trick, Aeotech also makes a whole house energy monitoring solution. And we're just going to open this up real quick and see sort of how scary it looks. And if it's too scary, then we're going to have Brian the electrician. Oh, it's actually not that scary. Everything is. Everything is here. Why don't you take the whole thing off? It's hitting the breaker. Yeah, this is really clean. They did a great job. I mean, I don't. It's not that I like hanging out in here. This is not my. This is not my like happy place. How are you supposed to do this? Aeotech. Yeah, way to go. Aeotech, you know, we were you were doing real well up until this point in the video. OK, that looks probably like it'll work, I guess. I mean, what the heck could this thing even do? So this will monitor your power. And then what if your power goes over a certain amount, you could get like. Oh, it's working. Oh, is it working? Yeah. Oh, cool. So guess how much power your whole house is using. Let's go look. I mean, right now. Hold on. OK, let me think. Let me think. Let me think because the HVAC is not running. Range isn't running. OK, I'm going to say the whole house. There's not very many lights on either. It's going to be like four amps. Yeah, actually almost spot on. Really? Six hundred and forty watts. Oh, that's freaking awesome. You know what? Here, we could turn on this microwave. OK, ready? Is it bad to run an empty microwave? I have no idea. Refresh. What do we got? 750. Hold on. What do we got? Oh, two thousand watts. Holy crap. Now, I can't leave this here because as part of the home renovation, we're pulling out this hundred and twenty five amp service and we're going to replace it with a 200 amp service or maybe even more, because we actually want to put a couple of electric car chargers in the garage. But that's a project for another day. Make sure you subscribe so you don't miss it, because there's going to be lots more videos about this project. 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If you guys enjoyed this video, go check out our HVAC video where we got a proof of concept running for how we're going to use Home Assistant to control multi zone air conditioning with just a dumb AC unit. Mind you, I think we're... whoops. Thanks Flo plane. You guys are the best. Yeah, I need a pun now.