&gt; After considerable research, it&#x27;s not worth the hussle or money.<p>Agree. There is no point in making a 75% smart home. A 10% smart home is fine, it feels like a nifty gadget here and there. It can be clever to automate just a few things, maybe get a nest or make it possible to start watering plants remotely when on holiday. But the dream of the full smart home isn&#x27;t here yet. If you have 9 lights switchable on your phone, that tenth light just feels like a hassle. If you try, you end up spending more time fiddling with your smart stuff than you would <i>ever</i> spend walking to light switches.<p>I have a shortlist of demands for &quot;smart home&quot; things (specifically the simplest things like switches and other fixtures).<p>1) It should be as reliable as a regular dumb switch. It can&#x27;t work 99% of the time, or take 100ms from switching to lighting.<p>2) It should require no extra cabling. If I can run ethernet over my power lines already, surely I should be able to reliably route around some smart home packets too-<p>3) It should work as far as possible with existing fixtures. I don&#x27;t want to replace my switch, I just want to add a smart relay behind the switch. Switches are pieces of interior design, I don&#x27;t want to be limited to a choice of 2 colors of extremely expensive &quot;smart switches&quot;.<p>4) I don&#x27;t want any products backed by a single&#x2F;small company. It should be a reasonably big consortium or an open standard. Z-wave checks that box, barely (and it fails horribly at item 1).<p>If I were to build a house today I would probably try to make some good decisions in &quot;dumb&quot; power cabling such as trying to put all lighting together behind some central master relay to be able to do the hotel style switch-all when leaving, and also put Cat6+PoE sockets everywhere (both high and low on walls) as to be able to put sensors (motion, smoke, whatever) without ugly cable routing or using wireless.<p>&gt; if my siblings an I were brought up just fine in the 80&#x27;s without being in a &quot;smart onesie&quot;, I&#x27;m sure we can do just as fine today<p>That&#x27;s really the same argument as &quot;we were brought up in asbestos houses with smoking people and we&#x27;re fine...&quot; isn&#x27;t it :)