I built an offline smart home

Tuya devices are available in Zigbee for about $5, and the Zigbee versions have no way to phone home.

The nice thing is you can:

1) Buy eight random Tuya Zigbee outlets ($40)

2) Three PIR presence sensors ($10)

3) Fancy Sonoff Zigbee USB device ($20)

4) Three RGB-CCCW lightbulbs ($15)

5) Three or four temperature/humidity monitors ($15)

And you're at the $100 mark with a basic smart home without breaking the bank, with a good path to upgrade if you like it.

The main annoyance are shipping times from China.

I keep trying to talk myself out of wanting to do this. I live in a very small studio-style home with a total of four lightbulbs in it. It takes fewer than 20 steps to get from any one corner of the house to any other.

But every time I read an article like this, I can't help but think how cool I would feel if my house could tell I was coming and turned my lights on and my heat up, or dimmed and then turned everything off once I got in bed.

Offline by default is great. It lets me decide which devices are remote controllable (thermostat) and use a VPN to access my home network for everything else.

I’ve got a mix of Lutron and Phillips Hue devices with a Honeywell Thermostat tied together with Home Assistant on a raspberry pi. (Lutron needs a hub. The hue devices connect directly to the pi.)

It’s been absolutely rock solid. I’m using Lutron Pico remotes as switches. I haven’t had to replace a battery in over a year after installing everything. Hue motion sensors just work.

Lutron switches are absolutely critical to my setup. They work (and paired remotes work!) when the network is down, which makes automation a progressive enhancement. Same with the thermostat, it’s offline first. Wifi connectivity is optional.

I tried living with smart bulbs but they get really expensive if you’re doing a whole house. And rebooting light switches is absolute insanity. I do not want automation bad enough to make my light switches less reliable to get it.

This summer I replaced a couple switches with Lutron and they’ve been very solid, in six months there’s been only twice where an automation didn’t set a state correctly and I don’t even know if I can blame Lutron.