Most smart homes start with an impulse buy: a set of smart bulbs on offer. Six months later there’s a smart plug from a different brand next to it, and a thermostat from a third. Three apps, three accounts, three clouds — and nothing that talks to anything else.
That’s a shame, because the mistake isn’t in the devices. Those usually work fine. The mistake is the order.
Buy the hub first, not the device
The most important decision in your entire smart home is where everything comes together. It isn’t exciting and it does nothing visible in your house, but it determines everything after it: which devices you can still buy later, whether things keep working when a manufacturer walks away, and whether you’ll ever do more than switch things on and off.
We build on Home Assistant, for three reasons that matter in practice:
- It runs locally. Your switches, sensors and automations keep working when the internet drops. Only checking in remotely needs a connection.
- It’s brand-independent. Hundreds of brands and protocols talk to it. You aren’t locked into one ecosystem, and you can buy whatever is best at the time.
- There’s no subscription. What you buy stays yours.
A hub costs you a Raspberry Pi or a small mini PC. That’s a few euros a month in electricity — less than most people expect — and it’s the one purchase you genuinely shouldn’t skip.
Want to set it up yourself? Our guide to Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi walks through it step by step.
Only then: which protocol?
Three of them matter, and they aren’t interchangeable.
Zigbee is its own low-power network. Mains-powered devices extend each other’s range, so the network gets stronger the more you add. Ideal for battery-powered sensors and switches — those last years on a coin cell. For most people this is the workhorse choice.
Matter and Thread are the new standard, designed to solve exactly the problem in the introduction: devices from different brands that simply work together. It keeps getting better, but support isn’t uniformly mature yet. Fine for new devices; no reason to replace something that already works.
Wi-Fi is fine for the occasional device that moves a lot of data — a camera, say. But thirty Wi-Fi devices in a house load your network noticeably, and they’re power-hungry compared with Zigbee. Use it where it makes sense, not as the default.
In practice you combine them. That isn’t a compromise, it’s just the right tool per job.
What to make smart first
Start with something that annoys you daily, not with whatever sounds most impressive. In almost any house this order pays off most:
- Lighting in one room. Immediately noticeable, easy to extend, and you learn the system on something where little can go wrong.
- Per-room heating. This is where the money is. Smart radiator valves that stop heating the spare room when nobody is in it pay for themselves.
- Energy monitoring. The moment you can see what each appliance costs, your behaviour changes on its own. Work out what a device costs with the energy cost calculator.
- Sensors. Door, motion and temperature sensors are cheap and make every automation after that possible.
Blinds, garden irrigation and cameras come later. They’re good fun, but they rarely solve a daily irritation.
What to skip
A few things that regularly end up in a drawer:
- Devices that only work through the manufacturer’s app. With no local API and no Zigbee/Matter support, you’re at the mercy of a company that may want to do something else next year.
- Smart bulbs where a smart switch belongs. If someone flips the physical switch off, your smart bulb is unreachable. A module behind the switch solves that.
- Voice assistants as a starting point. Lovely as the icing, useless as the foundation.
- Everything at once. A smart home installed in a single weekend is usually a smart home nobody in the house understands.
What about the Wi-Fi?
This gets underestimated consistently: a large share of “the smart home doesn’t work” complaints are really Wi-Fi complaints. A router in the meter cupboard, a shed just out of reach, an attic that drops out — and then the smart lock gets the blame.
So before you start, check whether your network can take it. We built a calculator for that: how many access points your home needs. And if you’re running Zigbee, place its channel deliberately alongside your Wi-Fi with the Zigbee channel planner — the two share a band and will otherwise wreck each other.
Do it yourself, or have it done?
Both work, and honestly, doing it yourself is the best part for a lot of people. Where people get stuck is almost never the installation — it’s the choices beforehand. Which hub, which protocol, which brands are worth it, and in what order.
We think that through with people separately, without turning up to install anything: an hour or two looking over your shoulder, a shopping list, and an order to start in. That usually saves a drawer full of gadgets that refuse to talk to each other.
If you’d rather have it built, we build it: local, brand-independent and subscription-free. Read more about smart home installation or request a free, no-obligation quote.