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I'm not investing in any smart home products unless: * I can fully control them without the cloud on a non-internet connected network * I can either pay for u

I'm not investing in any smart home products unless: * I can fully control them without the cloud on a non-internet connected network * I can either pay for updates, or they have free updates for at least 12 years, ideally 15 If a hurricane or tornado strikes, or some dictator tries to tell me what I can and can't do, my devices need to remain under my command.

nixgeek 1y ago
These are all Matter-over-Thread and meet your requirements, yay!
davidmurdoch 1y ago
Elegrp switches can be used offline. They need to be provisioned online first though, unless you flash with esphome (which can't currently be done wirelessly), but then you'll have to write a custom integration config. Pros: very inexpensive, and they look great. Cons: WiFi/ble only, they feel cheap, dimmers don't support a "transition" comment, so you cant dim over time easily.
culebron21 1y ago
I have accumulated so much smart-stuff fatigue, I can't stand anything branded as "smart". This means, as you point out, 1) any outage in the chain between me and the vendor's app shuts everything down for me, 2) stuff behaves inconsistently all the time. (e.g. Bluetooth speakers with a smartphone/tablet player app -- every other time something goes wrong: the app frozen completely because search autocomplete lost packets; you can't find the damn playlist buried in a sea of features; another your device wakes up and steals the bluetooth speakers.) Regarding the electric switches, I was fond of bypass switches (where you can turn on/off by flipping any of the switches connected to a lamp) and made a lot of them in my apartments. Turned out not all of them were needed. I didn't need much control at home, e.g. I don't need to control the lighting above the kitchen desk when I'm not in front of it. Wifi switches allow a lot of freedom in positioning and re-positioning them, but they escalate everything to the unreliable realm of IP/internet devices. I'd probably vote for a controller on a lamp, and switches not actually inerrupting 230V~, but be connected with a thin and flat 12V= bus, and just signalling, and hence be easy to put under wallpapers. (5V= would be hard to send further than 3 metres.)
- torginus 1y ago
  Modern smart switches are pretty small (most of them are designed to fit into wall sockets behind plugs/light switches). I personally think relays are a much more reliable than solid state switches and are very unlikely to fail in a dangerous way, and fully interupt the circuit, but they do have a 'click' some people dislike, and have a lifetime of 100k-ish switches, so for an application where you keep switching rapidly (e.g. not light switches), this might be a problem. Ikea used Thread and Zigbee which are not Wifi, they use a mesh network and don't suffer from saturation the way Wifi does, in fact adding more devices tends to make the network more reliable since devices can route around failing or congested nodes. I've had good experience with them in practice, but do be mindful that they share the 2.4GHz band with Wifi so in an apt building, you might run into radio channel congestion. Personally I use smart home stuff for controlling heating devices and a few other key items, I don't think it makes sense to make every light switch smart, but technically people have done so and it tends to work all right.
Loic 1y ago
Currently renovating our house, everything will be KNX based. Offline, no servers needed (even within the house) but nice for visualization, standard, 500+ vendors of compatible hardware. Highly recommended.
- kleiba 1y ago
  Also currently renovating our house, will not put any smart home stuff in it at all.
torginus 1y ago
All previous Zigbee and current Thread devices are physically incapable of connecting to the internet - the hub they talk to might, but since these are standardized (Matter and/or Zigbee define standard protocols for devices like this), you wont have problems picking another hub. As for software updates, they can be updated, but these devices are so simple they can be reasonably bug free after a while - and security's not a concern (that much) since they don't really have internet access. Some devices were known to have vulnearbilities where the attacker was physically present to get in radio contact with the device, but those are pretty rare and impossible to exploit en masse.
- Ajedi32 1y ago
  I realize Thread devices need a border router, but once they're connected to that router don't they get an IPv6 address with internet access? Or am I just misunderstanding the protocol?
  - torginus 1y ago
    Not 100% sure about Thread as I'm more used to Zigbee, but afaik the Thread router acts as either a proxy between your regular network and the Thread devices (you can wrap IPv6 packets so they can be exposed over regular ethernet) or the router is the smart hub itself and the nodes are not really accessible from the Wifi network. How it works in Home Assistant afaik is that the border router is a piece of software running in docker that has access to the radio, and then HA talks to the thread devices via the virtual network interface of Docker.
  - nagisa 1y ago
    A border router is not necessary in a typical installation! Its something you only need if you want to do fancy things. Otherwise a commissioner is sufficient (to bring the device onto the network.) That said, it is entirely up to you how you would configure the system that the thread border router connects to. Thread specification uses local addresses for the thread devices, so in order for these devices to get access out into the public internet you would need to NAT the IPv6 pretty much (or the devices would have to be smart enough to figure out a globally routable IP address, via e.g. DHCP.) At the same time since it is all bog-standard IPv6, you also get full control with firewall rules, NAT/forwarding and such. Overall you'd need either a very unusual device or a major misconfiguration off the beaten path to get thread devices talking on the public internet.
gerdesj 1y ago
That is my approach. It requires quite a few components to work: * Multiple VLANs - segregate devices - I usually have two for IoT devices: "THINGS" and "SEWER" * Router/firewall segregation * Home Assistant * etc So my doorbell has a camera and I run the likes of Frigate or Zoneminder. It is PoE and also has a chime relay. It will still ring if the network goes down. I am gradually migrating my home light switches to zwave ones. They will still work, regardless of HA being up. My car (EV) and utility provider (Octopus) and so on are getting complicated and have multiple apps. I have a single Home Assistant box that manages all of that lot. All of that is quite complicated. I'm an IT consultant with 30 years experience but a novice can go quite far already and it will get better.

nixgeek 1y ago

These are all Matter-over-Thread and meet your requirements, yay!

davidmurdoch 1y ago

Elegrp switches can be used offline. They need to be provisioned online first though, unless you flash with esphome (which can't currently be done wirelessly), but then you'll have to write a custom integration config. Pros: very inexpensive, and they look great. Cons: WiFi/ble only, they feel cheap, dimmers don't support a "transition" comment, so you cant dim over time easily.

culebron21 1y ago

I have accumulated so much smart-stuff fatigue, I can't stand anything branded as "smart". This means, as you point out, 1) any outage in the chain between me and the vendor's app shuts everything down for me, 2) stuff behaves inconsistently all the time. (e.g. Bluetooth speakers with a smartphone/tablet player app -- every other time something goes wrong: the app frozen completely because search autocomplete lost packets; you can't find the damn playlist buried in a sea of features; another your device wakes up and steals the bluetooth speakers.) Regarding the electric switches, I was fond of bypass switches (where you can turn on/off by flipping any of the switches connected to a lamp) and made a lot of them in my apartments. Turned out not all of them were needed. I didn't need much control at home, e.g. I don't need to control the lighting above the kitchen desk when I'm not in front of it. Wifi switches allow a lot of freedom in positioning and re-positioning them, but they escalate everything to the unreliable realm of IP/internet devices. I'd probably vote for a controller on a lamp, and switches not actually inerrupting 230V~, but be connected with a thin and flat 12V= bus, and just signalling, and hence be easy to put under wallpapers. (5V= would be hard to send further than 3 metres.)

torginus 1y ago
Modern smart switches are pretty small (most of them are designed to fit into wall sockets behind plugs/light switches). I personally think relays are a much more reliable than solid state switches and are very unlikely to fail in a dangerous way, and fully interupt the circuit, but they do have a 'click' some people dislike, and have a lifetime of 100k-ish switches, so for an application where you keep switching rapidly (e.g. not light switches), this might be a problem. Ikea used Thread and Zigbee which are not Wifi, they use a mesh network and don't suffer from saturation the way Wifi does, in fact adding more devices tends to make the network more reliable since devices can route around failing or congested nodes. I've had good experience with them in practice, but do be mindful that they share the 2.4GHz band with Wifi so in an apt building, you might run into radio channel congestion. Personally I use smart home stuff for controlling heating devices and a few other key items, I don't think it makes sense to make every light switch smart, but technically people have done so and it tends to work all right.

Loic 1y ago

Currently renovating our house, everything will be KNX based. Offline, no servers needed (even within the house) but nice for visualization, standard, 500+ vendors of compatible hardware. Highly recommended.

kleiba 1y ago
Also currently renovating our house, will not put any smart home stuff in it at all.

torginus 1y ago

All previous Zigbee and current Thread devices are physically incapable of connecting to the internet - the hub they talk to might, but since these are standardized (Matter and/or Zigbee define standard protocols for devices like this), you wont have problems picking another hub. As for software updates, they can be updated, but these devices are so simple they can be reasonably bug free after a while - and security's not a concern (that much) since they don't really have internet access. Some devices were known to have vulnearbilities where the attacker was physically present to get in radio contact with the device, but those are pretty rare and impossible to exploit en masse.

Ajedi32 1y ago
I realize Thread devices need a border router, but once they're connected to that router don't they get an IPv6 address with internet access? Or am I just misunderstanding the protocol?
- torginus 1y ago
  Not 100% sure about Thread as I'm more used to Zigbee, but afaik the Thread router acts as either a proxy between your regular network and the Thread devices (you can wrap IPv6 packets so they can be exposed over regular ethernet) or the router is the smart hub itself and the nodes are not really accessible from the Wifi network. How it works in Home Assistant afaik is that the border router is a piece of software running in docker that has access to the radio, and then HA talks to the thread devices via the virtual network interface of Docker.
- nagisa 1y ago
  A border router is not necessary in a typical installation! Its something you only need if you want to do fancy things. Otherwise a commissioner is sufficient (to bring the device onto the network.) That said, it is entirely up to you how you would configure the system that the thread border router connects to. Thread specification uses local addresses for the thread devices, so in order for these devices to get access out into the public internet you would need to NAT the IPv6 pretty much (or the devices would have to be smart enough to figure out a globally routable IP address, via e.g. DHCP.) At the same time since it is all bog-standard IPv6, you also get full control with firewall rules, NAT/forwarding and such. Overall you'd need either a very unusual device or a major misconfiguration off the beaten path to get thread devices talking on the public internet.

gerdesj 1y ago

That is my approach. It requires quite a few components to work: * Multiple VLANs - segregate devices - I usually have two for IoT devices: "THINGS" and "SEWER" * Router/firewall segregation * Home Assistant * etc So my doorbell has a camera and I run the likes of Frigate or Zoneminder. It is PoE and also has a chime relay. It will still ring if the network goes down. I am gradually migrating my home light switches to zwave ones. They will still work, regardless of HA being up. My car (EV) and utility provider (Octopus) and so on are getting complicated and have multiple apps. I have a single Home Assistant box that manages all of that lot. All of that is quite complicated. I'm an IT consultant with 30 years experience but a novice can go quite far already and it will get better.