Home automation
For households, and for the kind of small building that behaves like one. It is the thing we have lived inside the longest — which is a different qualification from installing it for somebody once.
A house that runs itself
Smart home products are sold as convenience and delivered as a drawer full of apps, each with its own account, that stop speaking to each other the day a vendor rewrites their API. The lights are in one app, the heating in another, the car in a third, and none of them know you have gone to bed.
One system — Home Assistant — defined as code rather than clicked together in a phone app. That distinction matters: an installation defined as code can be reviewed, changed, rolled back, and rebuilt from scratch if the hardware dies. A clicked-together one exists only in a vendor's cloud, and only until they decide otherwise. Our Zigbee devices run through our own coordinator and Zigbee2MQTT, so the switch on the wall still works when the internet is down.
What that looks like
- Lighting that follows presence and knows the difference between the evening and 3 a.m.
- An electric car charged to be ready at departure time — and paused during peak tariff, because the system switches tariff itself on the utility's schedule.
- Heating that starts and stops with the season without anyone deciding it should.
- Humidity held where it belongs, with the dehumidifier as part of the loop rather than a thing you remember.
- Smoke, fire and door-left-open alerts that reach you wherever you are.
- Cameras recording to a machine inside the building — the footage never reaches a vendor cloud, and motion alerts come from the same system as everything else.
- Voice control that runs through our own model gateway, so the sentence you speak in your kitchen is not somebody else's training data.
How we know
Our own premises run a hundred automations across more than a hundred devices in twenty-one rooms. Every one of them was written, broken, and fixed by the person who has to live with it — which is a materially different quality bar from one installed by someone who leaves afterwards. One example standing in for all of them: detecting that somebody has left the house looks trivial, until GPS bounces into the neighbouring zone for a minute and switches off half the house. There is a three-minute debounce and a check on the surrounding zone in there now.
Who this is for
- A household that wants it to work even when nobody is thinking about it.
- A house being renovated, where the wiring decisions are still open — this is the cheapest moment by a wide margin.
- A small office or studio, which is technically the same problem with different opening hours.
- Someone who already has a drawer of half-working smart devices and wants them to become one system.
If you want this, write to us. Same first hour, same straight answer — including "you do not need us for this", which for a small setup is sometimes the honest answer.