📅 Published: March 2026 | ✍️ By Brad Andrews | ⏱️ 15 min read
It Started Before Smart Homes Were a Thing
If I’m being honest, my smart home obsession didn’t start in 2013. It started sometime around age 13 or 14, in my bedroom, with a VTech cordless phone with snap-on colour faceplate inserts and a RadioShack motor you stuck over your light switch with double-sided tape.
The motor was IR controlled. Which meant I had a remote control for my bedroom light. From bed. It was not a smart home automation, but it was cool.
I cannot overstate how cool this felt at the time. I also cannot overstate how quickly it burned through double AA batteries seemingly every other week. But I kept buying batteries because the alternative was getting up to turn off the light, and that was clearly not acceptable.
That little gadget from RadioShack was, in retrospect, the first domino. I had no idea what was coming. However, you can take a sneak peak here now if you really want.
2013: A New House, a Rescued Dog, and a Light Switch That Didn’t Work
Fast forward to 2013. First house. I painted the entire place myself, replaced every light fixture, and fairly quickly after moving in did the thing that properly made it a home: I rescued a dog from the London Humane Society. Harley who unfortunately is no longer with us but was along for the birth of our smart home and children.
That summer, smart home kicked off in earnest. I picked up a Leviton smart hub and switches proprietary system, the kind that seemed like a reasonable entry point at the time and proceeded to learn the most important lesson of the entire next decade:
Unreliable automation is worse than no automation.
Commands worked sometimes. Lights responded when they felt like it. For someone who’d spent time in IT making sure systems behaved predictably, this was infuriating. For anyone else in the house or anyone who visited it was proof that this whole smart home experiment was a terrible idea.
The spouse approval factor, a metric I would come to measure everything against, was in negative territory before I’d even defined the concept. Back it all went.
A friend of mine I won’t name him, but I hold him fully responsible for everything that followed introduced me to Vera Home Control. I’ve never quite forgiven him.
2013–2016: The Vera Years and the Polling Era
Vera became the standard in my home for the next several years and honestly for its time, it earned that place. Z-Wave based, reasonably reliable, an actual community behind it. After the Leviton experience, “works consistently” felt transformative.
But there’s a piece of smart home history worth understanding here that most people have completely forgotten: in the early-to-mid 2010s, instant device status didn’t exist outside of Lutron’s proprietary ecosystem. Lutron held the patent, which meant every other Z-Wave device on the market had to rely on polling your hub periodically asking each switch “are you on or off?” rather than the switch proactively reporting its own state.
The result was automation that worked, but with a subtle lag and imprecision that reminded you constantly it wasn’t quite right. Good enough to use. Not good enough to forget you were using it.
That patent would expire around 2016–2017, which matters later in this story. But first: life moved forward in ways that had nothing to do with light switches.
In August 2016, I got married.
2017: Building From Scratch
In July 2017, we moved into a home we’d built ourselves. If you’ve ever built a new home, you know the particular financial experience of making every single decision at once on a budget that is already fully committed. The smart home plans were ambitious. The budget was, let’s say, creatively managed.
Fortunately, I had hardware to bring with me. The old house had been running Vera with a couple of Hikvision cameras, a Yale deadbolt, and roughly a dozen Z-Wave polling switches. When our realtor told us that the smart home tech would likely add no value for most buyers and might actually concern some of them, imagining complexity or the cost of replacing smart switches with standard ones I wasn’t particularly surprised. It was 2017. This was not yet normal.
I uninstalled everything, packed it up, and brought it to the new build. On move-in day:
- Every light in the house had a Z-Wave switch
- Every exterior door had a Yale smart lock
- Linear garage door openers were integrated
- A Monoprice 6-zone amplifier with Chromecast Audios powered in-ceiling speakers throughout with the main floor TV connected as a zone source
That last setup deserves a moment of appreciation. I found a community-built integration for the Monoprice amp on the Homeseer forums more on Homeseer shortly that used an iTach Flex IP-to-serial converter to handle input switching automatically: when the Chromecast started playing, the amp switched to that source; when the TV came on and the Chromecast went quiet, it switched back. The fact that this worked at all still impresses me slightly.
There was just one problem. While I’d been busy building a home and getting married, Vera had stopped moving.
January 2019: Enter Homeseer
Four years after I’d started with Vera, the platform looked almost identical. The company had sold to Ezlo. The community had noticed. And I had a Monoprice amp that I needed properly integrated or wanted integrated, if we’re being precise about the distinction, but that kind of want is exactly where the interesting decisions come from.
That want led me to Homeseer.
The timing was almost suspicious. Homeseer had just launched multi-tap support for their switches single, double, or triple tap triggering different scenes or automations. Did I have a specific use case in mind? Not really. Did I immediately know I needed it? Naturally.
The new house ended up with a mix of older GE/Jasco Z-Wave switches carried over from the previous place and new Homeseer switches. Later that year, a firmware update brought instant status to the Homeseer switches the Lutron patent had expired, and the difference was immediate and obvious. It only deepened my desire to replace every remaining polling switch from the old setup.
As a Systems Administrator managing Windows infrastructure and cloud environments, Homeseer made sense. Familiar territory. Windows-based. The plan was a solid, reliable platform that didn’t demand constant tinkering after work hours.
The plan failed almost immediately. Because tinkering, it turned out, was the entire point.
Automations started simple: timed morning lights, exterior lights on at sunset with an offset, movie scenes. Then they grew. They got interesting. But then became genuinely fun in a way I hadn’t expected.
September 2019: The Leap
In September 2019, I left my corporate IT career. In October 2019, I launched ManagePoint Technologies a full-service IT firm based in London, Ontario, that would go on to become a Certified B Corporation and Living Wage employer.
Starting a business is consuming in a way that’s hard to describe from the outside. The hours are long, the mental load is constant, and the list of things demanding your attention never gets shorter. Home automation slowed down considerably.
But it never stopped being useful. If anything, the value became more visible precisely because I was paying less active attention to it. The system ran. Schedules executed. Lights turned on and off. Music played when it was supposed to. Voice control handled the quick questions. None of it required me to think about it which, when you’re building a company from scratch, is exactly what you need from your home.
2018 and the Arrival of a New Variable
Our daughter arrived in 2018 and immediately and thoroughly reorganized every assumption I’d made about how our home worked.
Schedules that had been perfectly timed automations were now irrelevant. Routines that made sense before a newborn made no sense after. The smart home had to adapt, and adapting it was genuinely one of the more interesting automation challenges I’d encountered.
What emerged was a set of automations I hadn’t known I needed:
White noise. Google Home speakers in the nursery on a schedule, triggered by bedtime routine. Consistent, automatic, one less thing to remember at 11pm when your brain has already checked out.
The baby camera. A Ubiquiti G3 Micro mounted in the nursery real camera, integrated into the same system as everything else, no separate app, no subscription. We briefly tried a Nanit, which was beautifully designed and thoroughly locked down behind a subscription wall with almost no integration capability. I convinced my wife that a Unifi camera was the better long-term call. She agreed, we sold the Nanit, and the G3 Micro went up. Our second child got a G4 Instant.
The late night lock check. With a baby in the house, security stopped feeling like a convenience feature and started feeling like a responsibility. I built a late-night automation to verify every exterior door was locked quietly, automatically, every night. A check that runs whether I remember to do it or not. Proactive, not reactive. This is what good automation is for.
The garage door. I left the garage door open once. Just once. That was enough. An automation now monitors if the door has been open with no motion detected for long enough to confirm we actually forgot and left, it closes itself. Not immediately, because sometimes you’re working in the garage. But if it’s been genuinely forgotten, it handles it.
The doorbell. This one I cannot take full credit for framing. One afternoon the doorbell rang. The baby was asleep. The dog barked. The baby woke up. My wife looked at me with an expression that communicated clearly and without words that this would not be happening again.
I already knew exactly how to fix it. A virtual switch Nap Time mode that disables the doorbell notification entirely when activated. One tap on her phone. Silence. Baby stays asleep. Dog remains the only unpredictable variable, and we haven’t found a Z-Wave integration for dogs yet.
The spouse approval factor recovered significantly during this period.
2021 and Growing Up
Our son arrived in 2021. By this point, the smart home was infrastructure. The kids grew up with it the way every generation grows up with whatever is normal in their house not marvelling at it, just using it, expecting it to work, occasionally being the most demanding users in the building.
Chore reminders announced through the house speakers. Door alerts when someone came and went. Exterior cameras they checked themselves when they heard something outside. The technology stopped being mine and became the family’s.
Which meant its reliability was no longer just my problem.
Early 2025: The Migration I Should Have Made Earlier
Somewhere between managing a growing business, raising two kids, and adding automations whenever I found a spare hour, I’d started watching the Home Assistant community more closely. The platform had evolved dramatically from the one I’d dismissed years earlier. Lovelace the redesigned dashboard interface had turned it from a YAML configuration project into something that looked and felt like the future of home automation.
The development pace was extraordinary. New integrations, new features, new capabilities shipping every month. The community was enormous, genuinely helpful, and producing custom cards and integrations that made every proprietary platform look like it was standing still.
In early 2025, I started testing in parallel with Homeseer. By the time I committed to the full migration, it happened over a single weekend.
The transition was smoother than I expected, largely because I’d already been using Z-Wave JS UI alongside Homeseer to manage my Z-Wave devices. Migrating them into Home Assistant was straightforward no re-pairing, no starting from scratch. The Z-Wave network came across cleanly and that made the largest chunk of my physical devices a non-issue from the start.
I used the Homeseer integration to bridge both platforms while I moved everything over natively. Within a couple of hours, I was fully running on Home Assistant. The next morning, Homeseer was off.
What had I been waiting for?
I went from 50–60 automations to over 200. Devices I’d half-forgotten about were auto-discovered before I’d finished setting up. The platform found things on my network I hadn’t thought to migrate they were just there, ready.
If you are ready to get start now check out my article on Setting up Home Assistant
What the System Looks Like Today
The Monoprice amp ran faithfully for years. About three to four months ago, my other business became a Sonos reseller and installer, and the in-ceiling speaker system finally got the upgrade it deserved. Sonos replaced the Monoprice setup entirely and integrates natively into Home Assistant with no friction.
If that hadn’t happened, the plan was Music Assistant with Sendspin which I’d tested and found worked out of the box with Home Assistant Voice PE with no fuss and HA Voice PE satellites connected via 3.5mm to the existing amp. I still run Music Assistant to manage my Voice PE satellites, the Satellite 1 speaker, and Sonos all together under one roof.
The Google Home speakers are gone. In their place: fully local voice control built on Piper TTS, the Wyoming Protocol, Voice Satellites, and Home Assistant Voice Assist pipelines. No cloud. Zero data leaving the house. Not one subscription left. It just works and it works privately.
The doorbell has made its own journey: Ring to Google Nest to a Unifi G4 Pro. The Hikvision cameras from 2013 are a distant memory. The Nanit lasted about five minutes.
Today the system runs:
– 2,600+ connected entities across Z-Wave, Zigbee, Matter, Wi-Fi, and more
– 200+ automations covering lighting, presence, security, energy monitoring, family schedules, sports scores, and things I’m still adding
– Fully local voice control private, fast, and entirely under our roof
– A family that doesn’t know how to live without it which is exactly the point
The Power Outage Test
The truest measure of a smart home isn’t how impressive it looks on a good day. It’s what happens when it goes away.
Not long ago, we had an outage that lasted more than a day. Generator running, fridge and freezer connected, the essentials covered. And within a few hours the gaps made themselves very clear.
We went out to run errands and realized we couldn’t pull up the camera to check on Clarke. We do that more than we’d noticed it had become completely automatic, the same way you glance at your phone before leaving the house. You don’t think about it until you can’t do it.
Inside, no music. No quick question to a voice assistant. No automated anything. The kids noticed. My wife noticed. And my wife, who has watched me spend a decade building this system with patient tolerance and occasional pointed questions about whether we really needed that she noticed most of all.
The convenience had become normal. The normal had become invisible. And losing it, even briefly, made its value impossible to ignore.
My home has a fully high wife approval rating. Without it, honestly, this blog wouldn’t exist.
Why I’m Sharing All of This
I want people to care about the technology, yes. But more than that, I want people to care about their own journey their own home, their own family, and the path that gets them there. Real life doesn’t pause for home automation projects. Businesses get launched. Babies arrive. Dogs need walking. Garage doors get left open at inconvenient times.
The smart home that works isn’t the one with the most devices. It’s the one that fits your life and quietly makes it better even when you stop noticing it’s there.
I’m not here to tell you what to buy. I’m here to share what I’ve actually learned across more than a decade and four platforms, because the smart home industry is genuinely overwhelming. Most vendors are terrible at explaining what their products can actually do outside their own closed ecosystems. Walled gardens everywhere. Little honest guidance on how any of it fits together.
That’s the gap this site exists to fill. I’m more than happy to give back what I’ve learned. And here’s the thing about sharing what you know, it has a funny way of coming full circle. If something I share starts you down a path that leads somewhere interesting, and that eventually circles back and teaches me something new, that’s the whole point. That’s how this works.
You don’t need to spend a decade figuring this out. My decade-plus of experience is here to start you at year 14.
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Helpful Resources & Links
- Home Assistant Official Documentation Integration directory and architecture overview
- Z-Wave Alliance Background on instant status and the Z-Wave standard evolution
- r/homeassistant The community that quietly convinced me to finally make the switch
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