I need HELP with my new house...

[LostViking009]

REGARDING THE HOME THEATRE:

If you can, please bring in a professional, at least for designing the architectural things in the room. The best audio system in the world still sounds like sh*t in bad acoustics. In it's current form, the room is obviously both really resonant and reflective. Few more things. You don't want sound proofing, you want acoustic treatment. Those are different things, you wan't the room to sound good, but not dead - and your main concern is not sound leaking out or in the room. Also, you'll probably do a lot of things in the room that will reduce HF reflections, but what is hard to remove are low-frequency reverberations (and standing waves or room modes). A general rule: to capture low frequencies, you need width and mass. The cheap egg-carton looking foam pieces you can buy online do basically nothing with rooms like this, as your main problem isnt sound over 5kHz, but it's under 1kHz. So your best bet is to consult an audio professional, or educate yourself on acoustics but it's a huge rabbit hole. Just don't buy some foam and put it on the wall. Please. IMO a dark sounding reverberant room is worse than a bright sounding one.

--an audio guy

[Orion09]

Hey Linus!

 

Long time fan of the channel and A/V slash home automation tech here. For the thermostat situation you could probably replace the existing thermostats with just temp sensors and have electronic valves with those hooked up to a home control system like Control4. This would also allow for the control of the forced air cooling system as well. 

 

You should honestly look for a good Control4 dealer in your area. They can design a system for you to take care of all your video, audio, networking, lighting, door access, and sensors and combine and control it all from the one system through an app or touchscreens throughout your house. 

 

Also the theater room is rely going to depend on the space. Another reason to find a good home automation dealer.

[Fizzle]

Mr Tips,

 

I've been there and made a bunch of mistakes along the way but the zoned underfloor heating is at least something I got right. Checkout Heatmiser, not as fancy as (Google) Nest but you get a few benefits including a nice wall panel, good enough app but most importantly it still works without internet and you get A LAN FACING API (with no security but we will deal with that later). 

Add a raspberry pi or similar to talk to the API and you can actually drive everything from wall panel. Your Pi will monitor the API every 10 seconds or so it will read the target temperature of the room and if the target is lower than the room (within some margin to avoid it flip flopping about) then the Pi will do a call for cold and adjust the AC and vents accordingly. You can add a presence detection check as well easily enough.

 

The bodge are you asking for is to use those two wires to run a temperature probe down to the basement. You would then need wireless thermostat panels in each room. I would strongly suggest you replace 2 wire cables with a proper thermostat cable though as it will make your life easier in the long run. You are after all already getting rid of everything so get it right the first time while there is no one living in the house. More on this later.

 

Be wary of having a bunch of ESP devices as you will spend your life maintaining them, never put them somewhere you can't easy get to which brings us to IoT home rules:

1. It must work even if you lose your internet connection.

2. It must work even if the live service goes bust (or Google just gets board of it).

3. It must work even if your visitor doesn't have the right app.

4. It must work every time the same.

5. It must recover gracefully in the event of a power cut or some other error.

6. It must be easy to replace, smart things will die unexpectedly after 3 months. Don't put them anywhere it isn't easy to reach.

7. Bedrooms must be silent. Smart things have a tendency to go CLICK loudly in the night.

8. Plan out network isolation for all IoT things to avoid creepy people pivoting off your thing to look around your network.

9. It must still work if you are not there. (Like if you are dead, would you want your grieving family trying to explain how this shit works to some random plumber in the middle of winter?) I have seen some people with envelopes saying 'in the event of my death' and it has all the passwords, schematics and troubleshooting info.

 

A few bonus tips:

Every room should have lots of power and ethernet.

Learn from your predecessors what made sense in the 90's doesn't make sense now and so 2030's requirements will not be the same as 2020's.

Build yourself a way to get cables around the house easily. You should be able to run any cable from any room to any other room without needing to redecorate after. I have been using 100mm steel conduits with magnetic covers to keep it hidden.

Any cable you put in should go to a wiring cabinet, even the power, lights, switches, everything. It will give you options later.

 

You actually have a great team with all the skills you need to do IoT properly (maybe apart from security). If you make it all work seamlessly together then you have a new line of business because no one else has managed it so far!

 

Quite happy to discuss what I've done in more detail.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Cyrusxir]

You already dipped your toes into the Pi with the home camera set up, why not thermostat? By having bear bones on the wire access it would allow you to revisit the topic in the future with additional more full featured set up or added functionality. Here are two links, I think the third one takes a whack at the two wire mercury set up. Maybe you could integrate a Pi into the nearest outlet, maybe use them as wireless repeaters, and extend a touch screen module to the cut out. Extending the wires to the nearest outlet in order to make that happen In my mind is a lot less work. If you just did some small experiments with basic Ascii bread board encoding, you could encode signals on one end of the wire and split them on the other. You don't need to know what the signals are now just that you can adjust the encoding in the future as you expand the functionality because it doesn't necessitate adding any more wires. Just updating the Pi's with the new encoding. 

 

https://hackaday.com/2019/02/27/hack-my-house-raspberry-pi-as-a-touchscreen-thermostat/

https://www.iphoneness.com/cool-finds/hestiapi-touch/

https://opensource.com/article/21/3/thermostat-raspberry-pi

 

For the game room you said it didn't have much space. A table suspended from the ceiling that could be retracted into a recess would be cool. You could line the bottom of it with sound proofing so that it appears seamless with the rest of the ceiling. Basically the link bellow with sound dampening panel on the underside of the table. If you streamed games to some mini PCs integrated into the table, you could have more people join your lan party with virtualized instances, move fewer pc's to your house, and have a much cleaner space that you could use for other things when you feel like it. Having control over the instancing would still make it so that your kids would only be able to use the in room devices facing the stairs. I went to look at the pics from the wan show, I don't know if that wall is load bearing but you could just use an I beam and extend the lan room and VR room into one large space.

 

https://www.designboom.com/design/jcpcdr-flying-table-detachable-seat-belts-hang-from-ceiling-04-21-2020/

 

You clearly already know what you want in the Living room and office. Maybe those panels just need to be stained with a lighter neutral color. Who knows, Being a business owner and your wife being the CFO; I imagine with the functionality of that storage space it might be one of those things that grow on you. Unless you already have something in mind maybe it might be worth just waiting a bit? Seeing how the rest of the house comes together and not rushing another project would allow you to give it the time to really dedicate to doing it right and figure out where you will relocate somewhere comfortable so the remodel doesn't impede your work. I recently bought a house so that is the mindset I'm coming from.

 

I got nothin for the garage beyond charging them at night and using them to heat the house during the day if you don't have gas but you have those water tanks so probably?

 

I went back to see the old wan show about the house. As far as pictures above the mantel. Maybe it would be tasteful to take a big old picture of the old house and put it above the fireplace. Sentimental value you know? I'm sure you probably have something from what you had to give to the Realtor.

[LostViking009]

Also just a small electrical thing: please have your whole house residual current protected. I think it's not the standard over there, but with curious kids and those half-assed power plug designs.... You should install some RCD/GFCI breakers.

In simple terms: normal circuit breakers (like a 15A one) protect the cabling in your house, RCD breakers protect you.

[HellAlex]

I have a friend who made his whole apartment a smart house. Understand everything DIY - electric outlets, locks, alarm, PoE, humidity sensors, heating, lighting, water, gaming setup, redundancy power for at least 4h and so on. His main problem was that every smart device (more than 60 devices) communicated constantly with the mother module which spoofed the whole Wi-Fi network and made it unusable. Thus he needed either a better mother module (with integrated Wi-Fi hotspot) to control everything or a dedicated Wi-Fi network only for smart devices. In the end he ended up doing both - new mother module and separate network for smart devices. Additionally he added a PSU for at least 10-12h power delivery and for additional security level added an Amazon machine ($10 a month) which controlled everything at his place remotely in case of a breach, data loss or power/internet outage.

On the topic of thermostats:
In mine apartment I am using a Vaillant 12kW heater with a weekly programmer - 7 days, 30 minutes interval. The transmitter use a 2.4GHz radio signal (not Wi-Fi) and work with 2 AA batteries per year. The receiver is hooked directly to the heater and just control the on-off cycle (the power is provided from the heater). Not the most economic solution, but it is cheaper than AC at least in my country.
For the cables that will run from the solar panels to the machine room - don't put too close the exhausting vent or at least add a fire safety mechanism.
 
On the topic of the cinema theatre:
Don't put a double door, put the door elsewhere. It will break the acoustics of the room. I only know that you might need a sound isolation and at least 8.1 channel audio. And as it is in the basement - good ventilation.

On the topic of the LAN room:
You can easily separate it from the rest of the network in the house with a simple router with 10 ports. You won't need to pass a single cable for each PC there and if you are using a mesh networking, you will be able to control the network traffic from everywhere. In case you are going to do a single server for 7 players (7 gamers, 1 PC) then... I can not help you with that and you will need to pass individual cable to each peripheral. Other solution could home game streaming - have a dedicated Nvidia Now-like streaming PC and a terminal stations for each person (NUC or SteamLink-like machines).

[iamthepat]

Quote

To my knowledge, there is no smart thermostat that will run on 2 wires

 

Linus, don't know if you'll see this or if it has already been mentioned, but smart thermostats can work on 2 wires - I got a nest for my hydronic baseboard heater which previously used exactly the same mercury switch. The key you're looking for is the voltage of those wires. If it is using 24v, smart thermostats should work. If it is line voltage 120v, you can still actually still use the thermostat, but will need a relay placed between the line voltage and thermostat

 

I am not an expert by any means, however, I suspect that since it is just controlling a valve for the hot water lines, it would not be running on line voltage like an electric baseboard heater. As well the gauge of the wires in the current thermostat seem a bit anemic to handle 120v

[7heo]

3 minutes ago, iamthepat said:

or if it has already been mentioned

About half this thread is about this.

[Jtalk4456]

5 minutes ago, Egg-Roll said:

Luckily he hasn't made the mistake of letting us to decide how he does things, the internet would troll him very hard

But yea, it's possibly the worst color to paint on a wall lol. Cars on the other hand...

Little bit of a rant here, but I genuinely have an issue with pink, especially hot pink. Not in the color itself but how it's portrayed and stereotyped in culture.
1. It's the color most viciously shoved down peoples throats as a gendered color. Sure you've got blue for baby boys, but once that baby boy gets older he can like green, purple, red, black, pretty much every other color and his sister can like blue without being questioned. But if he likes PINK, heaven forbid parents are assuming sexuality. Pink has been made into a girls color through and through (Barbie for example) and it's so annoying for my next reason. 
2. PINK IS NOT PINK!!!! It's red, guys, it's just light red, no different than sky blue or light green or lavender purple. It's just a tint of an existing color, but people act like it's got it's own spot on the color wheel. Should it bother me so much? probably not, but it does. 

[CanadianJet]

I am a high-end home designer in the Fraser Valley, and I deal in 3D renderings and modelling of those homes. This includes VR walkthroughs of the home. I have designed theatre rooms and media rooms in the past as part of large houses. If this is a service that Linus is interested in, I'd love to offer my services!

[Uttamattamakin]

Probably said already but when it comes to the HVAC stuff.... hire an expert.  Do that wrong and not only can things be uncomfortable they could potentially be explodey. 

[mgltt]

So - there's home automation and there's home automation.

There's the consumer-facing kit (Nest, Somfy, Ring, etc) and then there's the stuff that's been the backbone of "smart homes" for decades - KNX, LonWorks, C-BUS, Dynalite, DALI. If you're looking for products where HVAC is their bread and butter, as opposed to a niche category - these latter systems are the ones to look at.

They're mostly two-wire bus-powered low-bitrate protocols, so would very likely work over your existing wiring. For example, KNX, you could use an Elsner KNX eTR 101 thermostat (and it's even quite pretty!), an ABB VAA/S6.230.2.1 to control the valves, and then grab a 1home Bridge to have all those devices show up in HomeKit, Google Home or Alexa.

For home theatre, the big thing is sound - having the room well treated, being able to tune in minute detail, and being able to drive multiple outputs. My go-to for high end home theatre is a QSC Q-SYS Cinema system - and if you want to get really fancy you can go Atmos (the real Atmos, not the consumer kind).

$0.02

[PartyingJoe]

As someone who lost a close friend when they moved into their new house please i beg everyone not just linus please get yourself a carbon monoxide detector they are fairly cheap and a absolute life saver . You can't smell  , taste or see carbon monoxide . Boilers , gas fires , water heaters , gas cookers , open fires etc if not burning correctly can produce carbon monoxide. It great their is proper ventilation but just incase there is a leak just get one any way it better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it .

[Psittac]

I work HVAC in Colorado but we have a completely different philosophy.  We prefer simple reliable and cost effective.  In general anything beyond a single stage air conditioner and 2 stage 80% furnace will never leave you coming out ahead.  Granted that's assuming you have someone honest and affordable to work on your equipment.  Everything beyond is spending a quarter to save a nickel.

 

With all of that said there are different needs than what we provide.  For a tech influencer that can make a video about their fancy setup the roi is less important.

 

I will say from experience that simply slapping dampers on a static AC compressor and static blower is the worst thing you can do, it will never work out.  Unless you are going bawls deep on the controls and the equipment it won't work.  Static systems are designed to work with all of the airflow they can manage and shutting off a portion of your airflow will cause a problem.

 

I would look into variable compressors and blowers

 

As for the control factor I'm not certain, My dad who I work with doesn't even like nest so I have little to no hands on with smart controls.

 

*edit: oh as @mgltt pointed out there are even consumer grade systems that use fewer wires to I'd assume use some form of data to communicate instead of being a simple switch.  Eco bee is one that can do this but I believe it requires more than two wires.  I'd follow the rabbit hole he has put in front of you. (I almost went into building controls years ago when the family business was struggling, luckily I've been able to work with my dad for years)

 

*edit again: my reason for "never coming out ahead" comes down to greatly increased maintenance and repair costs just for the materials not to mention install.  Cost of ownership for anything beyond simple basic and reliable will come with added cost in some way or another.

[Psittac]

30 minutes ago, PartyingJoe said:

As someone who lost a close friend when they moved into their new house please i beg everyone not just linus please get yourself a carbon monoxide detector they are fairly cheap and a absolute life saver . You can't smell  , taste or see carbon monoxide . Boilers , gas fires , water heaters , gas cookers , open fires etc if not burning correctly can produce carbon monoxide. It great their is proper ventilation but just incase there is a leak just get one any way it better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it .

Good advice, the biggest threat is a heat exchanger problem in a forced air system because the CO is being distributed directly into the bedrooms where people are sleeping.  We recommend having one in every room that someone sleeps in.  With something like a boiler, water heater, gas range etc it is more localized and not as much of a threat because chances are you will be awake when around these appliances and can notice that you aren't feeling well before there is a problem.  The best indicator of whether or not there is a mild CO leak is you, if you start to get a headache or feel nauseous but it goes away when you go outside there may be a CO leak.  Don't get me wrong, Everyone with a gas fed appliance should have at least one CO detector but forced air is the one that is likely affect you while you sleep.  In Linus' case one detector in or near the mechanical room should suffice but there can always be small amount's of spillage that should be checked out but it is normal.

[Uttamattamakin]

3 hours ago, Fizzle said:

Mr Tips,

 

Be wary of having a bunch of ESP devices as you will spend your life maintaining them, never put them somewhere you can't easy get to which brings us to IoT home rules:

1. It must work even if you lose your internet connection.

2. It must work even if the live service goes bust (or Google just gets board of it).

3. It must work even if your visitor doesn't have the right app.

4. It must work every time the same.

5. It must recover gracefully in the event of a power cut or some other error.

6. It must be easy to replace, smart things will die unexpectedly after 3 months. Don't put them anywhere it isn't easy to reach.

7. Bedrooms must be silent. Smart things have a tendency to go CLICK loudly in the night.

8. Plan out network isolation for all IoT things to avoid creepy people pivoting off your thing to look around your network.

9. It must still work if you are not there. (Like if you are dead, would you want your grieving family trying to explain how this shit works to some random plumber in the middle of winter?) I have seen some people with envelopes saying 'in the event of my death' and it has all the passwords, schematics and troubleshooting info.

Just saw this comment and I'd add 

10.) Don't expect this to be a once in 20 year investment.  Just accept a 7-10 year upgrade cycle. 

 

3 hours ago, Fizzle said:

A few bonus tips:

Every room should have lots of power and ethernet.

Learn from your predecessors what made sense in the 90's doesn't make sense now and so 2030's requirements will not be the same as 2020's.

Just run glass fiber to every single room even if you have no use for it now.  About the only thing we can be certain will be useful in 2100 is optical fiber. 

3 hours ago, Fizzle said:

Build yourself a way to get cables around the house easily. You should be able to run any cable from any room to any other room without needing to redecorate after. I have been using 100mm steel conduits with magnetic covers to keep it hidden.

Any cable you put in should go to a wiring cabinet, even the power, lights, switches, everything. It will give you options later.

Agree so much. 

 

3 hours ago, Fizzle said:

 

You actually have a great team with all the skills you need to do IoT properly (maybe apart from security). If you make it all work seamlessly together then you have a new line of business because no one else has managed it so far!

Plus every one of these things would be a great series of videos. 

 

3 hours ago, Fizzle said:

 

Quite happy to discuss what I've done in more detail.

Do you have a website to show off what you did or maybe let people pay you a nominal fee for consultancy?  If you have actually done this right lots of people would like to see how.  

[KouKouKaChu]

I've been looking into this for my place too since I'm also putting in radiant heating and cooling. Mostly to maximize the sound proofing as air systems just leak sound. Just using some air exchangers in some strategic spots to make sure the air inside is nice and fresh. But there's some other things I'm doing as well. I have a hot water recirculation system that can be turned on so when I turn on the tap, it's nice and hot. While I'm not in an area that has water restrictions, that would certainly be useful out on the west coast. Automated blinds so I can enjoy my view outside, but it's auto-closed at night. Some lighting controls. Security sensors. That kind of stuff.

 

Ultimately, I've decided on the Loxone system who can manage a lot of that in their server system that's fairly low power but does all the things I really need done. They still use the same sort of valve systems that you also seem to have, but they use an actuator to turn the knobs and tweak the temperatures. It seems to know how to talk to other systems like door locks, ring style doorbells, etc. But at least the core system is standardized and consistent. Also works with google assistant. I'm sure it works with Apple stuff too, just never bothered to check on that. They also have a native app, which is also available on Windows, MacOS and the watch platforms, so I don't have to work off my phone or tablet. So, if I'm gaming and it's getting a bit warm in there, just switch to the app and drop the temps a bit or close the curtains if it's getting a bit too bright.

 

Still deciding on the best sliding door lock, but otherwise, I'm about to get it all rolling.

 

I'm also a fairly competent tech guy, but when I come home, I just want things to work. I fix things at the office, and I don't need to come home and fix things at home. So that's why I went with a solution like this.

[foxale08]

I don't think anyone has mentioned it but there are smart vents (in place of zone dampers) from Flair (what I personally use) and Keen that integrate with smart thermostats like ecobee (what I personally use) and Nest. Flair lets you use ecobee room sensors in place of their own for most room/zones. The flair vents do make noise (metal parts moving) when opening and closing but I've gotten used to it.

[Mason_vb]

You could probably use an arduino on either end to convert high frequency signals into the other necessary wires, using the two existing wires as both power and data. powerline ethernet works like this, using existing power wiring in a house for ethernet. It'd be a bit of work but I'm sure it's doable 

[MapleBlad]

Honestly with every different kind of system you have in that house, I would go commercial grade and get a BAS.  Contact something like Honeywell, Johnsons Controls or Siemens.  I worked at a college campus in building operations.  It was a million square feet and had wings built from 1960 to 2020, so every single different type of heating/cooling tech was involved.  The entire thing was run off a BAS, individual controls for each room (zone), dampers, water heaters, everything.  Every single mechanical piece of the building systems was integrated.  You can get really fine control over anything with a BAS and the right controllers put in.  Doesn't come cheap but solutions exist.

[MrUserAgreement]

I dont think you would need individual thermostats in the rooms unless you want the control in the rooms themselves. If you want to just control everything from Home Assistant anyway, I would suggest you do away with the thermostats all together. Those thermostats are just contact closures; a closed circuit means heat and an open circuit means off (or vice versa). You can do everything at the valves in your mechanical room. For example, if you are not afraid of a little DIY, install a relay board (http://wiki.sunfounder.cc/index.php?title=8_Channel_5V_Relay_Module) and a Raspberry Pi to control it. On the Raspberry Pi, install https://github.com/flyte/mqtt-io (or something similar) to interface the GPIO with Home Assistant. You can then set up switches or whatever you want in Home Assistant to trigger MQTT calls to your Pi which switches the relays which toggles your valves.

 

If you want assistance, I am an engineering student and my email is on my profile.

 

I wish you the best!

[cwilde]

This is an awesome and exciting project that I'm excited to play out. Very excited to see a crossover with The Hookup!

 

I'm a building systems design engineer out in Alberta who experiments with Home Assistant in my off hours. I'm not registered with EGBC so I can't stamp anything for Linus but If there is anything I can do to help on the controls or HVAC side I'd be happy to help.

 

I've been watching you guys since the beginning and have grown with your channel, it would be awesome to play a small part in a mega project like this.  

[Nicholas10293759]

This opensource project using a raspiberry pi running piHome could be a solution that uses the existing 2 wire thermostat wires with DS18B20 (one wire temp sensors) to measure the temperatures in each zone and the uses a raspiberry pi/relay board mounted in the mechanical room to control the valves. Controls could be added to control an air conditioner and dampers. Pihome is Google Assistant/Apple Homekit/Amazon Alexa Compatible.

 

I have been wanted to play around with it to control the hot water radiators in my Condo for awhile but currently do not have the time.

 

You would likely want to add a fail over low temperature thermostat (mechanical) in the coldest room of the home to act as a backup for the raspiberry pi if it fails. The backup thermostat will stop the pipes from freezing in the winter (not sure if Vancouver can get that cold in the winter time).

GitHub Page - https://github.com/pihome-shc/pihome

PiHome - https://www.pihome.eu/

[dogwitch]

so am not sure on this. so in lan room he said was a window.

is that  even the the ground?

i could not tell in video. i would triple check to seal that thing. and also see where the water running off.

seeing also if it freezes.(i dont know if it freezes at said house).

but any window near ground lvl always need to be triple check. leaks etc.

[lispy-dobby]

A good expert to ask on home automation might be Wendel from Level1Techs. He has a whole lot of videos regarding the topic. Including one about using two wire switches with modern wiring. Just watch the following videos do another collab. ps. I don't think he can help with audio he refers to himself as tone deaf.

,