My Favourite Home Automation Project + Future of Smart Home?

I am incredibly appreciative and honestly mind blown that you guys helped me to achieve 10K subscribers in such a short period of time, literally blown away! This is a Q&A for you guys, you guys submitted the questions and I tried to answer as many as I possibly could. Questions like what Home Automation project am I most proud of, what do I think the future of the Smart Home industry is, Coke or Irn Bru, my favourite smart home sensor, how did I get into smart home and so much more of my ramblings! Let me know what you think about Q&A's?

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#homeassistant #smarthome
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0:00 - Intro and thank you
1:20 - If money was no object
2:43 - How did I get into smart home and first device
5:02 - Most Useful Automation?
6:13 - Which project can I not get right?
7:24 - Smart home startup?
8:20 - Whisky or Rum?
8:55 - What do I know now that I wish I knew when I started
10:12 - Shots fired
10:17 - How to become a HA developer
11:25 - Automation I'm most proud of
12:36 - What is the future smart home protocol?
14:21 - Which automation would I miss the most?
14:55 - Next evolution in automation editors
15:36 - How do I keep my smart home secure?
16:48 - Why did I start YouTube?
18:46 - 100 baby sized elephants or 1 elephant sized baby
19:24 - How do I make YouTube videos?
21:54 - Elbow licking
22:13 - Favourite automation 2.
23:53 - Home Assistant backup strategy
24:56 - Will Thread take over?
25:44 - What's the next goal?
26:53 - Most complex automation?
28:13 - How much have I spent on smart home products?
29:01 - ZigBee vs Z-Wave?
30:11 - Do I still do my day job + what is my day job?
31:48 - What's something I want to achieve in the future with home automation?
32:56 - Thoughts on Plan4act?
33:55 - Is it true...
34:02 - Ale or Lager?
34:30 - Coke or Irn-Bru
35:16 - Salt & Vingar or Salt & Sauce?
35:53 - Outro

[EverythingSmartHome]

Thank you all so much for the incredible support 🙏 sorry this ended up being so long, I didn't realise how much I talked 🤯 did you guys enjoy the Q&A? I had a lot of fun making it 😅

[maxcat]

Love your videos. Can you please do one on how to assign household chores to your children on a rolling schedule. Specifically so that child 1 gets dishwasher today, and child 2 gets it tomorrow. Thanks.

[zelial]

Thank you for your work on this channel. You know what I would love to watch? A journey of turning your parents' home smart (with your dad as a special guest if he'd be willing).

[uSlackr]

On the smart light switches - Inovelli has some great switches for the US home. They are paddle switches with only momentary up or down, so they stay in a neutral position. Makes it real easy to integrate into automations. I started in our newly renovated kitchen where the lights are fully automatic.

[chrisgrimes]

New to Home Assistant and Love your videos the most. Lots to learn and my set up is still very basic after 2 months and trashing the Wink system. I really appreciate all the work you put into these videos.

[hybrispsycho]

Interesting video, would never have thought you an introvert lol when I first started watching you I thought I would quite like to do YouTube stuff for games and stuff but can't even stand my own voice and thought I would never have the confidence like you did. Keep up the good work and congrats on. The followers looks like it's nearly 11k already 😀

[uSlackr]

Opinion re: Z-wave vs. zigbee. I didn't think twice about this as I was building out. They both work pretty much flawlessly. I had a system that handled both. Both benefit from having a a mesh of devices on the same protocol.

[nicolasraby]

I'm glad you are mainly DIY, much more interesting videos when someone makes a build than someone who connects something out of the box.
You'll hit 50k soon man no problem!

[tomekhekin]

Congrast 10 K. "We finde it easy" to be clear you find it easy .... I thanks for your support find it at best manageable. Thx for all tutorials.

[juniorst]

Definitely you deserve 10k and much more! Cheers from Brazil. Success!

[ntqty]

Congratulations on the subscriber count; almost 11, 000 already! It's clear there's a lot of effort you put in to each video.

That was an awesome introductory project you had with the biomass heating controller. If you are ever short of ideas for videos, or want to do a longer technical "series" you could interleave with less technical videos, then that would be a super interesting subject with a lot of scope.

I'd love to hear about the design of the system, what alternatives you considered when designing it, if you integrated user-friendly fallbacks like manual controls for if things like arduinos or power supplies fail, what turned out differently to how you expected and needed changing, did you need to implement actual control systems like PID, or do you just control a builtin thermostat in the boiler, do you try and predict when the boiler needs to come on to reach a temperature at a given time of day as the seasons change, what you learned when using arduinos for control and your approach to integrating them with home assistant (using ethernet sounds like a good idea for reliability over various wireless approaches), and from your dad's perspective what from the electrical engineering side was important and so on (including whether things like ignition systems or relays cause electromagnetic interference you have to care about in the arduino side).

I don't think you need to worry that it's too esoteric or unique to be interesting. It's probably big enough that it has a lot of different components as part of the solution that you could focus on in turn and viewers could pick and use for their own applications in isolation. I think as you've already found (e.g. especially with the templates video) there's an appetite for more technical content rather than just another "look at my dashboard" channel or a gadget demo channel and you have a good knack of presenting that.

Also, TIL: nginx is pronounced Engine X

[taylorjackson]

You're doing an awesome job man, I'm glad you've reached this milestone, here's to 10k more!

[AwesomeOpenSource]

Congratulations on 10, 000 subs! I just crossed that point about 2 weeks ago as well! Keep up the great work. I see you headed for 100, 000 easy!

[madst]

Congratulations. Well deserved.
Running ML to detect patterns and deviations makes a hell of a lot of sense.
Maybe a relatively simple start would be to collect deviations in the form of overrides and suggest schedule modifications.
I have tried Irn Bru - it tastes about as artificial as it looks  😀

[uSlackr]

Absolutely loved visiting Scotland. Hoping to return.
Great whiskey for sure.

[kamilk]

There will be 50, 000 for sure.
You run one of the most interesting guides.
We are waiting for more videos, maybe how to run home assistant on truenas

[nielslangkilde]

Hi Lewis, I am not surprised about the 10.000+ subscribers:
Interesting subjects
-You know what you talk about, and you have the passion for the things you do.
-Superb video and audio quality
-Good examples, that are easy to relate to
-And your lovley Irish accent ;-)

Keep up the good work..

Fun with a Q&A session also ;-)
Question: Would you build the boiler-controller with ESPhome if you should rebuild it?


-Greetings from Denmark

[rob]

Finally getting around to catching up with your videos...

Well done on 10, 000 subscribers!

Some great questions and some interesting answers too 🙂

[AndrewDanne]

You present these video's in a way that is so interesting, enjoyable, and enlightening. Thank you. Would love to know more about the dual boiler project that you did with your dad as it is a very bespoke and ground-up build with lots of exploration, experimentation, and learnings based on failures. Would love to hear more about it and the journey it invoked. "Tapadh leat" & cheers mate.

[FreshfrogmarketingUk]

Great video. Keep at it. I love your stuff.