Refining a Smart Home: 2026
Back in December 2021, with a quiet week over Christmas, I wrote about refining our smart home. Six years of adding a gadget here and an app there had left it, in all honesty, thrown together, and I had a plan to tidy it up, in my mind at least? Reading it back now makes me smile. Roomie, Harmony, Alexa, Hue, Somfy, Nuki, Rointe and HomeKit, each with its own app, and a Raspberry Pi on order to run HomeBridge and hold the whole thing together.
I signed off by calling it The Step, until the future threw something new at me. Well, it did, and nearly five years on the apartment is a very different place to live. Not because we've added more gadgets, but because everything finally works together.
Enter Homey
The future arrived in the shape of a Homey Pro. If you haven't come across it, Homey is a smart home hub that speaks just about every language a device can, Zigbee, Z-Wave, Matter and Wi-Fi, with an App Store covering hundreds of brands on top. Hold on a minute, isn't that what HomeKit was meant to do? In a way, but HomeKit works best with things built to Apple's rules, and Homey simply doesn't mind who made it.
It lives in the hallway cupboard alongside the Philips Hue Bridge Pro, an Aqara Hub M3, a Matter Zigbee bridge and a Synology NAS, all tucked away out of sight. This time I started with the layout, every room set up as a zone and every device placed in the room it actually lives in. That was a lesson learnt the hard way in 2021, when one app created the rooms and every other app inherited the mess.
Not everything from 2021 made the move. Some of the Somfy blinds made way for wooden shutters, they're opened by hand, but we simply preferred the look, and sometimes that's reason enough. The Harmony Hub gave way to Apple TV throughout the apartment, a cohesive experience on every TV with a matching remote. HomeBridge had the most eventful retirement of all, switched off, called back to run the ceiling fans, then retired for good once we'd written our own fan app. More on that shortly.
What really changed things though was Flows. A Flow is a simple rule, when this happens and this is true, do that, and Advanced Flows lay those rules out like a flowchart so one Flow can look after a whole room. There are over 40 of them running the apartment now, and that's when the home stopped being something we controlled and started looking after itself.
Writing our own apps
In 2021 the Rointe radiators were the one thing I couldn't bring in, and I'd resigned myself to opening the Rointe app forever. Nobody had made a Homey app that did what I wanted, so I asked myself the obvious question, how hard could it be to write my own? Famous last words 🤦🏻♂️
That Rointe app is where it all began. A separate Heating Dial project ended up rolled into it, so it's now a fully featured app with live control of every radiator and towel rail, a dashboard dial to warm a single room or a whole group, and a holiday mode that keeps the place frost-free while we're away, then puts everything back as it was when we return.
One app led to another, and each started the same way, something was turning into a chore and I thought there must be a better way. Bin Collections came from the simple fact that councils rarely collect like clockwork, so its reminder stays on the dashboard until someone taps Collected and a missed week never catches us out. Laundry Tracker uses vibration sensors on the washing machine and tumble dryer to know when a load has finished, then turns from green to amber to red as the hours pass, so clean washing is no longer left in the drum until it smells. The Dashboard Alarm Keypad put a proper code-protected keypad on the hallway iPad. And Dreame Rooms, still a work in progress, sends our robot vacuum to clean exactly the rooms we choose. Angela named the vacuum Bernard, and we have no idea why?
Some projects never made it to the App Store at all. The Mantra Fan app gives local control of the ceiling fans with no cloud involved, and is what finally sent HomeBridge into retirement. The HomeView clock turns the hallway iPad into a giant clock face when nobody's using it, and the Pantry app keeps track of what's in the kitchen cupboards, right down to importing the Ocado order. I've written about a few of these already if you'd like the full ins & outs.
Lighting that thinks for itself
In 2021 every bulb was already Philips Hue and the switches were neatly covered with dimmers, but someone still had to reach for one. Today the lights mostly look after themselves, and the best way to explain how is to walk you down our hallway.
It's the busiest part of the apartment, with a motion sensor at the bedroom end and another at the lounge end. During the day the ceiling lights come on bright, from 6pm the Peacock lamp takes over at a softer 50%, and once we've gone to bed it drops to a dim nightlight, so a 3am trip to the kitchen doesn't blind anyone. A minute after the last movement everything goes off, unless the shoe cupboard is open, in which case it waits. The wall switch still works too, press it and the sensors step aside for an hour before taking back control.
Every room has its own version of that thinking. The bedroom lamps only come on if it's actually dark and before 11pm, and switch off three minutes after we leave. The office knows a working day from a weekend, with a bright desk lamp from 10am on weekdays and something gentler in the evenings and at weekends, depending on the daylight. If we both head out during the day, it switches off behind us.
There's still room for a little fun, with Hue Sync boxes on the lounge and bedroom TVs and Hue Tap Dials in most rooms for the times you do want to take over. But do I ask Siri to turn the lights on anymore? Not really, I just walk in.
A home that finally makes sense
The same approach runs through the rest of the home. Homey knows when Angela and I are in or out and sets the alarm to match, with Night mode once we've gone to bed. Ring the doorbell and whatever's on the TV pauses. Leak sensors keep watch wherever there's water, and if Bernard gets himself stuck, we hear about it. None of it is especially clever on its own, the magic is that it all happens without anyone having to think about it.
In 2021 I wrote that voice control wasn't what made a home smart, it was the implementation and the ease of use. I still believe that, the difference now is how it's all put together. Instead of a dozen apps each doing one job, there's one system that knows what's happening in every room and responds, the heating, the lights, the locks, the music, even the bins. And when something doesn't have an app, I write one.
It no longer feels like a collection of gadgets, it feels like a coherent, smart place to live. Is it finished? Of course not, you know me, there's always something new on the horizon. But for the first time the mist has well and truly cleared, and only time will tell what the next five years bring……
And as always, if you'd like a Homey setup like ours, or an app built around the way your home works, contact us today 📱
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