Smart home for old buildings, wireless-based, broad base wanted

Hello everyone,

I have a question about smart homes.
I will soon partially renovate / fully renovate my parents' house
- 10x10m
- 2.5 stories
- Fully renovated / refurbished in 1980

meaning some remodeling,
new stairs, removing a few walls and adding beams, new floors,
new ceilings, new walls.

I want a "smart home" with which I can primarily control topics like
- Intelligent lighting control (motion sensors, people counters, ...) and shading
- Clever heating
- Control of air conditioning and decentralized residential ventilation
- Garage door
- Integration of photovoltaics with power storage
- Charging stations
- and a few more small things.

I would like to go for a wireless solution because it is not yet clear whether the electrical system will be touched everywhere, and I also want to be able to easily integrate future expansions.
The primary requirement for my smart home is actually that when it is set up, it is smart
IN THAT I do not have to constantly turn lights on in the app, but that everything runs as automatically as possible (the app is imo not smart, but smart is when I do not have to deal with it daily) :) .
Also, a broad base is important to me; fully encapsulated solutions with massively limited actuators / sensors are basically out.

I have no problem with openHAB or similar, I think you can’t avoid it if you want flexibility
(different technologies), right?
Now I stumbled upon "homee" in connection with Enocean, which sounds basically good.

Where I’m kind of stuck now and what my question is:

Would you go directly with a Raspberry Pi with openHAB or similar and connection of different technologies
or use something else as a “central unit”?

Thanks for brainstorming feedback, best regards
Rüdiger

Old buildings and radio – that's often where the problems start. How thick are the walls/ceilings and what material are they made of?

Hi Mycraft,

good point, thanks for the answer.
Exterior walls 50/60 cm masonry.
Interior walls with one exception 12-20 cm masonry.
But relatively open, we don’t want many "individual" rooms but rather large areas.

lg
Rüdiger

As a rule, the intermediate ceilings and of course the distances are a problem. At some point (very quickly) it simply stops being fun to use radio.

Well, I would first plan something like "technical shafts" and intermediate distributors into your floor plan. They can be implemented later as a kind of pipe box, for example, planning something in the stairwell since you want/have to do something there. Before a SmartHome comes a ConnectedHome. From experience, I can tell you that the more "open" and "established" a (radio) standard is, the better off you are. Example: My Tuya LED panels are going back on Monday! After a firmware update, the RGB stuff no longer works and without the "app," you can forget about the remote! EnOcean is okay – for example, I use it with my roller shutters. However, pairing with an iobroker and USB dongle is only possible with a lot of (free) time. Zigbee is also okay. For example, in the office, I equipped my floor lamp with a Zigbee socket and now switch it on/off with a wireless switch or via Alexa voice command. Instead of homee, I would consider something like wibutler. Also, check your flush-mounted boxes to see if they can accommodate radio actuators and if you have a neutral conductor in them. And possibly get info about the current electrical system.

Ok, understood, thanks for the info. Electrical is currently being checked, more here later.

Question about wibutler:
1. Sounds great!
2. But I have concerns because despite open standards, "only" a limited set of 200 devices is supported
3. I have slight concerns whether you can also map reasonable rules like "Control the shading based on the light incidence on the house wall and the ventilation based on the CO2 measurement, but only if someone has been in the room for at least 30 minutes" or something similar.

Is that possible? Or are there alternatives for that as well? Raspberry and Openhab had (have?) the problem that I can’t build an OpenHab central on Raspberry that supports z-wave, zigbee and enocean, right? I mean now without soldering on the board?

Regards Rüdiger