A three storey Melbourne home: pool, garage, intercom, heating and lighting, in one app

Where it started

The owner had already put a lot into the house: a pool with its own controller, a video intercom at the front door and another at the gate, cameras, a garage door, ducted air conditioning and hydronic heating, smart lights in the basement and a music system. Some of it was in Home Assistant, most of it was not, and nothing was in one place.

He wanted the whole home in one app for the family, with the garage, the gate and the pool working from it. He had also been told the garage door could not be integrated.

What we connected

• Pool: the existing controller, so its readings and controls sit with everything else
• Garage: the existing motor, with a small retrofit module, so the door opens from the dashboard, the phone and the car
• Front door and gate: both video intercoms, with the indoor monitors kept
• Cameras: the home's recorder, connected locally rather than through a cloud service
• Heating and cooling: the air conditioning and the hydronic radiators
• Lighting and presence: basement lights on relays, presence sensors and smart bulbs
• Music: the speakers around the home, playing from the family's music service
• Energy: two solar inverters, the home battery and the car charger, readable in one place

Every system kept its own controller. The pool, the air conditioning and the intercoms work exactly as they did if Home Assistant is switched off. We connected them, we did not replace them.

The garage door that could not be done

We read the motor's manual instead of going by reputation, and found a port made for exactly this kind of control. A small module wired to it gave full open, close and position control, with no change to the motor and no new opener.

The lesson: never call a device incompatible until you have read its manual. The pool controller was connected the same way, from its specification sheet.

Making a big home feel small

With three floors and sixteen rooms, the risk is a dashboard that is just a long list. We built two in our own design: a wall dashboard that shows the whole home on one screen with no scrolling, and a phone dashboard with the same pages made for a thumb.

The home page shows the family, the doors and the gate at a glance. Each floor has its own rooms page, and there are pages for climate, energy and music. The family can switch between a dark theme and a bright one.

How the work was done

Two visits covered the parts that need hands: the garage module, the relays in the basement, the intercom at the gate and the handover. Everything else, including the dashboards and the automations, was built and tested from our desk over an encrypted private network.