No issues with it at all, I'll still continue to recommend, install and cover it on this channel. I just wanted to try out something different to ensure I can be balanced and cover various available options. I feel like a lot of home networking content on KZbin has become so UniFi focussed that it often compltely ignores all of the other options that exist out there.

You'd really neeed to have two retractive switches, both switching live to the switch input on the shelly so that when either switch is pressed it'll momentarily switch live to the shelly's switch input. If your issue is that one of your switches is a regular 2 way switch because it's part of a multi-gang switch plate, you'd need to look at getting some sort of grid switch which would allow you to mix retractive switches with regular switch modules on the same plate.

@@camerongray1515 using click mini grid and swapping them out regular switch. But sounds like would need to change all the switches on the connection to retractive.

While they can work for some setups, they aren't really an alternative to this. While fibre HDMI cables can run long distances, they are also significantly harder to run through a building than CAT6 cables due to the non-removable connectors. This system also has the advantage of being able to be used with existing CAT6 cabling that many buildings already have installed.

Thanks! Everything is generally unscripted except for sometimes having a quick checklist of things I need to remember to cover. Although, this does result in an absolute tonne of outtakes and parts needing re-recorded several times before I get them how I want the!

I always ask myself why they need so much hardware. Home automation and iot doesn't need much bandwidth. Cameras a bit, but nothing crazy. Even a nas can be done for much less. I would need that kind of hardware only for some production software for my company, but I prefer to run them in cloud or serverless for reliability reasons

I absolutely don't *need* half of this hardware, but it's something I enjoy playing with - many hobbies are not based around a specific "need" for anything. I also run a KZbin channel which is primiarly based around this sort of stuff, nobody is going to watch a channel that talks about plugging a Hue bridge into their ISP's router and running everything over WiFi! People who care enough about this sort of thing enough to watch KZbin videos on it want to see more advanced setups, there are already tonnes of channels out there covering consumer smart home setups. I want to do something different. Then on top of that I get the benefit of having a fast and reliable network (which is particularly important with two people working from home most days), a NAS that can easily handle the extremely large video files I work with for this channel and a home automation setup that offers many nice "quality of life" improvements. I'm now in my new house and haven't yet got around to installing any of this stuff so I'm now sitting with most devices connected over WiFi (with a single powerline adapter to wired-only devices in my studio which performs abysmaly) and no smart lighting or home automation kit - it's definitely something that I really miss now that I don't have it and will be installing it all (and more) again as soon as I have time and space in my video schedule.

@@camerongray1515 thank you very much for the honesty! I work from home as well (I don't have a video production company, but yes, speed is important) I have a good connection (fiber optic) and 2 routers. Because I move often I don't have a NAS but I have my harddrive synced with Google Drive (a few terabytes of space). And when I travel for more than 2 weeks I bring a Google home and some smart appliances (i.e. light bulbs, some smart plugs and a Chromecast for the TV) and I think I can achieve 80-90% of the comforts I have at home. Of course when in a few months I will move in my first owned home I am planning to have all my smart home automation with the KNX standard all wired without wi-fi smart plug and smart lights. But yes, for the network I still think that 2 switches and a wi-fi mesh would be more than enough for my needs. I also have a small proxmox server (an old PC) but that is to test some software before using it in production (all on cloud that is more resilient).

I ended up needing to return it (updated the original video with a pinned comment but didn't have time to make a dedicated video on the issue) - I found that occasionally the OpenTherm connection on the Heatmiser would drop until the hub was restarted, this only happened once every couple of months or so however what made this issue worse was that when the OpenTherm comms dropped, the boiler would run the heating continuously at full power. The same would happen if the OpenTherm cable was completely disconnected, Viessmann couldn't get to the bottom of this either. The problem was that with both of these issues combined together, it meant that once every couple of months the heating would just suddenly turn on continuously at full power and I'd only realise when it became unbearably hot inside which could have been a disaster had it happened while I was away on holiday meaning I had to start switching the boiler off while away which defeated the point of having a smart thermostat! Ultimately Heatmiser agreed to a return so I opted to just do that and put the Nest back. Time will tell what I end up going for heating controls wise in the house - I have a lot more rooms now and insulation between them is pretty good, so maybe something with smart TRVs.

I did switch to Heatmiser but ended up needing to return it (updated the original video with a pinned comment but didn't have time to make a dedicated video on the issue) - I found that occasionally the OpenTherm connection on the Heatmiser would drop until the hub was restarted, this only happened once every couple of months or so however what made this issue worse was that when the OpenTherm comms dropped, the boiler would run the heating continuously at full power. The same would happen if the OpenTherm cable was completely disconnected, Viessmann couldn't get to the bottom of this either. The problem was that with both of these issues combined together, it meant that once every couple of months the heating would just suddenly turn on continuously at full power and I'd only realise when it became unbearably hot inside which could have been a disaster had it happened while I was away on holiday meaning I had to start switching the boiler off while away which defeated the point of having a smart thermostat! Ultimately Heatmiser agreed to a return so I opted to just do that and put the Nest back. Time will tell what I end up going for heating controls wise in the house - I have a lot more rooms now and insulation between them is pretty good, so maybe something with smart TRVs.

Lol I saw your comment before I started the video. Didn’t understand what that was about but realised as soon as I played the video 😂😂😂😂

I ended up swapping from that setup to TrueNAS just to keep things simpler, the flexibility of expansion was nice with mergerfs/snapraid but I just feel more comfortable with the data integrity protection and "set and forget" nature of TrueNAS. It just wasn't going to really be an exiting enough project to make a video on.

They're separate, this is the sort of scenario where while I could separate the storage, it would just add additional complexity and points of failure for no real benefit. Sure in an enterprise environment where you have highly available SAN storage and a large number of VM hosts and want to easily migrate and failover VMs between hosts then networked VM storage can make sense, but not when it comes to a single VM host and a single NAS. Nothing is encrypted on these machines themselves, any particularly sensitive files can still be encrypted individually. The offsite backups are however encrypted before transmission using Rclone's "Crypt" feature as the offsite backup server isn't in a completely secure location and other people do have physical access to it.