The FINAL Tour of my Flat's Home Network & Smart Home Setup!

[@marksapollo]

Good luck with your move Cameron, your network is so neat. Looking forward to your videos of your new network build in your new home.

[@travisash8180]

Cameroon, will you install pinkyblue lights in your new place ?

[@MRPtech]

Your light switch setup is awesome. This gave me so many ideas how i can get mine done. Thank you

[@CiscoPhipse]

GREAT Video - Cisco Professional Network engineer here 🙂 I have a rack at home too, so it's very interesting to see what other people are doing. I have ethernet running around the home to a patch panel and for devices not that important wireless. For data, I leverage the cloud as you have to balance the cost of running all that kit with the cost of paying for cloud storage.

[@labbiee]

The different colours of patch cables are so delightful! Its making me want to get a keystone patch panel instead of terminating into standard rj45s and bringing them through a brush panel!

[@Fisher666ism]

Thanks mate for the nice video. You have a solid networking setup!. Its so nice to see real networking gear and not the usual Ubiquity/UniFI crap from other channels.

[@xurok]

Love your channel man, can't wait to see what's next in the new place. Love from France.

[@Netblock.systems]

Absolute beauty of a setup!

[@trident1314]

Nice tidy setup....you love a switch or 3 don't you 😂... looking forward to see what's planned for the new home.

[@StasWright]

Put the Patch panel between the Switches and use 6 inch or 1 foot patch cords. It doesn't look as pretty, but much easier to trace wires. For home networks where you are the only one in the cabinet it doesn't matter much, but for remote offices where you don't always know who's going to be in the data closet it's a huge help to be able easily trace cables. BTW: Very Nice setup.

[@killerpanda4659]

1ft patch cables are way better than 6inch imo, less strain on the cable and you're more likely to be able to reach your ports on a switch from the patch panel. I personally like the thin style patch cables that don't use the boot, the boots are annoying and it's easier to unplug without them

[@Leebobs1983]

Great video and looking forward to seeing what you do in your new house!

[@littlebluedinosaur]

Would love to see a dedicated video on how you set up the touch screens

[@Chris-yc3mm]

That shelly thing seems like a great way to do smart lights

[@BrennonBaxter]

I love your touchscreens used in your smarthome. Do you have a brand or model that you can point me towards?

[@karim74]

Nice crisp video

[@kelvinfleuty6496]

Have you got a link for the 4inch touch pad?

[@graham2425]

Can’t wait for you new set up and home tour,,

[@ant.s]

Your office server rack is nice!

[@The_Electronic_Beard]

Nice install! Love seeing other perspectives! You videos are very precise and ooze with your enthusiasm for this type work. Wish i had found your channel sooner! I do have a question about your production. Do you script your content? Sometimes it feels like you do, with all the details, but something tells me your passion allows you to freeform these videos. Eitherway, its everything a nerd like me wants! 😂

[@camerongray1515]

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!

[@cyberneticwarmachine]

Can't wait for a new home tour in the new house! Good luck with the move. Also that HDMI utp thing, super neat, but can't find any info on it?😅

[@atomictransfusion]

what patch cables are you using? they look pretty neat

[@hill2button]

Very nice!

[@paulhyland3528]

How do you configure your shellys to trigger power with loss of automation? I have a similar setup with pro 2s but im triggering the power. I know you can go into distached mode but defeats the object of having a fail safe when losing ha. Id loike to get smart lamps like your setup to control intensity/colour. Look forward to seeing the new house install!

[@Aimtjie]

I would love to know too. Looking forward to the new house setup

[@jackipiegg]

12:09 Pity you didn't show any power monitoring side of it, e.g how much watts it runs per day etc. Would be useful for someone who wants to do this.

[@DozIT]

Well done! The only nit-picky thing I see is the switches are daisy-chained creating a 'waterfall' effect. If the primary switch goes down, or gets updated it will take the second switch offline. In an enterprise config we'd use an aggregation switch as primary, providing an uplink to each switch independently. In your case, I recommend just using the other available SFP port on your Opensense. Obviously high availability likely is not your top concern in this network, and network switches are pretty damn reliable!

[@camerongray1515]

Thanks! As for the switches, with this setup, the multi-gig switch is essentially acting as the aggregation switche as all ofther switches are connected to this one - they aren't really daisy chained. Adding in a dedicated aggregation switch would just move the single point of failure - in a HA enterprise environment you'd have redundant aggregation switches. While I could definitely uplink all of the switches to the OPNSense firewall, the issue with this is that now any LAN traffic between the switches would then need to be forwarded by the firewall's CPU which is significantly slower than a switch chip. For a small setup such as this, you'd probably be better off actually daisy chaining the switches and then connecting both the first and last switches on the chain back into the firewall to form a ring then use STP to block ports to prevent a loop forming. That way, if any switch in the chain were to fail, the others would still have a route back to the firewall.

[@DozIT]

@@camerongray1515 makes sense! Didn’t even consider a ring, that’s a clever solution!

[@txga2005]

Great video!

[@H1pok0ndr1ak]

Hehehe, I have one of those data cabinets... ZPAS are amazing... i "found" it for 100 gbp in London, a few years ago. I lied, I actively hunted for one of these, after seeing another youtuber with one, and i just said to myself... I want That..

[@mikescott4008]

All very nice. May I asked what the APC smart PDU model is? Good luck with the move and new build.

[@devvoid1312]

What's with the patch setup? Forgive my potential ignorance, but isn't the point of a patch panel to terminate your runs at the back of the panel and then having small patch leads to switches, etc? Looks like the patch leads are running behind the rack and then the switches have cables coming through the rack again?

[@camerongray1515]

The patch leads are running directly from the patch panel to the switch. In such a small cabinet, using short patch leads was awkward to neatly manage so instead I'm using 1m patch leads with the excess tucked down the side of the rack.

[@bwhgs2]

Could you show how it locks the cabinet ?

[@camerongray1515]

I forgot to show it in this video, but I have a dedicated video covering it here: kzbin.info/www/bejne/p6PYhJWKepWYnqs

[@Liam-js6di]

Good video. I thought you’d moved away from Nest to a local thermostat a few months ago though?

[@camerongray1515]

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.

[@rschrader]

Nice video as usual

[@KolinMc]

Where can I find out how to setup home assistant and shelly like that?

[@G7OEA]

are you leaving the cab behind for thed next owner?

[@camerongray1515]

Yes, the cabinet and all network cabling were left behind although the networking equipment came out (except the patch panel and PDU). I also left the alarm system (but removed the UART to Ethernet adapter), removed the in-wall touchscreens since they wouldn't work without my Home Assistant server and swapped all of the smart switches back to regular switches. I'll be releasing another video shortly showing the process of taking everything out and getting the place ready for a "normal" person to move in.

[@travisash8180]

@@camerongray1515 I bet the neighbours will be pleased with a "normal" person.

[@z_polarcat]

What type of down do you use? How do you control their color?

[@rezenclowd3]

What is the Nas 2u server chassis with 2x 5.25 bays @10:37 and does it need rails? I have a 2 post rack and am looking to add 12 drives as well....even a short depth jbod would be fine...

[@jeffrdrama7984]

When you move and start running cables, please can you film the drilling through the walls part and how you measure from outside etc? I always struggle with that part, no issues terminating cables etc, just the drilling part which is a pain. I always blow all the bricks or mismeasure and end up having too many holes..

[@SBBUK]

How much did you pay for these switches? Had a quick look and the prices I found are pretty mad for SMB kit. I want to replace my 2.5gb and 1gb switches with a single unit but there's nothing really that affordable that does POE. Closest i've found is the Zyxel XMG1915-18EP.

[@TomMorris1]

Are there any things you will do differently at your new house, based on your experience with your flat setup?

[@camerongray1515]

Very good question! The install in the house will have a bunch of differences, some due to simply having more space to work with but also some based on learnings from the flat (and other installs I've done since). I'll probably keep thinking of more of these so will try to cover them in future videos. - Everything will now be in one large rack in a central location rather than being split across two and the rack will be far away from any living areas so I no longer need to worry about noise. All of the HDMI distribution kit will also be centralised. - A rack deep enough to mount full size servers, this was partially a space issue in the flat but the deepest rack I had was 600mm deep so could only mount short depth servers which made things awkward. I'll instead be using a full 1000mm deep rack so that I can fit full size servers if I want to. - Wiring in a way that that I'm not reliant on smart technologies long term. For example, yesterday I was installing downlights in the kitchen. Long term I'll be installing smart bulbs so can easily zone lights however I want them, but I still pulled in a pair of separate feeds to allow me to physically switch two different zones of lights separately. I also pulled in a cable from the light switch to be used for future under-cabinet lights. I could have easily not done this and instead relied on smart switching, but pulling the cable means I can revert back to traditional switching at a future date. - Wired alarm system - The wireless system in the flat was great, but the PIRs would sleep after they detected motion to save battery which was fine for alarm purposes but meant that they couldn't really be used for home automation tasks. - Keeping "core" cable routes accessible as possible. Of course there will always need to be cables that run through finished walls or under hard to remove flooring materials, but I plan to keep the main runs that carry the majority of cables as accessible as possible (in trunking inside cupboards, high up in the attic above any future loft boarding, under carpeted floors instead of hard ones) - this will make pulling in future cables an easier, less destructive process. - Ideally a dedicated RCBO for "core infrastructure". Like, the flat, the new house still has a split load consumer unit (because apparently spending a tiny bit more on RCBOs is way too unreasonable for an expensive new house!). This meant that if I were to trip an RCD, I'd also knock out the servers and network kit. I'll probably convert this to a fully RCBO board in the future (thankfully Hager boards can be converted without being fully replaced) and will then put the network kit on a dedicated RCBO so it's resilient against needing to turn a circuit off, or accidentally tripping something. I'll also install a UPS in the rack and may even look into using the UPS to feed a couple of sockets around the house for certain equipment. - I also want to spend more time testing and prototyping things before installing them. This was also a bit harder to do in the flat due to having such little space to work with meaning that i often had to install things and then set them up which resulted in things getting rushed and never quite working as well as I wanted them to. In particular, I want to really focus on figuring out the control of the HDMI distribution system, I had it working but it was always a little bit clunky and intermittent.

[@TomMorris1]

@@camerongray1515 Thanks for the comprehensive and interesting answer!

[@TomMorris1]

@@camerongray1515 Its a real shame about the split load board, our new build house from a few years ago was split load as well. Would of thought all RCBO would be mandatory by now, I guess they didnt put in an SPD in either which would be nice to have. Regarding UPS, I have seen some people go down the route of using seperate Inverter and batteries usually used for solar/off-grid for a more cost-effective UPS equivalent (especially if you want to support other household loads), but not sure if you can enable safe-shutdown on servers with kit like that.

[@und4287]

​@@TomMorris1Probably the classic case of builders saving money wherever they can...

[@darlingtonjonesimagery9247]

QUESTION: BlueIris on your PC, are you running TEAMVIEWER to control remotely? What happens in power off, does it automatically restart or do you have wake on lan or something like that?

[@camerongray1515]

I'm using Windows's built in Remote Desktop for remote access from my LAN. I personally wouldn't use Teamviewer for anything other than remotely assisting someone, I want all management of my machines to be LAN only and fully within my control. The PC just runs 24/7 so is never shut down, I have then set the BIOS to power on automatically when mains power is applied so in the event of a power cut, the machine will automatically power on when the power comes back.

[@darlingtonjonesimagery9247]

@@camerongray1515 this is good insights. Thank you

[@molitovv]

0.75 Playback Speed Engaged

[@prof.v7477]

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 😂😂😂😂

[@MrMonero]

Hmmm I’m currently watching at 1.5x

[@molitovv]

@@MrMonero Wow! What is your ear bandwidth?

[@tramcrazy]

What happened to the Heatmiser thermostat? Did it not end up working as you wanted it to?

[@camerongray1515]

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.

[@harveybolton]

Is your TrueNAS & Proxmox servers storage independent or do you link the two via iSCSI/NFS? I'd like to switch away from a single machine that does all my storage/docker needs to get a more modular setup so that compute and storage are mostly separate but its an area I'm new to. Also curious as to how you handle encryption, LUKS/ZFS keys required on boot or automatic/no encryption?

[@camerongray1515]

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.

[@blackcobolt1520]

Nice video. What make and model of panels are you using for the lighting wall touch screens? You've given precise models for nearly everything else.😂.

[@camerongray1515]

They're a fairly generic product from AliExpress sold under a bunch of different brands. They tend to be advertised as "Tuya Touch Panels" or similar with a model number of "T6E". However, it's hard to link specific models as manufacturers seem to be swapping between the Android versions I had here and Linux based devices which look identical, and work the same when it comes to the Tuya Smart Life side of things, but they can't be modded to run Android apps in the same way that the Android ones can so if you're looking for them, be very careful to make sure the one you buy runs Android and not Linux. In particular, the ones that advertise "Alexa Built-In" appear to be the Linux ones.

[@NaderHajHasan]

Any procedures how to turn it to HA terminal?

[@bwhgs2]

Who do you use for off site backup I need to start doing it ?

[@camerongray1515]

I currently have a physical machine colocated offsite that I back up to, however historically I've used Backblaze B2 which I'd definitely recommend - very affordable and can easily backup to it from TrueNAS or other machines using software such as RClone.

[@MR-NAGAH]

Clicked the card for your truenas build and that went through mergerfs and snapraid. Have you now moved to Truenas fully? I might have missed that update/ video.

[@camerongray1515]

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.

[@MAMDAVEM]

Cameron what made you move away from Unifi gear?

[@camerongray1515]

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.

[@JakeHillion]

Is that an APC AP7921 PDU? APC seem to have removed all trace of the firmware from the Internet now that it's out of support, which has been a really disappointing experience for me. I recently found that mine is on an ancient revision and tried to update it, and have spent perhaps 2 hours searching for firmware to no avail. A bad experience to remember when I next consider buying power hardware! Does anyone in this special place on the Internet have any suggestions where to look?

[@EsotericArctos]

Fans would be more of an airflow system rather than a cooling system. The air is not cooled as such. You do have "air cooling" as such I guess when you blow air over a heatsink, but technically that is different to air flow control in a space. I know, I am being pedantic. A lot of people interchange the definitions of cooling and airflow control. Moving on . Really great video showing off a well designed network. The video format is good too, not too long, not too short. Just the right amount of information without going overboard. Really well presented. Thank you :) Your philosophy on home automation is pretty well identical to the one Paulus (founder of Home Assistant) has. The home automation should be seamless, invisible but missed if it goes offline. Wall switches and lights should operate as expected by a stranger coming on to turn on a light, without breaking the home automation, or with the light doing something weird because the home automation overrides the manual switch. I got rid of majority of my smart bulbs and replaced them with smart switches, except for the few places I may want colour added. I have physical switches in that case, similar to the Hue switch, that is the main light switch for those smart bulb situations, with the wall switch being bypassed and covered or even removed in some cases. These are not ideal though as they still need Zigbee, but the switches in my place have no neutral, so I can't do the shelley trick

[@user-zr7kz4vs7c]

nice video :)

[@jonathanrollins2470]

Like your videos. Maybe... Talk just a bit slower for those of us that are slow listeners lol

[@GeneralKenobi69420]

Meanwhile 29 year old neet me who's almost never had a job and can barely even keep my room clean

[@britishagent]

A bit overkill for a small home

[@00000a0009]

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

[@camerongray1515]

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.

[@00000a0009]

@@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).

[@travisash8180]

@@camerongray1515 In your new place will you put a budgie in the cludgie ?

[@akane8615]

You slur ur word a lot.

[@travisash8180]

He's not drunk !

[@drazenmiskovic4952]

You're gonna get cancer of all those electronics around you 24/7. I love tech, gadgets and stuff but I'm trying to minimise it as much as possible, for simplicity of life, mind and health in general.

[@thenullco]

So how does electricity move around your home?

[@drazenmiskovic4952]

@@thenullco your question has nothing related to do with my comment...

[@NeilSleightholm]

@camerongray1515 can I ask what make those press switches are?

[@camerongray1515]

They're from the MK Dimensions range - MK retractive grid plus modules in an MK Dimensions grid frame. That said, I don't think I'll be going with them in the new place as the MK retractive switches are really stiff to press, even with one of the two springs removed.