Just having smart meters fitted and talking to the engineer, the hive system is sounding really good. I have a basic thermostat so looking to upgrade soon, I’m also looking into home security alarms and cameras, and like the idea of it all being connected.

I was going the route of nest (have the smoke alarms) but the cost of the cameras (£150+ each) and ongoing storage costs are too much (£8pcpm). There doesn’t seem much difference between the thermastats.

An all singing dancing domestic security system has been quoted in at £1.5k (App based wireless system, 2 bell box, 7 PIR, 3 camera). But am I investing in something soon to be out of date?

Would I better off holding off a few months and putting the money towards an integrated system like Hive or Nest? Can you link these systems up to an audible internal and external bellbox?

Ideally I want to be able to link in security lighting, and timing on internal lights

Budget was under £1k for the lot – this isn’t looking enough

Anyone having similar dilemmas?

You can tie all of the major systems together with IFTTT.com

3/4 Arlo cameras cost about £350-400 and come with about a weeks worth of free storage for life. (Just checked on Amazon, 4 camera pack is £379 in a lightning deal today).

Smart Things allow you to have sensors and other things to automate the house.

Not sure how much a Hive / Nest costs for a base box, but a lot of their bits will work together.

Make sure you check the specs on the cameras. The Nest cams are really good and give a decent 1080p image.

i’m waiting for the external canary ones to appear as i have a canary camera in the living room and it’s excellent.

I’ve been looking at the arlo systems how would I go about linking these up to an audible alarm system then? So if I get the push alerts and some scrot is breaking in I can set it off remote, or it will be triggered internally if a PIR sensor goes off?

The nest smoke detectors have sensors as they have a night light (one of the reasons I got them). Could they be rigged up to an alarm system?

I have done basic research on IFTTT lots more reading for me.

Is this something worth buying a rasberry pi for a fiddling about?

and what happens with these wireless systems if the crook just cuts the phone/cable line in.

pretty easy to spot them – in our last property and this one they are in easy tamper positions on the front of the house – set of pliers, job done no internet

I’ve got a couple of canaries. Image quality is great. No idea how they would connect to anything else but the phone app works well at alerting me. Not sure why I’d want them talking to my thermostat.

Not a thermastat as such, they are setting up hive (and nest) to be a home hub, so you use their app to control everything. The thermastat is just part of the system.

I like the idea of the cameras alerting, then if a sensor trips, turn lights on, kick off alarm. Maybe I could also ask it to turn the temp up really high….

Hive does / is bringing out soon lights and sensors and cameras

Nest already does cameras and surely the smoke alarms could be rigged up to be motion detectors / audible alarms easy enough – the hardware is there already

Not a solution for thermostats etc, but I have a security camera from Y-Cam which works really well with 7 days of cloud storage for free. Their full home alarm/camera kit looks great value:

https://www.y-cam.com/product/protect-home-bundle-trial

I like the whole ‘internet of things’..
would you be using this for security, for spying on kids, or to ‘switch things on when you’re home’ etc?

Those arla cameras look cool, but I could NOT be bothered with batteries…

DrP

I got the Hive system as I got some free Hive bulbs and sockets when I signed up with British Gas with our new house. To be honest I don’t know much about the camera side of things but Hive works with the Amazon Dot thingy too.
Pretty chuffed with my Hive to be honest.

I’ve got (two) amazon Exho, and NEST.
The ability to tell it to turn up my heating (“alexa, trigger I’m chilly”.>!) is ‘cool’, but a bit unnecessary!

Fun though!

DrP

Information security nightmare, i.e. both
– your data / data about you out of your control and being used for purposes you don’t intend/foresee
– the likelihood of your connected devices being compromised and therefore manipulated to work in an unintended way potentially against you

Other than that, all good.

how would I go about linking these up to an audible alarm system then?

Not sure about audible, but the Arlo “detect motion” is a trigger (if) in IFTTT, so you can get it to do anything that is connected (then that).

and what happens with these wireless systems if the crook just cuts the phone/cable line in.

True, we’re on cable so it’s underground for a fair bit of the front garden.

This would be a problem with any connected alarm that you don’t pay for monitoring on. You can buy routers that have a cellular data backup if it’s a big concern.

One of the amazon reviews says arlo doesn’t support IFTTT. Plus a few grumpy ones about poor customer service.

Seems lots of people think sirens are out dated. I am not expecting anyone to come and investigate, what I want is the burglar to know they have been detected, make them want to be in the property as short a time as possible

I’m about to rip out the hive system which came with the house. The controller freezes up and turns the heating and hot water off. Happens a few times a day. I’m informed that I need a new base thing for BG to connect to it, but it’s £80. A new controller is around £110 which I heavily suspect is needed. I can get an entire new nest system installed for close(ish) to that, which is what I intend to do.

and what happens with these wireless systems if the crook just cuts the phone/cable line in.

Any decent alarm has a GSM SIM back up and will txt you etc.

I looked at all of these but they all failed at the first hurdle: they’re not open source, so there’s no way to know what’s going on, and if they stop supporting you (yes Google, this means you) you have a load of junk.

So over Christmas/New Year I made one using a pair of Raspberry Pis, a relay, a 1-wire thermostats, and a touchscreen LCD hat for the Pi.

The code took a few evenings; I chose to write it in Nim but I imagine Python would be easier and faster to write (but perhaps slower to run).

Works surprisingly well. I can ssh in and update the database to change the temperature with just a few lines of SQL 🙂

Next step is to hook up a Pi camera module so that it can turn itself on/off automatically based on motion.

Been qouted 1250+vat for a wireless system with siren, 7 pirs and 2 720p cameras. 110+vat pa for maintenence and app usage. Same concerns over if the vendor goes bust the setup likely is useless. Starting to make nest look reasonable. Any recommebded research links for how I could potential link up the nest sensors to a raspberry pi and trigger the existing internal siren?

I should quit my day job and just bang out Raspberry Pis with a couple of cameras (£25 each), temperature sensor (£0.50) and PIR modules (£3 each).

Total BOM is probably under £100.

Linky

The above link is a controller that works with a load of different home automation protocols. This means you are not tied in to one company for all the accessories so you can shop around for cheaper stuff. I think this might be the way forward for our household as Nest prices are a little eye watering.

So little update, I took a punt on a 3 cam arlo hd setup.

Not entirely sure tbh. A couple of issues with the app being flaky needing me to log out and back in again to see the hardware (apparently a common issue)

The deal breaker is the level of lag from the cameras ‘waking up’. I can walk from my front gate and only be picked up 8metres later by the time I’ve opened the front door. Not good really if you are trying to cover an area like your drive where you want to catch people heading for the side gate.

They would probably be much better inside in a zone where the thief might spend some time. Even then they make an audible click when switching on and the infra red leds are obvious.

Think they will be going back. Real shame but just not good enough for the price tag