Advanced STR Automation

In the last post I went over the basic home automation that I think every STR should have. Here I’ll list the more advanced equipment we have installed. It’s not really more advanced, more complex may be a better way to describe it. Tying all the devices together requires a Hub and can be more than someone seeking the basics would get into.

This is more of a hardware list to give you an idea of the devices you can install. In future posts we’ll cover how we get the automations to do what we want them to.

The Hub or Controller

The Hub we use in our short term rentals is called Home Assistant (HA), it’s the glue that connects all the different devices together. It’s essentially the start of our home automation show. lol

The hardware is a Raspberry Pi and the operating system that runs on it is called home assistant. If you’re from the IT world you most likely have heard of a Raspberry Pi before, but if you haven’t it’s simply a super tiny computer that packs a lot in it’s tiny case.

PS- Don’t let the picture scare you, it’s not that complicated. 🙂

Get The Hardware

The Hub Case

I got this case because the plastic case the Raspberry comes with (see the picture of it above) has a fan that gets noisy over time.

I tried using better quality fans to install in that original plastic case but they also were pretty loud and I preferred not having that buzzing sound from the fan if I could help it.

Then I came across this case.

It’s an aluminum case that doubles as a heat sink. There’s also a fan in the case, but it only turns on when it goes over a certain temperature.

The case does a pretty good job of keeping the Raspberry temperature down, and the fan from turning on. It does turn on once and a while but it’s not for very long when it does.

Get This Case

I’ll probably do a seperate step by step post on setting up the hardware, the case and installing the software. It’s not very difficult but can get a little confusing the first time around.

The Zwave / Zigbee USB Adapter

This adapter is what gives the Home Assistant the ability to communicate with Zwave and Zigbee devices.

It’s basically two devices in one.

If you plan on controlling Zwave or Zigbee devices with your Home Assistant (HA), then this dongle is a must.

Get This Adapter

Door Sensors

These little guys are vital! They connect to HA using Zigbee and report back when a door is opened.

These really give you piece of mind when you’re house is sitting empty.

We installed them on all the exterior doors.

We thought about installing them on the windows too, but haven’t done that yet.

We use the door sensors for automations that:

- Turn off/on the thermostats based on an exterior door opened or closed
- Let us know the cleaners left and a door is still open
- A door was opened and no one is scheduled to be at the house

Get This Door Sensor

Light Switches

We used to use Insteon light switches, which I loved, but the company is no longer in business. 🙁

Now we use this light switch from Inovelli. I loved the feel of the Insteon switches, but these light switches do have many more features.

It does everything the older switches did, and much more. You can configure double taps to do something, triple taps can do something else , you can group different switches together into a virtual circuit, and you can have the colors of the LED on the right of the switch change to indicate different things.

Get This Light Switch

Automation examples include:

Turning on all the common area lights when the guest first arrives at the house
Turning on the entrance light if it’s after sunset and the guest has not arrived yet
Turning off all the lights after the cleaner has left the house
Turning on the lanai lights on low at sunset if there is no one at the house
Turning on/off the front exterior lights based on sunset/sunrise
Grouped all the entrance lights together, so pressing on button controls all of them
Double click off the entrance light turns off all the lights in the house double click it on and it turns then all on
Double click off the light outside the bedroom turns off all the lights and locks the door
Change the LED to the right of the button to GREEN on the switch in the kitchen when the front door is unlocked.
Change the LED color to PURPLE on the switches by the thermostats when the thermostats are turned off because a door is open.
Change the LED color to GREEN on the switch by the sliding door when the door sensor senses the door is open.

Sprinkler Controller

Our irrigation system is from RainBird, which has the option of installing a WiFi Module.

This is the WiFi module we installed. It works pretty well and gives you the ability to monitor the watering and HA gives you run time history on the sprinklers.

We use this to monitor the watering more than anything. If the schedule on the sprinklers changes we get an alert. The landscapers have adjusted sprinklers in our community to crazy numbers, so this is in place to make sure our water bill doesn’t go through the roof. 🙂

Get This Sprinkler WiFi Controller

Pool Automation

This is an expensive option to install, but it’s worth it. We had our pool service install it for us. It’s called iAquaLink and Jandy is the company that makes it.

It allows us to control the pool heat, spa heat, and tells us the salt levels (we have salt level pools).

One thing I don’t like with iAquaLink is the buttons controlling the spa. To turn on the spa it’s three separate buttons, one for the spa heat, one for the spa mode and another for the blower.

Luckily with Home Assistant we have all the spa options turn on and off when the spa button is clicked and in our directions we let the guests know that too. 😉

Here are a couple of example automations we use:

- Like I said above, we use it to turn on/off all the spa components with a single button push
- Turn on/off the pool heat automatically based on the houses booking calendar
- Send us an email when the salt levels in the pool are low
- Send us an email when the pool equipment has an error
- Turn off the pool light at sunrise

Amost Everything Else…

Home Assistant has all kinds of connectors you can install for just about any WiFi or ZWave or Zigbee device.

We have connectors for a bunch of other things:

SmartThings connector for all the TVs in the houses and the washer and dryer
We use Tuya to control the split unit in the game room
Arlo connector for the cameras
A Logitech Harmony connector for the remote control in the theater
Connector for the Ring doorbell
SmartThingQ connector for the LG dryer
We have a device called sense in one of the houses to monitor the electrical usage, there’s a connector for that too
A connector for Roku devices
A connector for the Asus Router
Denon connector for the Amplifier in the theater
An Eero connector for the wifi repeaters – using this we can tell which cleaner is at the house!
A B-Hyve connector to control the water hose, to autofill the pool. You can go to this post for more details on how I did the plumbing for the pool filler here

I Hope this post has peaked your interests…

I find home automation really interesting, and it makes our STR lives easier to boot! There are a bunch of other things we do with our Home Assistant, I just listed the ones that fit into the general categories above.

Hopefully the list above give you an idea of what is possible with home automation. In the next post I’ll go over some of the most useful automations and how we set them up.

Steve

Hi, I'm Steve. My wife Sandy and I have been in the vacation rental business since 2012. Over the years we've learned a ton, this blog was created to share some of that info. I hope it helps both veteran and newbie hosts improve their businesses.