I’ve tried close to a hundred various devices, both ZigBee and Z-wave, and I’ve never had an issue with a Z-wave device but many with ZigBee.

I still use them here and there (mainly Hue bulbs), but I prefer Z-wave whenever possible.

Another factor is ZigBee devices tend to respond much slower. Z-wave light switches are instant on/off when instructed whereas my ZigBee lights always have a delay between 1-4 seconds.

It’s fairly universal throughout developed countries. Might be called something different than GFCI though.

This is something I’ve been eyeing for the same use case: https://www.getzooz.com/zooz-zen15-power-switch/

Ive had great experiences with Zooz products in general, but haven’t used this one (yet).

It does also control, but I’m sure if it’s anything like their wall switches it has a setting to default to ON.

EDIT: Didn’t see the ZigBee part of your post. Adding a z-wave dongle isn’t too difficult if you’re open to it. ZigBee sucks IMO.

True. Also in newer homes the GFCI might be at the circuit breaker.

Either way, as long as it’s GFCI you shouldn’t have any concerns.

Your bathroom receptacles are protected by a GFCI safety mechanism. You can confirm by noticing if the receptacle has two small buttons usually stamped with “Test” and “Reset”.

If the smart plug had a malfunction due to humidity (unlikely), the GFCI receptacle it’s plugged into would instantly cut power.

You can toss a toaster in your bathtub as long as it’s plugged into a GFCI and 99.99999% chance you would be totally fine. Don’t try this at home.

+1 for Amcrest PoE.

I also use a Reolink Doorbell PoE and it’s better than any Nest or Ring doorbell, without the cloud bullshit attached.

My only issue with the amcrest is that they get bad IR pollution at night and are sometimes unusable. But that’s apparently an issue with most dome cameras at night.

Electrical code and common practice has changed and improved drastically since ungrounded wiring was the norm.

I’ve worked on many houses and each one was a potential disaster waiting to happen.

Just sayin. Be safe.

I had a few issues with pairing. Besides that, Phillips has made some controversial changes in the past that were anti-consumer.

But bypassing their hub and therefore the app and online account by using a ZigBee hub avoided those concerns for me.

Connecting and setting up a ZigBee hub was very simple. But I’m also using Home assistant so can’t vouch for the process with Google.

I would urge you to have an electrician sort out your electrical issues first.

I helped a friend gut and rewire his kitchen and besides not being grounded, the wiring was very poorly done. I told him it was a miracle he didn’t have a fire.

Their microwave would flip a breaker if anything else was on in the kitchen. I traced the circuit to a pull string light in the basement. The ENTIRE kitchen circuit was passing through a rusty old screw terminal on the light fixture. The wire’s sheathing had completely melted back exposing 4" of bare hot wire.

Don’t trust that old wiring at all. And if you can’t afford to fix it asap, at least stock up on smoke alarms and have an escape plan.

Expensive but the color quality is the best on the market.

Wasn’t a fan of their hub so I connect the bulbs directly to my ZigBee hub/dongle.

I won’t get on too high of a soap box, but strongly considering moving away from Google especially for home automation. Support open source privacy respecting systems and products (or at least products that don’t push anti-consumer practices).

I know Phillips doesn’t fit that by any means, but any device that supports a local API/ZigBee/z-wave/matter is fine in my book.

Not sure. I think without having the integration explore page it would be hard to hit the limit, unless you have a serious amount of custom components.

My personal anecdote:

Z-wave is king. ZigBee is a far second place and WiFi / Bluetooth are a last resort.

I’m a huge fan of Zooz products having tested many other brands and been disappointed.

My biggest failure rate has been with Shelly products. Sonoff is alright but have also had issues here and there. I’ve yet to have any issues with my Zooz switches and smart plugs and I have close to 50 of them.

Your first suggestion is a clever one.

I can imagine writing a small script on the host machine to listen for subdomains, forward them to pfsense to update the aliases, and possibly set them to expire after a few days for security reasons.

Surely something like this exists. How to find it…?

There’s a few apps I need to split out. Top priority is the signiant app which according to their documentation requires various AWS subdomains as well as their own. Specific subdomains are not specified and are implied to change regularly/on demand.

In an ideal world I would do my split tunneling on the device itself, but I don’t trust Windows and thus I run my VPN at the router level.

This isn’t a problem for most things, but I need to utilize my full bandwidth to transfer large files to clients in a timely manner, and a VPN becomes a massive bottleneck.

Pfsense lets you alias by domain name (I believe it regularly resolves down to an IP and uses that for filtering), but again, you need to supply the exact subdomain.

Just wondering if there’s an alternative solution to this issue. If it’s external to pfsense that’s not the end of the world.

Worst case scenario, I would set up a dedicated Linux box or maybe even a VM which could share access to the file transfer NAS and split tunnel the entire box around the VPN. Definitely less convenient.

This looks promising. I’m going to investigate further. Thanks!

I’m leaning towards a Samsung A7 flashed with LineageOS and I may try to use FullyKiosk again. I just really hate the idea of using an Amazon or Google OS. I would build a raspberry pi / touchscreen system if I had the time.

How important is the battery concern? I’ve read it’s an overblown worry for modern tablets.

This is what I would do if I had the time to spare. I’m surprised there isn’t a market for custom Homeassistant tablet devices.

From what I could find, similar to iOS, you need some type of external management device to set this up.

Yes, it will count towards your bandwidth.

I typically don’t get anywhere close to this though.

The few times I did were due to initiating large backups between devices, upwards of 2TB. But I’ve since moved my backup system to a mesh network and haven’t hit bandwidth overages since.

I recommend it every time this question pops up and I’m surprised more people aren’t privy to it:

Rent a VPS as your public gateway. Connect the VPS to your server with a simple wireguard tunnel.

The only thing on the VPS should be a reverse proxy with SSL/TLS pass through.

Send the traffic at the VPS reverse proxy to a reverse proxy on the main server. Configure this proxy to use letsencrypt certs.

The benefit and importance of the SSL pass through reverse proxy, is that it allows all data in transit to remain encrypted until it reaches your physical server. Traditionally, most would suggest the one and only reverse proxy exist on the VPS but all traffic would then be decrypted on the VPS. This could obviously compromise your traffic if the VPS provider snoops or your VPS is compromised.

Cloudflare tunnels decrypt on their hardware as well, which is why I always recommend avoiding their services.