---
title: 'If I Rebuilt My Smart Home, I''d Want This'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=Wkzg8sNkm8Y'
video_id: 'Wkzg8sNkm8Y'
date: 2026-08-06
duration_sec: 1043
---

# If I Rebuilt My Smart Home, I'd Want This

> Source: [If I Rebuilt My Smart Home, I'd Want This](https://youtube.com/watch?v=Wkzg8sNkm8Y)

## Summary

This video tours Joel's rebuilt smart home in Boulder County, Colorado, which was reconstructed after a devastating fire. The tour highlights the unique, reliable, and creative smart home technologies Joel implemented, including e-paper displays, RFID music cards, automated shades, and a bird identification system. The video emphasizes the importance of reliability, local control, and thoughtful design in a smart home.

### Key Points

- **Introduction to Joel's Smart Home** [00:08] — Joel's house in the Rocky Mountains is full of smart home tech that is extremely reliable. The house was rebuilt after a fire destroyed over a thousand homes in the area, and Joel's architect father helped design it from scratch to be smart home capable.
- **Timeframe E-Paper Displays** [01:14] — Joel developed a software called 'timeframe' that runs on e-paper displays throughout the house. It combines data from Home Assistant and Apple Weather to show critical information, like device health and door status, unobtrusively. The displays can show real-time information and even video.
- **Charging Drawers and Fire Safety** [03:14] — To keep phones out of sight, Joel uses charging drawers with thermally protected systems that include temperature sensors to automatically turn off outlets, which is important for fire safety.
- **RFID Music Cards** [03:28] — Joel uses RFID cards with different artists that can be tapped on an RFID reader to play music on Sonos speakers throughout the house. The cards are inkjet printable, and the automation pairs Sonos zones and sets volume, then sends a Spotify playlist.
- **Manual Local Control with Pico Remotes** [04:12] — For devices like Sonos that lack good local control, Joel programmed Pico remotes to control play/pause, volume, skip, and regroup speakers, providing a seamless manual control option.
- **Nap Time Automation** [04:48] — Closing the door to the kids' room triggers an automation that turns on the sound machine, turns off lights, and closes shades, making nap time easy.
- **Home Gym Audio Integration** [05:28] — In the gym, Bluetooth receivers are tied into a mixer so that Peloton and Apple TV audio seamlessly switches without manual input. RGB light strips are modded into the ceiling, and a camera system feeds to the Apple TV while working out.
- **Kid Cave with Light Bright Board** [06:42] — Under the stairs, there's a kid cave with a massive Light Bright board powered by smart light strips and a Zigbee motion sensor that turns on when kids enter.
- **Dog Water Bowl Sensor** [07:38] — Joel uses an Aqara water leak sensor wired into the dog's water bowl to alert when the bowl is dry, using the sensor in reverse. The Aqara sensor doesn't have a siren, which is beneficial for this use case.
- **Server Rack and Aqara Devices** [09:05] — The server rack uses a fully Ubiquiti setup with dual internet connections. Aqara contact sensors and T1 light strips are used throughout, and the contact sensor on the server rack door triggers lights.
- **Ethernet Drops and Reliability** [09:58] — Joel ran almost 100 Ethernet drops throughout the house, with pairs of Cat 6A in each room, which contributes to the smart home's reliability.
- **Smart Shades with Central Power** [10:39] — Low-voltage lines run to every window, powering 45 shades from a central bank of Hunter Douglas power supplies, eliminating the need for batteries. The shades adjust based on the sun's angle.
- **Lutron Lighting Controls** [12:17] — Joel uses Lutron RA3 and Caseta systems for lighting. RA3 dimmers allow touch-to-dim and stay in sync with automations. Home Assistant bridges the two systems for advanced automations.
- **No Smart Bulbs, Only Dimmers** [13:38] — Joel avoids smart bulbs, using smart dimmers with dim-to-warm bulbs that change color temperature as they dim, providing both reliability and ambiance.
- **Outdoor Gate Sensor Solution** [14:22] — For the outdoor gate, Joel used a long-range contact sensor meant for vehicle gates, wired via existing landscaping wiring to an ESP32 inside, solving the cold weather battery issue.
- **Bird Identification with Birdnet** [15:02] — Joel feeds audio from Ubiquiti cameras into a neural network called Birdnet, which identifies bird species and sends data to BirdWeather API. The rarest bird in the last 24 hours is displayed on the e-paper displays.
- **Specialty Lighting and Conclusion** [16:43] — Joel added Hue bulbs in outdoor casings for second-story lighting, wired through gutters. The tour concludes with praise for the home's reliability and creative solutions.

### Conclusion

Joel's rebuilt smart home demonstrates that with careful planning, reliability, and creative problem-solving, a smart home can be both functional and delightful. The key takeaways are the importance of wired infrastructure, local control, and integrating systems like Home Assistant for seamless automation.

## Transcript

Rocky Mountains at Joel's house, and it's full of amazing smart home tech that I didn't even know was possible before visiting. Not only that, but everything is extremely reliable, possibly the most rock-solid smart home
I've ever seen. That's because Joel had an unfortunate event happen, but there was a silver lining. A harrowing day in Boulder County with two significant fires fueled by dry conditions and very high winds. Yeah, so about 4 years ago,
thousand homes in our area, including ours and every house in our >> More than a thousand homes were destroyed and two people died. Many people still rebuilding. And kind of a silver lining was that I
had always wanted my dad, who is an architect, to build me a house, and we built a lot of things kind of from scratch to be >> smart home capable. I get asked all the time if I were starting over on my smart
home or if you were building a new home, what you should focus on. Well, Joel has done that here at his house, so there's lots of great tips that I can't wait to show you. So, let's go check it out. So, I think this is maybe the most
unique part of our smart home. This is a piece of software I've been working on for about a decade now that I call time frame, and it runs on a system of e-paper displays throughout our house. So, this one is a 25-in 4K e-paper
display from Boox. It displays what's effectively a web page driven by a Mac mini, and the application combines data from Home Assistant and also has data directly from Apple weather, and it really unobtrusively displays critical
if any part of our smart home is unhealthy, this is a big way that we've made the smart home so reliable is it will actually tell us if a device is failed. There are hundreds of smart devices in this house. It'd be really
overwhelming to have a dashboard that had even a tenth of them. It will just show us the state of a device if it needs attention. So, we have a young toddler and we should know when our doors are unlocked. So, for example, it
now shows us that the front and alley doors are unlocked. And right now it's actually telling you that I need to refill the dog's water bowl. I am a huge fan how this looks. The e-paper just blends into the house. You don't have
are actually throughout the entire house. And there's some really cool your mind that can be displayed on the screen that I'll show you in a minute. Unlike most e-paper displays, it can do real-time information. So, typically
kind of almost like flashing when you update say a changing a page or something like that. This one can actually display moving text and sometimes video. So, it's technically a computer monitor. For other screens in
e-paper displays from a company called Visionect. Those are thin clients and they load this and display this webpage about every 10 minutes, which means that information. So, one nice side effect of having all this information on the
screens is that we don't necessarily need to have our phones on us. Because of that, we put in these charging drawers that hide our devices out of sight. One important thing with doing a charging drawer is that you use a
thermally protected system. This has a temperature sensor. So, [music] if for automatically turn off the outlet. That's really important for fire safety. So, a fun way to listen to music here in Joel's house, he has these RFID cards
with different artists and you can just grab one, tap it against the RFID reader music throughout the house on the Sona speakers and show what music is playing here on the display. So, these cards are, believe it or not, inkjet
printable. So, there's a company that makes an adapter for inkjet printers that are meant to print on CDs, but you can put blank printable RFID cards in instead. So, the automation this runs is it's a tag in Home Assistant. So, when
you scan the tag, it pairs a couple of our Sonos zones in the ceiling and sets the volume to be the same and then sends a Spotify playlist to that group zone. had for the smart home was that everything needed manual local control.
the devices that didn't have a good local control option, like Sonos, is we programmed Pico remotes. So, inside here we have a Sonos controller that uses the
Pico audio remote that allows us to play and pause the current music, change the volume, skip to the next track, and then this center button will regroup the speakers, which anyone who uses Sonos knows is that that's a nice shortcut to
knows is that that's a nice shortcut to have. really awesome automation that makes it so easy to put the kids down for nap
time. All he has to do is close the door. Now, the sound machine turns on, the lights turn off, and the shades are closing here behind me,
closing here behind me, and look how dark it's getting. >> Yeah. I think I need this for myself. That's right. As my kids get older, I'm the one who needs the naps. But, the automations
don't stop there. Joel also has some really creative ideas in their home gym, too. One problem we had to solve when we were designing the gym is that the Peloton devices have audio. They play music when you do a class, and same with
when you do one on the Apple TV. And we were going to use like a traditional, you'd have to switch the inputs, which was going to be really annoying. So, instead, we put Bluetooth receivers in the server rack and tied in all of them
together into a mixer that allows us to to just set the correct volume for every device. So, that when you come in here and turn on the bike to do a class, it's seamless this is. You don't have to use any buttons or anything. All you have to
do is start riding the Peloton device and the automations run. There's also some really fun RGB light strips in here that are modded into the ceiling so they sit nice and flush. They look great and they're just a lot of fun. So my wife
training together, but we need to keep an eye on the baby. So we use our Ubiquiti camera system fed through scripted in Home Assistant into HomeKit picture on the Apple TV while we work out. And of course the smart bassinet is
also integrated with Home Assistant. So when we turn it on, it automatically enables the camera to record. Smart bassinet connected to Home Assistant? All right, maybe I want to have another baby now.
watching right now, turn it off. Seriously, stop watching. All right, now that they've stopped watching, good thing because if they saw what was behind this door, you would have a massive project on your hands.
Welcome to the kid cave. Come in here underneath the stairs, Come in here underneath the stairs, there's a hardwired contact switch that just turns on this light when you open up the door.
when you open up the door. But check this out when you close it. >> So in here we have a massive Light Bright board. Joel built this entire thing. There's smart light strips powering it with a Zigbee motion sensor
that turns it on when any kids come in here and it looks incredible. My kids would love this. Actually, I love this a lot too. I'd probably be in here playing with it as much as the kids would.
This is why Joel's smart home is so great. There's fun tech, and clever ideas. So, Joel came up with a really creative solution. Their dog drinks a lot of water, and they want to be notified if the dog water bowl is empty.
So, Joel is using an Aqara water leak sensor, and he tied some wires to it that go into the dog's water bowl, and he's using it the opposite way that you would use a normal water leak sensor because if the water leak sensor is dry,
then he gets alerted. And the Aqara water leak sensor is actually a really good use case for this because most of them have an alarm that will beep when there's water detected, but it would be going off all the time if there's water
in the bowl. So, it's actually a benefit that the Aqara sensor doesn't have a siren. And speaking of Aqara, Aqara is sponsoring this smart home tour series. Traveling for these is expensive, so I appreciate Aqara sponsoring this, and
Joel's actually using Aqara devices all throughout his house. A lot of contact sensors on doors, and there's one right here on this door to the server rack. And I really like the Aqara contact sensors because they're so small, and
the battery life is very good, which you wouldn't think for how small these sensors are. And when you open up the server rack door, the contact sensor triggers automation that turns on the Aqara T1 light strips here in the server
rack. The Aqara T1 light strips use Zigbee, so they're extremely reliable. They look really good. They have warm and cool whites and great RGB colors. I'm using them on my server rack. And Aqara has lots of unique smart home
devices, and they're also very reliable cuz many of them use Zigbee. So, I'll have those linked down in the description, and thanks to Aqara for the utility room, we have our server rack with a fully Ubiquiti setup. One of
is that you can have two internet connections. So, the first one on top, we have a fiber line that runs right here. And then, as a backup, we have a installed here, right on top of the rack, but it got really bad reception
what I did is I installed it in my office upstairs, and then used PoE from the rack to power the modem and bring the data back to the rack. What's really great about that is that we have our
provides backup power for the modem upstairs without having to have a generally, when we were wiring the house, we ran, I think it's almost 100 Ethernet drops everywhere we could, corners of the house, couple for each
room, and they were pairs of Cat 6A. And that's what makes this smart home so reliable. There's Ethernet running throughout the entire house, and you signals. Like, I have some Ethernet running through my house, but if I had
running through my house, but if I had 100 drops going everywhere, oh man, that would be so much better. So, if I had to start over, this is definitely something that I would do. It makes things way more rock solid. And the reliability
doesn't stop there. Joelle's smart shades are also very thought out. While low-voltage lines run to every single window, and we use these Hunter Douglas power supplies that run all the power for every shade to a central location.
Yeah, so I think we have maybe 45 shades in the house, and they all thankfully run back to this one bank of power supplies that keeps them powered without any need for batteries. We wanted to have top-down, bottom-up shades, which
rail and the top rail of the shades to cover, like, the bottom half of a where there's a light-filtering version, like what you see here, and then there's a blackout behind it, so we [music] can choose between the two. And Joelle has
dialed in all these shades around the house so perfectly. Depending on where the sun is in the sky, like the angle of it, the window shades will open or close, that way direct sunlight isn't like beating down on the countertops.
And as I've been walking around, they've been slowly adjusting. It is incredible. It's so fun to see. I'm extremely jealous of all these window shades that they're powered, they're reliable, and how versatile they are. Funny people
do this kind of intense of a shade actually one of my favorite features of the smart home. Once you can automate manually, you actually just use them a lot more. If you could always have every
you'd want it to be, wouldn't that be awesome? And it really has proven to be shades are already where I want them to be. Well, I keep getting more jealous of Joel's setup as the tour goes on. And
So, when we were picking lighting controls for the house, we kind of had two criteria. One is we wanted it to be rock solid reliable, and the other is And that anyone who was in our house could control the lights without having
to know anything about the house. That led us, I think pretty obviously, to a Lutron system. We used a combination of RA3 and Caseta. We picked RA3 for our wall dimmers because they have this really great interaction where you can
touch to dim the level, and this level will change when you do an automation. So, it always stays in sync, which is something that even the newest Caseta dimmers won't do. So, I've never used these RA3 switches from Lutron before,
but I am blown away by the sensitivity. You can just press anywhere along the side, and it just jumps straight to that brightness. And you can move up and down. It's so responsive. Like, way more than I thought it was going to
be. I'm blown away. We're able to use Home Assistant to bridge the Caseta and RA3 systems together, so we can have automations that use devices from both sides and together do cool things like having a light come on at a different
brightness based on motion at a certain time of day or based on say the brightness of the sky outside. So Joel's not using any smart bulbs in the house, just using smart dimmers. That way they stay very
reliable, plus easy to use since anybody can [music] use a switch on the wall, but he still wants the benefits of a light changing colors. So he has these bulbs in the ceiling that are dim to warm. When they're full brightness,
they're a little bit cooler, and as you dim the lights, they get warmer. So you wanting to add these types of lights to my own house because I don't really want smart light bulbs all over my ceiling, but I do want them a little bit warmer
at night. So this is a perfect solution. Joel also built step lights into his stairwells to see better. These and all the other light colors match perfectly, [music] and he even strategically placed accent lighting to light up pictures and
the dashboard, which looks [music] incredible. there's some really cool things that you have to see. Starting here with the gate. Joel did something that I did not think was possible. Our winters get
really can't use battery-powered devices outside, and that includes contact sensors. So for this gate, I found a long-range contact sensor that was meant long-range contact sensor that was meant for vehicle gates, and I wired it using
our existing landscaping wiring, and that allowed me to have an ESP32 device inside where I could plug it into power where wasn't cold, and give me really reliable uh performance [music] for the sensor. This is such a creative
solution. And this next automation combines technology and nature. So my wife and I are really big birders, and we wanted to see what birds were coming scared away really easily if you get too close. So we installed an Ubiquiti
and it records motion events that we can see later to review all the different species that came to our house. It's mounted on this pole with a PoE cable. I was really happy that I ran so many lines because we ended up having to dig
this under the gravel here and under our walkway and tie it up to one that we ran under our deck. But just so happened because we ran pairs of them everywhere we needed. This is so much fun to see the birds coming near our house and we
have a camera in our bird feeder that our kids absolutely love. But Joel took this camera set up with the birds way up a notch. So another cool thing we've done with our cameras is we feed them into a neural network called Birdnet.
And what it does is it takes an audio feed and tells you what bird is making a sound in that audio feed. We in this case feed in a couple of Ubiquiti cameras including the one at the bird bath and it sends these taggings to the
BirdWeather API that we then use to display the bird that was tagged the least in the last 24 hours on the displays, which basically tells us like unusual bird that has come across our property in the past day. That is so
smart that Joel's using the microphones on the cameras to identify the birds. I never would have thought that was possible. But what about the birds' privacy, you know, using microphones to listen in on the birds?
Since Joel designed every square inch of this house, he was able to add another layer of specialty lighting that you wouldn't normally think about but adds a lot. Like up here, he has Hue bulbs in outdoor casings lighting up the second
story. The wiring runs through the gutters and it [music] looks amazing. Joel for letting me tour your smart home. The reliability is off the charts devices around your house. >> Well, thanks for stopping by. It was
really cool to share it with you. Yeah, and thanks for watching.