Inner-West Smart Home Retrofit

A Victorian-era inner-west terrace with three different eras of wiring, no smart anything, and one very specific brief: it has to keep working when the internet goes down.

The brief

The family had tried two off-the-shelf platforms previously. Both worked beautifully in the showroom and fell apart the first time their internet dropped out. They wanted:

• Every automation to run locally, even with the NBN disconnected
• A single dashboard that covered lights, climate, security, and solar
• Hardware that didn't need replacing in two years
• Voice control that didn't send every command to a third party

What we built

The backbone is a Home Assistant OS instance running on a small Intel NUC with a UPS, paired with a Zigbee 2 MQTT coordinator and a dedicated ESPHome network for custom sensors.

• Lighting — all switch mechs retrofitted with Shelly Pro relays behind the plate; existing dumb switches still work exactly as before
• Climate — zoned ducted A/C exposed via ESPHome, with per-zone temperature tracking and presence-based scheduling
• Security — Frigate for local AI camera processing, Zigbee door/window sensors, local siren
• Solar + battery — real-time energy monitoring pulled from the inverter API onto the dashboard
• Voice — on-device Whisper STT routed through a local wake-word, no audio ever leaves the network

Outcomes

• Internet outage last winter lasted 14 hours. Heating, lights, security, and voice all kept working without intervention.
• Non-technical housemate uses the wall-mounted dashboard daily and has never needed to open the app
• Energy usage is down ~18% compared to the 12 months before the retrofit, driven mostly by automated climate scheduling

What's next

Phase two adds whole-home water monitoring and an automated irrigation system tied to the Bureau of Meteorology forecast API. Already scoped, scheduled for late 2026.