My house is ~140 years old. We've put lots of smarts into it. Nest thermostats that just work and flip on AC or heat when our phones connect to the house's WiFi. We've replaced all the common area light switches with Lutron Caseta switches. These too remove 3-way wiring by replacing remote switches with little remotes that fit in your now empty work box. They have a hub you can use to connect to the internet, but they also work fine by themselves. In some rooms we use Philips Hue lights because there are no built in lights (or if there is infrastructure for lights, it's for gas lamps). The Hue stuff does need its hub to work. Our smoke detectors are all Nest Protects. They just work without issue. None of this stuff has ever failed, and it can all be programmed by mere mortals using IFTTT. Or controlled by Amazon Echo, which is what we actually do.
Thanks for sharing your setup, pointers to stuff that works like Caseta and Sonos and how you make it all work together are really useful as I’m in the process of working out a smart home of my own. I felt like it might be of interest to others here so I submitted it as a post.
Sounds like what I'm doing. You'll put hundreds or low thousands into it.
If Lutron decides to stop supporting Alexa or Ben a HomeKit exclusive, you're not ruined.
The problem is when you invest 5 figures into a solution that requires a proprietary setup, you're out major money and need to deal with techs futzing with your house for weeks.
I have two Sonos ($1000) and they work quite well, but I'm queasy about how they will essentially be bricks if Sonos goes out of business. I have other dumb speakers and amps that are over ten years old and they will not have this issue.
My house is ~140 years old. We've put lots of smarts into it. Nest thermostats that just work and flip on AC or heat when our phones connect to the house's WiFi. We've replaced all the common area light switches with Lutron Caseta switches. These too remove 3-way wiring by replacing remote switches with little remotes that fit in your now empty work box. They have a hub you can use to connect to the internet, but they also work fine by themselves. In some rooms we use Philips Hue lights because there are no built in lights (or if there is infrastructure for lights, it's for gas lamps). The Hue stuff does need its hub to work. Our smoke detectors are all Nest Protects. They just work without issue. None of this stuff has ever failed, and it can all be programmed by mere mortals using IFTTT. Or controlled by Amazon Echo, which is what we actually do.