How to plan your smart home when building a new house

Image courtesy of S. Higginbotham. On our most recent IoT Podcast, we actually had two very similar questions left on our IoT voicemail hotline from Tyler and Dan. Both are building new homes and are wondering how to best plan for their smart home needs. They also have some existing smart speakers and devices but are willing to make changes. 
Since everyone’s home and needs are different, we decided to take a more generalized approach for anyone who is building a new home and how to decide the best way to plan ahead for making it smart.
First and foremost, you need to get your underlying infrastructure down. You don’t want a new home with pockets of bad network coverage. Yes, a mesh network is what we recommend but having extra ethernet ports throughout the home will be welcomed. We suggest Cat-5, 5e, or better yet, Cat-6 cabling run in the walls of a new home. Specifically, you might want ethernet ports in any rooms where a computer or smart television may be used.
Next is to choose a smart assistant platform or ecosystem. This helps because not all devices work with the three major platforms: Amazon Alexa, Apple HomeKit, and Google Home.

Once you’ve made this decision, you’ll have filtered out smart devices that won’t work with your system of choice. And to be honest, this choice is highly subjective. I use Google Home but maybe you prefer Apple Homekit or Amazon Alexa. HomeKit does work well but requires you to be an iOS user and I personally don’t want that limitation forever, even though I currently use an iPhone.
Regardless of your ecosystem choice, we recommend the purchase of one or more smart displays. Apple really doesn’t have its own display option, so if you chose HomeKit, you can skip this. Amazon and Google make a range of smart displays in various sizes, however, and they’re very handy for controlling devices by touch as well as viewing live footage from webcams and video doorbells.

From here, you should focus on what we think are the basics you’ll likely want for your smart home. You may not need all of these but plan for lights, smart locks, a video doorbell, a thermostat and regular webcams, possibly for both outdoor and indoor usage.
Again, the ecosystem choice will drive some of the decision making here because you’ll want to plan for devices that are compatible with that choice. 
Lutron Caseta switch and dimmer For existing homes, it may be simpler to purchase smart bulbs. However, when building new, we highly recommend installing smart switches, which can be used with non-smart lighting. The Lutron Caseta line is our recommendation because it works well and looks nice. You do need a Lutron hub for these switches but the benefit here is that these will work with all three ecosystems. There’s an added future value-add as well: If you decide to eventually install smart shades, the hub can control Lutron Serena...