Home automation system for a house that is under construction

I'm building a new house and the time to pick a home automation system has come. And I'm afraid I'm a bit lost. I've talked to our electrician and he gave me the following recommendations:

- wireless based systems (zigbee, zwave and friends): these can be unreliable if your house uses a lot of concrete. They've had bad experiences in the past and don't recommend it anymore. They say it is the cheapest to install.

- KNX: has its own set of wires and independent power supply. It's therefore very reliable. It has a pretty wide industry support so finding components that support KNX is easy. However, they say it's very expensive (though it wasn't clear to me if the expensive part was the devices, installation or management software).

- Wiser: another wired system. That was his recommendation. He said the cost for that is less than a KNX system.

​

For a bit of context, the house under construction is in Europe. It has 2 floors, the bottom floor has concrete walls. The two floors are connected by a 40cm concrete slab and concrete stairs. The top floor is mostly open plan. The house is expected to have Full wifi coverage via a mesh of ~3APs. There is ethernet available in all rooms.

What is important for me is that the home automation doesn't rely on any cloud service to function properly (I don't want my stuff to be bricked if the provider pulls the plug). If necessary, I have enough experience to run any kind of server software to control my house (there will be a dedicated server somewhere in the house).

​

I'm currently leaning towards KNX, due to it being fairly standard and the fact that it can be run totally locally. The extra cost given by the electrician scares me a little, though.

​

From this information, what do you think would be the most reasonable choice for a home automation system?

Submitted by npiguet

Comment Below