Smart House: Wired or wireless?

1

Hello everyone, I am new here.

What is the best way to a smart house: wired or wireless?

Thanks!

2

This totally depends on the circumstances of your house, both in terms of its physical structure and also considerations such as ownership.

Worst case: you’re renting, so you’re limited to non-intrusive retrofitted solutions that will almost always be wireless.

Best case: you’re building a new house from scratch and own it, in which case the best solution is to hard-wire everything that you possibly can. In general, a wired connection will be faster, more reliable, simpler, and less maintenance than a wireless connection.

For most people, reality is in between these extremes. It could be a house that’s owned by you, but it’s an existing house with traditional wiring. Some parts of it may be practical to re-wire but this could be a very significant expense. If the house is on a concrete slab with brick walls and a flat roof with no accessible ceiling space, rewiring could be a nightmare and very expensive. If it’s a timber-framed house on stumps with good ceiling access, it could be relatively easy.

So the simple answer is: it depends.

Wherever you can, go hard-wired. Wherever that’s not practical, use wireless. My philosophy is to use the appropriate solution to the specific problem, but in general, wires beat wireless.

I’ve had many people tell me that I shouldn’t have hard-wired anything in my house, and I should have used WiFi everywhere. This was my response to that short-sighted attitude:

3

Hello Jon,

thanks for you answer, I understand you. In my case I am building a new house and I will use wire then.

Regards from Colombia.

4

Great! Please keep us all updated on your projects. Building a new house and wiring it up as you go is the dream for many people here on the forum, so I’m sure there are many who would want to see how you do it.

5

I will, but first I’m doing the design in a model.

6

Ya have to start somewhere? Right?

I totally agree with Jon that wired is absolutely the best whenever possible. It’s just as versatile as wireless and WAY more secure. In case you haven’t done so already, binge watch his video’s on setting up his house. There is a lot to consider when laying out your wiring for the new build. I have no idea what codes Colombia has for electrical and those codes usually dictate what you can get away with. Try to think of every possible gadget you could want in the house and if possible, double wire everything… this means run two sets of ethernet cable to every place you are running wire. You will inevitably find that you wanted more than one wire and after the walls are finished, that is a little bit too late to change anything.

I also don’t know what kind of electrical topology operating there but I asssume you are just like us here in the States and it is 120/240 single phase and you can’t install hubs or panels with low voltage controlled relays like Jon has in his home there in Australia. That would be the best possible situation but if you are stuck with the electrical junk we have here in the States, you will have to make do.