I use this combo with OpenHab instead of HA, but the relevant bits are all the same.

I find it pretty good, but have had these problems:

• Really poor Comms with devices: this turned out to be the placement of the dongle, it was too close to my PC case, and putting it on an extension resolved this completely.
• Rarely (once a quarter ish) the controller will fail to communicate with Zigbee2MQTT, causing the latter to crash. I’m not on the latest version of either and probably should update, but simply have the Zigbee2MQTT process (using a docker image) restart automatically and it’s not something I notice any more.
• Even more rarely (I’ve had it once) the dongle crashed to the point that I had to unplug it and plug it back in to restore service.

It’s by far more reliable than some of my questionable scripting choices 😊

I haven’t got into this yet, but the approach I was going to look into was using an IP camera and CCTV style software, which gives me my buffered recordings. I can then choose to process the image for motion, or use a PIR or push of the door bell to trigger the save (which is less intensive processing).

Just buy a conventional webcam/ipcam and use that in addition to a conventional doorbell. If you’re not wanting it to be Internet connected, you aren’t going to be using away from your home.

Maybe some Lego Technics!

I don’t know specifically for either of these network types, but push come to shove, you can always create a second network in your basement and then centralise the control over IP.

I think you need a butler!

Smart homes are about taking the thought and manual actions out of the every day. Currently, at least.

The really hard stuff that you talk about is currently infeasible. But it’s being worked on. Self driving cars, washing machines do smarter load detection these days, etc. You can buy ready meals and put them in the microwave already, no need to prepare and cook from scratch. They just taste shit and will give you colon cancer if you eat too many.

It takes about thirty seconds of my time to boot up my computers and logon to work. That happens automatically now for me, that’s about the only time saving I’ve made 😄

Doable, make a note of where the wires connect, unscrew them and unscrew it off the wall. Hopefully you have a little slack for something new.

You need to understand what voltage if any is coming from the wall. That will impact your replacement choices. Smart wall stats generally expect power.

I put a Moes Zigbee stat on last year which is connected to three wires (live neutral switched).

Depends on the bulb. Philips Hue for instance work fine as a dumb bulb if there is nothing to pair with. And (at least some) have Bluetooth so you can connect them that way to your phone in ther interim.

There is no set rules, and will depend on the bulb. But I had a few for a while that I just used as dumb bulbs until I fixed my setup.

Not really. I had a major update to OpenHab which to be frank, isn’t the best at regression and backwards compatibility, and that kippered a lot of stuff, but once I had worked through those everything was back to normal.

Batteries run out, and sometimes kit can fail (touch wood I haven’t had that).

Though I think if you go down the commodity route with a mixed in ecosystem, you’re more likely to hit issues over a more involved system.

Completely disconnected from the Internet means that packets can’t make it from the device to the Internet. You achieve this through physically separate networking, VLANs or simply relevant firewalls. With a stateful firewall you can get picky with restrictions on TCP SYN packets to get fine grained control of who can establish a connection. I felt this level of detail was inappropriate for OP’s self proclaimed technical proficiency.

Possibly OP means Internet connected, but not using a third party service to handle the feed. If they do, then they can ignore my comment and select something more appropriate from other helpful contributions.