What is a Local Smart Home?

In today’s connected world, the term “smart home” often brings to mind flashy devices, cloud apps, and voice assistants that seem to know what you want before you do. But when it comes to creating a truly reliable and private smart home, there's a different kind of setup that's gaining traction, one that's not dependent on the cloud. It's called a local smart home.

The living room of a smart home showing off a media wall with LED strip.

Local vs Cloud: What's the Difference?

Most off-the-shelf smart home devices rely heavily on cloud services. That means your light switches, thermostats, or even your video doorbells are talking to servers across the internet, sometimes on the other side of the world, before they can do anything. If your internet goes down, or if the service provider has an outage, your smart home isn’t quite so smart anymore.

A local smart home, on the other hand, keeps the intelligence of your home in your home. That means the automation, control, and communication between devices all happen locally, within your home network, without relying on an external internet connection or third-party cloud servers.

Why Local Control Matters

A Luxeia Smart Home is created using Home Assistant, one of the most powerful and flexible local smart home platforms available. It gives our clients full control over their smart homes, and most importantly, that control stays within their home. This brings several key benefits:

Reliability: Your smart home keeps working even if your internet doesn’t. Whether you’re switching lights, unlocking doors, or running complex automations, everything continues to operate smoothly.
Privacy: Your data stays in your home, not on someone else’s servers. There’s no need to send sensitive information to a third-party company.
Speed: Local control means minimal delays. Devices respond instantly because they’re not waiting for a signal to bounce to the cloud and back.
Freedom: You're not locked into a single manufacturer’s ecosystem. With Home Assistant, we can integrate a wide range of devices from different brands and protocols, all working together seamlessly.

A Real-World Reminder: The Spotify Outage

A recent global outage with Spotify is a great reminder of why local control is so important. Millions of users found themselves locked out of their music libraries simply because the app, and the servers it relies on, were temporarily down. For a music app, it's frustrating. But imagine if that were your lights, your heating, or your home security system.

Smart homes that rely on third-party cloud services are only as good as those services are stable. Outages happen, and when they do, your convenience, comfort, and security can be affected. A local smart home is built to avoid those pitfalls.

The Bottom Line

A smart home shouldn’t stop being smart just because your internet drops out or a company has server issues. By building local-first systems with Home Assistant at the core, we ensure that your smart home remains reliable, private, and under your full control, 24/7.