Edinburgh Home Assistant Repair & Rebuild

Location EdinburghSize 6 BedroomsProject value £30,000 ex. VATCompleted April 2025Type Full Smart Home

Project overview

This six-bedroom property in Edinburgh, plus a separate two-bedroom annex on the same grounds, was sold to the client as a fully functioning smart home. It wasn't. The previous owners had built their own Home Assistant setup as a DIY project, without professional installation, and over time it had fallen into disrepair. Scripts had stopped working, the YAML configuration was corrupted in places, and large parts of the system, from lighting to ventilation, no longer functioned as intended.

Technologies & products

• Home Assistant
• Zigbee Lighting
• DMX Lighting
• CCTV
• Gate Intercom
• WiFi Network
• Climate Control
• Mobile App

Scope of work

We spent a full day on-site assessing the existing installation before touching anything. The brief that emerged covered:

• Auditing the existing Home Assistant instance to identify what was salvageable versus what needed to be rebuilt from scratch.
• Recovering and stabilising the DMX lighting system, which used DMX LED drivers to power dimmable bulbs throughout the home.
• Diagnosing and strengthening a struggling Zigbee network covering 37 IKEA Styrbar battery-powered switches across two large properties.
• Recovering and updating the existing Hikvision CCTV system.
• Replacing a broken, outdated gate intercom with a modern IP-based unit.
• Extending WiFi coverage across a large rural property with poor cellular signal, including outdoor areas.
• Bringing heating and ventilation control (a Zehnder MVHR system, plus Nest and Samsung climate systems across the two houses) into Home Assistant natively, in place of the previous custom scripting.

The challenge

The core challenge wasn't any single broken component, it was untangling a system with no consistent structure behind it. The previous owner had written extensive custom code to control lighting, heating, and ventilation manually, rather than using native integrations, and a lot of it had degraded through age and lack of maintenance. Working out what each script was actually meant to do, before deciding whether to keep or replace it, took the majority of the day on-site.

The Zigbee network compounded this. All 37 switches were battery-powered end devices communicating directly with the coordinator, with no routers anywhere on the network. Across a six-bedroom main house and a separate annex, that's a significant amount of ground for a Zigbee mesh to cover with no repeating devices in place, which explains why the lighting had become so unreliable.

Our solution

After spending time understanding the existing configuration, we made the call to remove the Home Assistant instance entirely and start with a clean install, rather than attempt to reverse-engineer and patch years of undocumented custom scripting. This gave us a stable foundation to rebuild from rather than inheriting hidden faults.

For the Zigbee network, we introduced routers across each floor of both the main house and the annex, spreading them throughout the property to give the mesh the backbone it never had. With proper routing in place, the existing DMX lighting setup, driven by DMX LED drivers into dimmable bulbs, came back online and has run reliably since, without needing to rip out and replace hardware that was fundamentally sound.

We recovered the existing Hikvision CCTV system and brought it into Home Assistant, and replaced the property's old two-core gate intercom with a modern IP Hikvision unit, integrated into the same system. To fix the property's connectivity, particularly the poor coverage outdoors, we installed four Unifi U7 outdoor access points and refined the internal network with a full round of firmware updates, giving the client reliable WiFi across the grounds despite having little to no cellular signal on site.

On climate, the Zehnder MVHR ventilation system had a direct Home Assistant integration available, one that likely didn't exist when the original custom scripts were written, so we connected it natively rather than recreating manual control logic. We did the same for heating, integrating the annex's Nest system and the main house's Samsung system directly.

Results

The client moved into a home they'd been told was smart, only to find a system that had quietly stopped working. What they have now is a fully functioning Home Assistant installation covering lighting, climate, CCTV, gate access, and network coverage across both the main house and annex, running from a clean, properly documented setup rather than years of undocumented custom code.

Project gallery

What we installed

• Home Assistant Installation & SetupGet a professionally installed Home Assistant smart home system built for reliability, privacy, and long-term performance.
• Smart Home Security SystemsProtect your property and family with fully integrated, locally controlled smart security designed for premium homes.
• Smart Heating & Climate ControlOptimise your home's temperature and air quality for year-round comfort while cutting energy bills.
• Home Network Design & InstallationBuild a fast, reliable, and secure network infrastructure that powers every smart device in your home.

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