IFA wrapped up in Berlin on 8 September. It's the world's largest consumer electronics and home appliance trade fair, and this year's theme was "The Future is Now," with more than 1,900 brands from 49 countries on the floor. Euronews sent a reporter to walk the halls and answer one question: what does the home of the future actually look like? Their answer was interesting, and it's worth unpacking, because it lands right on top of an argument I make to clients every week. The

Anker stood on stage at IFA in Berlin this week and made the exact pitch I've been making to clients for years: your footage should never leave your house. The product is called MindBase. It's an AI home hub with up to 48TB of local, expandable storage for camera recordings, household files and photos. No monthly fee to keep your doorbell clips. No data centre somewhere holding video of your kitchen. CEO Steven Yang framed it around three things the home needs: connection, lo

A security researcher in Philadelphia has a router sitting on his desk, plugged into an isolated test network, doing nothing but phoning home. Every few seconds it tries to reach a server in China. Nobody hacked it. It shipped that way. That router is a Zbtlink, one of twenty models a cybersecurity firm called VulnCheck found carrying the same hidden component: a piece of code that starts automatically at boot, runs with full root access, and accepts commands from anyone who

Predictive maintenance is having a moment in the smart home industry. The pitch is simple: instead of finding out your geyser element has failed when the water runs cold, the system notices the warning signs weeks earlier and tells you. KNX Association's own trend piece for 2026 makes exactly this claim. As AI gets built into more devices by default, the promise is that "you'll receive notifications when your appliances start to underperform before a defect is even present,"

I have been reading through the ETS manual for Faradite's TAP-5 KNX coupler this week, and there is a feature buried in there that I think is badly underused across the industry, mine included. Not the status LEDs. Every serious KNX keypad has had those for as long as I have been doing this. A light on the button showing the circuit state or the active scene is standard, it is expected, and there is nothing to write about. The thing worth talking about sits alongside that and

Early August, the US Federal Communications Commission banned the import of new "advanced robotic devices" manufactured outside the United States. The FCC was acting on a determination from a White House-convened interagency security review, which found these devices "pose unacceptable risks" to US national security. Most headlines shortened that to "robot vacuum ban," and that's not wrong, but it undersells how wide the actual definition is. An "advanced robotic device" is a

Every smart home platform makes the same quiet promise when it launches: trust us, we won't break what you already paid for. Give it a few years and most of them do. A firmware update bricks a hub with no backup path. An API you rely on goes behind a paywall. A company gets bought out, or just quietly stops shipping updates, and the automation you spent real money installing turns into a museum piece. So when I read through what KNX Association's newly elected board actually

People sometimes assume KNX is a niche European thing, a German protocol that a few enthusiasts run in old-money villas. I get it. That's roughly where it started. But I went through the KNX Association's own membership records this week, and the picture is bigger than most people in this industry realise, including some of my own clients. The home turf KNX was developed in Europe in the 1990s and the KNX Association is still based in Brussels. Germany, France and the UK rema

Philips Hue's Bridge Pro hub was bricked by a firmware update in June, and there was no way to back up the configuration. It's a good moment to look at why a decentralised, wired KNX system doesn't fail the same way.

A client told me last month his house was "fully automated" because he could turn every light off from his phone before bed. I didn't argue with him at the time, but I want to argue with the word here, because that habit, phone out, app open, tap the button, is the opposite of automation. It's a remote control with better range. Real automation means the house did that on its own. No app, no tap, no voice command. A condition was met, a rule fired, something happened. If a hu

An architecture firm in Szczecin, Poland called Archice leases office space on the 14th floor of the Hanza Tower. Big windows, great views, and the two problems that come with both: rooms cooked in the afternoon sun, and a floor full of high-power workstations running all day made it worse. Standard fix is to crank the air conditioning and eat the bill. Instead they fitted the office with a KNX system, automated curtains, ventilation and temperature sensors tied into motion d

Insteon shut off its servers in 2022. Nest killed Revolv in 2016. Wink added a subscription in 2020. Here's why KNX, as an open standard, doesn't have that failure mode.

I keep meeting people who think "smart home" means having enough switches and plugs that talk to an app. It doesn't. A home that turns lights on at 6pm every day isn't smart, it's a timer with better marketing. Real automation, the kind that actually feels intelligent, only happens once the house knows enough about what's going on inside it to make a judgment call. Everything else is scheduling. That distinction matters more this year than it used to, because the sensor hardw

There's a question I almost never hear in a client briefing: 'Is this gear actually certified to do what it says it does?' Most smart home gear carries no quality certification. The KNX Association just achieved ISO 9001 — here's why that matters.

Thinking about KNX automation but worried about the cost? Here's what clients actually save on energy, security, and long-term ownership, with real numbers.

I get it. The Takealot listing looks compelling. A four-pack of smart plugs for R400, a Wi-Fi light switch for R180, and an app that promises to turn your house into something from a tech magazine. I've had clients show me this stuff before. "Wayne, why would I spend what you're quoting when I can just buy this?" It's a fair question. And the honest answer is that you probably can get away with it — for a while. The problem is what happens after "a while." The cloud problem n

There's a shift happening in how people think about home automation. Not a subtle one. A few years ago, if you wanted a smart home, you got gadgets. Hubs on the counter. Screens on every wall. Different apps for your lights, your gates, your blinds, your security. The more devices, the more capable your home felt. That was the pitch. It's wearing thin. The clients I speak with now, the ones building or renovating at the top end of the market, don't want visible technology. Th