Choosing Hardware for a Home Assistant Installation

With a Selora Hub on site, the host is settled: Home Assistant is installed, updates are atomic, and backups run themselves. What you still choose per site is everything around it, and that is where installs succeed or fail. This guide covers radios, networking, and power protection.

Zigbee coordinators

The coordinator is a single point of failure for the whole Zigbee mesh, so treat it as infrastructure rather than an accessory.

• Prefer Ethernet/PoE coordinators. They let you mount the radio where the mesh needs it instead of wherever the Hub happens to live. The SMLIGHT SLZB-06/06M are reliable and easy to mount.
• Mount centrally, away from the rack, the Hub’s chassis, and Wi-Fi antennas. See PoE Zigbee coordinator placement for ceiling-vs-rack trade-offs.
• Build a router backbone first. Mains-powered Zigbee devices (in-wall switches, plugs, bulbs that route) carry the mesh. Install those before battery sensors, or the sensors have nothing to hop through.
• A networked coordinator decouples the radio from the host. Swapping or reinstalling the Hub never means re-pairing the mesh.

Setup: Zigbee protocol setup , and ZHA vs Zigbee2MQTT if you have not picked a stack yet.

Z-Wave controllers

• Choose an 800-series adapter, such as the Zooz ZST39 LR. It gets you Z-Wave Long Range and better range and battery behaviour than 500/700-series sticks.
• Put it on a 3-foot USB extension. Plugged directly into the chassis it sits in the noisiest possible spot.
• Z-Wave has no networked-coordinator equivalent in common use, so the stick stays with the Hub. Note which USB port it occupies; the path matters after a restore.

Setup: Z-Wave protocol setup .

Thread and Matter

Matter devices that use Thread need a Thread border router on site. Some are appliances you already install (HomePod, Apple TV, Nest Hub, certain Eero models), and you can also run one yourself. What matters is that you know which one the site depends on, because border routers form the Thread network and a client swapping one out will break devices.

See Matter and Thread protocol setup and Thread integration setup .

Wi-Fi and networking

• Wired Ethernet to the Hub. DHCP by default, or a fixed IP if the site expects one.
• Spare PoE port on the switch for the Zigbee coordinator.
• 2.4 GHz stays enabled. Most IoT devices are 2.4 GHz only and many fail to onboard if the SSID is 5 GHz or if band steering hides the 2.4 GHz radio during pairing.
• Be careful with IoT VLANs. Isolation breaks mDNS discovery, HomeKit, Matter commissioning, and Chromecast unless you allow mDNS reflection between the Hub’s VLAN and the device VLAN. See Wi-Fi IoT devices not connecting .
• Check the firewall before install day. The endpoints the Hub needs are listed in Network Requirements . Restrictive client firewalls are the most common installation-day blocker.

Power protection

• Put a UPS on the Hub and the network switch. A clean shutdown beats a corrupted database, and keeping the switch alive means remote access survives short outages so you can see what happened.
• Size it for a graceful shutdown, not for riding out a long outage.
• Anything that carries the Zigbee mesh (PoE switch, mains-powered routers on the critical path) benefits from the same protection. If the routers drop, the mesh reconverges slowly.

Starter bill of materials

Beyond the Selora Hub itself:

• Zigbee: PoE coordinator (e.g. SLZB-06/06M) with an Ethernet run to a central location.
• Z-Wave: 800-series USB stick plus a 3-ft USB extension.
• Network: managed switch with a spare PoE port, and a wired drop for the Hub.
• Thread: a known, documented border router if the site uses Matter over Thread.
• Power: small UPS for the Hub and the switch.

References