Pick your system and stay with it. Apparently we are all moving to matter. [Hopefully this fall]

https://www.howtogeek.com/793284/matter-is-the-smart-home-standard-youve-been-waiting-for/

We are in the Android camp, so can not advise you on best hardware. As someone who has 211 wifi IoT devices, and a dedicated router mesh just for smart home devices - I understand the frustration. Hopefully this new no need for Internet connection standard will resolve the issues.

Thanks, that helped to confirm Hue is definitely going to stay on the shortlist. Hopefully a matter upgrade for existing supporting ecosystems will help reduce the whole concept they are trying to overcome… replacing with yet another ecosystem. :)

Sense for power consumption monitoring, and Flume for water monitoring. Both detect abnormal rates and alert you. Just last week we discovered our dog had managed to turn on a spigot in the back corner of the yard that could have gone days without detection, due to the Flume alerting that there was abnormal water usage.

We also love Hue, and Sonos for audio.

Wow, smart dog! Thanks for the update, I’ve not heard of Sense, will check them out.

Thanks for the comments. We ended up a split Hue and Leaf light configuration. One thing to note for anyone in the HomeKit realm, install a smart switch on any non-thread HomePods. Why? Well, Apple randomly readjusts its primary home hub and if an older non-thread HomePod (or old Apple TV) is assigned the HomeKit hub role your thread based automations (also giving a false assumption that there is something wrong with your smart device) will hang, partially work or just flat out do nothing. You can set an automation to power off the older HomePods at night for 5 minutes then power back on. The reason for this is that the older HomePods or devices that don’t support thread will try to connect to the IoT devices via Bluetooth or WiFi and fail. Hope this helps someone else.