Since most smart home devices need their own hub, you tend to end up with a lot of them. We currently have three: Philips Hue, IKEA Trådfri and HomematicIP.
Since most of these hubs use Zigbee or another similar wireless standard to talk to your devices, they can’t just be hidden away in the basement either, as they probably won’t be able to cover the upstairs floor from there.
Add to that the various power bricks, UniFi Wifi Access point, tizi Tankstation for speedy device charging (I have a few of these all over the house) and the giant ball of cables hidden behind our piano kept growing and growing…
Since I’m not sure how long any particular hub will stick around, I didn’t want to start screwing them into the wall.
It turns out IKEA has a pretty good system for organising tools and other household items that can also work for networking gear: The IKEA Skådis system uses a simple pegboard-style board and offers hooks, elastic ties, clips and other accessories for mounting things to it.
We used it to stick most of the smart home stuff to a single board behind the piano in our living room, out of sight and off the floor (important with Roomba/baby in the house).
The result:
Ok, I got lazy making the cables look nice, but it’s much better than before believe it or not.
It’s not perfect for networking gear, but pretty cheap, easily extendable and easy to find, so good enough to be worth a shot.
Ikea Skådis at Ikea.de (affiliate link)
IKEA if you’re listening: with a few additional accessories (e.g. an adapter for the typical wall mount holes on equipment), this would be even better.