About North Control

About North Control

We're Canadian technology people who've spent years watching the smart home world tie itself in knots.

Why We Started North Control

Every few years, some new protocol comes along promising to fix everything. You buy in, set it up, get your friends and family on board. Then the company pivots, or gets acquired, or decides the real money is in monthly subscriptions. Your hardware becomes expensive plastic. We got tired of it.

We also got tired of being the person everyone calls when their lights stop working. The problem was never the technology. It was the business model. Cloud dependence means someone else controls your house. Proprietary systems mean you're locked in until they decide you're not.

Home Assistant changed that. So did Matter and Thread. The standards are actually open now. The hardware doesn't need the cloud. You can run everything locally if you want. It feels like we're finally at a point where this stuff might actually work the way it should.

The Canadian Problem

Getting Home Assistant equipment in Canada is still a pain. The exchange rate alone hurts. Then there's duties, shipping delays, and the mental math of figuring out if it's even worth ordering from the US.

Worse, plenty of offshore vendors run websites that look Canadian until your order shows up at the border and you're hit with surprise duties and weeks of delays. We wanted to make it obvious we're actually here.

Why a Beaver?

We could have slapped a maple leaf on everything and called it a day. Instead, we went with a beaver. Beavers are fun and resourceful - just like us. It's distinctly Canadian without being a cliché, and it signals we're the real deal, not another overseas storefront pretending to ship from Canada.

When you see the beaver, you know your order is shipping from Canada. No border surprises. No duty roulette.

What We Do

We ship Home Assistant Green hubs and connectivity hardware - ZBT-2 Zigbee and ZWA-2 Z-Wave USB adapters - from Canada. Free shipping across the country. You pay in Canadian dollars. We run our store on Shopify, a Canadian company, because we like keeping things Canadian when we can.

If something goes wrong, you're talking to someone in the same country, in the same timezone.

Your Data Stays in Canada

Your smart home data stays in Canada when you use Home Assistant. We don't track what you do with your equipment. We're not here to sell you monthly cloud services. We sell hardware that works without the cloud if that's what you want - full local control of your smart home automation.

We're not trying to revolutionize anything. We're just making it easier to get the good stuff without the border headaches.