Founder of Home Assistant here. Let me know if anyone has any questions about the project or the Open Home Foundation (which now owns Home Assistant, ESPHome etc)
Hi Balloob, great project, thanks for all your work! I've been using it for over 10 years now.
I am wondering if you've ever considered a change to your release rules. Monthly releases are great, but having breaking changes in every release can get to be a bit of a burden. I think it would make end users lives easier if you were able to limit breaking changes to only once (or twice) per year.
I try to read the breaking changes list every time, but sometimes I don't mess with HA for a few months as it's all running smoothly. Then when I do log back in I have a large backlog of breaking changes to review. Usually at this point I just don't upgrade and the problem keeps getting worse. If instead I knew that certain upgrades do no include breaking changes I could more easily keep up to date, and only look more closely at the yearly (or bi-yearly) update that includes the breaking changes.
We've actively managing our backwards incompatible changes, but sometimes it's out of our control (ie an API change). For things we deprecate in Home Assistant, it is a minimum of 6 months period where we print warnings with alternatives. Integrations set up via the UI, will only change for improvement if we can ensure there is a migration path (sometimes requiring adding some extra info).
Some backwards incompatible changes like requiring a new Z-Wave JS version are also able to be managed automatically by Home Assistant. However, because of choice, there are many ways Home Assistant can be installed and we're not always responsible for the installation.
I believe that we can do better in knowing what integrations you use, and mapping that against the integrations that require changes.
First, thank you. Home Assistant is an outstanding example of having control of our electronics rather than giving money to data harvesting companies.
Second, I'm curious, how often do you guys have to deal with negative actions taken towards you by those same data harvesting giants? I'd imagine they aren't huge fans of this technology. Any Cease and Desist or other fun examples you guys have had to defend yourselves from?
We have very good relationships across the industry, especially the bigger companies. I literally just came back from a meeting with Google Home :)
Where we see the most pushback is from industries adjacent to the smart home, as they don't appreciate the openness. Think garage doors, cars, or cloud data providers for info that can be useful in the home.
When someone complains, like Mazda [1], we pull their integration and communicate their stance to our shared users, and people considering buying into their products. We don't fight for access, as a manufacturer with a cloud service will always be able to find a way. If it is a local device though, our community tends to find a way[2]
It’s interesting how some of these actions backfire. I will literally never purchase a chamberlain product ever again because of how overtly money-grabbing they are.
I suppose in some ways, it’s a good thing. It shows me what companies I should support, and which I shouldn’t.
> It shows me what companies I should support, and which I shouldn’t.
I used to think that way too. Now, I think that all it takes is one bad quarterly report leading to a new CEO, and even the most open of companies can instantly switch to being closed, lock off all their APIs, stop working with open source projects like HA.
I don't know any solution to this, and if I'm honest, being bitten a couple of times has stopped me from experimenting with anything like home automation that requires me to buy physical hardware.
I think a big part is buying things that work locally and don’t require a cloud connection at all.
If it requires a cloud to function, you’re at the mercy of a company changing attitudes. If it runs entirely locally, the company can’t get in the way even if they want to.
It’s one of the aspects I really like about matter (or any other device that operates on a purely local protocol). If Inovelli decides to take a turn, it just means I won’t buy any new products from them, but the switches I already put in my wall will continue to function the way they do today.
Don't buy things that need a cloud integration and it's not really a risk.
Even if you don't use Home Assistant, their site is really good for helping with this--every integration lists a "class" like "Local Polling" or "Cloud Push".
Another shortcut is picking up a Zwave/Zigbee dongle (~$30 when I got mine) and buying products that work with that. If the only radio in the device is one that can pair to a local controller, it's a relatively easy way to ensure it's meant to work locally without a cloud integration. (If Kwikset has a bad quarter I'll never know--my door lock only communicates as far as my utility room.)
Besides "the company can't screw me over", if everything is running locally it also immediately limits the privacy and security implications. And ensures your house doesn't break if the internet goes out.
Organizing devices and creating automations is still very tedious.
I'd love to be able to add a device and describe it (where it is, what it does, etc.) and have HA automatically integrate it with existing automations or fuse it with other sensors. Maybe leveraging LLMs for this.
e.g.:
I buy a new leak sensor and add it to HA. I should just tell HA it's a leak sensor and it's in my laundry room and have it create an automation to send alerts, etc. when there's a leak.
Or I add a temperature sensor in my living room and have it automatically be fused with other sensors to update my living room average temperate.
You're right. Home Assistant is the best toolbox out there, but people need to build things themselves. That's something we plan to tackle, but no timeline. Leak sensors, smoke detectors, CO2 sensors, garage door openers, they can all have benefit from some built-in automations to warn when a problem is detected.
Add to HA, and set 'area' or 'label' to the same as all your other leak sensors. Use the area or label in your automation.
I find HA joyously easy to use. I have my garage door, lights all around the house, thermostats, hot water recirculation system, doorbell, lutron blinds, and ceiling fans. The automations are easy to make, and have been getting easier over the last few years with HA improvements. (and same as others in this discussion, I use zigbee smart switches. The GE brand ones are great).
One trick: Add your automations.yml (and ideally, all HASS config/ymls) to a git repository, so you can track changes, organize and observe how automation changes behave.
Like the other commenter said, smart switches are the way to go. I prefer the Shelly modules behind light switches. They are tiny, affordable and their new generation does Zigbee/Wifi/Matter/Bluetooth, so always something that suits your installation.
Agree with your Shelly-behind-the-switch model. My one hesitation going all-in with them has been perhaps reaching an eventual state of "too much 2.4Ghz WiFi traffic on a narrow IoT-specific WiFi network", but I suppose that's easily solvable by buying another AP. Currently I'm happily running a few of them behind the wall plate in my switches (check the space in your switch box first!)...no issues after many many months of continuous operation. Didn't know about the new gen supporting Matter, that's great.
Also, I too wanted to extend to you a really big THANK YOU from a very happy member of the HASS community. I came over from OpenHAB a handful of years ago and I couldn't be happier. Please keep up the good work! Good luck with all the hardware sales and Nabu Casa stuff!
In real terms though, it not that bad. I've got about 25 such devices always online and the traffic really is negligible. Most devices aren't sending anything while nothing is happening except for the periodic heartbeat like once a minute. Its not noticeable, even on my 20MHz wide network.
I have like 54 devices running on 3 unifi APs...it's unnoticeable (either that or my phone/laptop etc. are just using 5ghz and happy about it - either way).
I use smart lights with smart switches in detached mode and they are not resilient to ha going down. I wish I could get smart bulb functionality (dimming, color change) with smart switches being the physical driver of them being on/off.
I’ve got some inovelli white series switches that are on a circuit with Nanoleaf thread based lights.
I’ve managed to bind them using Matter bindings, so even if HA is offline, the switches can still on/off and dim the bulbs.
No UI supports this yet (though I think HA is working towards it), but the underlying protocol support exists, and products are starting to come to market that take advantage of it.
I think it 2-4 years, it’ll probably be ironed out and working well, but if you really want it, you can have that now with matter/thread.
I think Zigbee devices also have bindings, and those should probably be a lot more mature, but I haven’t played with those yet.
Not sure about color change, but dimming works fine - I have Shelly Dimmer2 modules behind switches, paired with "dumb" dimmable bulbs. Remotely controlled by HA / Adaptive Lighting, while also working with physical switch.
One solution to this if you're using Shellies to provide your "turn a dumb light switch into a smart light switch" is the scripting it has on offer.
I have 100% Zigbee lights, and each lighting circuit has a Shelly Plus 1 with the relay in "detached" mode (so the shelly will sense the light switch changing from open to closed and send a command to HA to turn on the lights via Zigbee). Most (all?) smart bulbs have a setting for "what do I do when power is restored" and you can set it so that they come on when power is restored.
You can then create a script that uses the MQTT HomeAssistant up/down topic and if HA is down, when the switch changes position operate the relay.
It's not perfect - if you have a powercut during the night all of your lights will come on when power is restored.
I totally missed Shelly becoming an HA Darling - I have an older home with some of the wiring not having a Neutral wire, so Lutron Casetta has been my only option and those No-neutral dimmers are extremely expensive.
Not the fella you asked but let me offer some wisdom: smart switches are a lot easier to live with than smart lights. If you also want color control, HA can do a decent job of making smart switches work well with smart lights.
The core problem with a smart light is that it very likely has a switch somewhere. If someone turns that switch off, that smart light just lost power and became dumb. Turning it back on now involves a trip to the switch.
A smart switch is smart so long as utility power is running and you never find yourself in a position where the managed device is in an unknown and/or uncontrollable state.
Even better, get smart switches that don't use wifi or IP addresses. I'm personally of opinion my homes core features should not rely on needing IP addresses, working DHCP or DNS etc just to turn a light bulb on and off.
Home assistant works amazingly well with zigbee devices, and these are plentiful and cheap etc, and don't rely on working wifi/IP infrastructure. When I sell up, my zigbee switches will work just fine as plain-ole light switches even with all my Home Assistant infra ripped out, leaving no issues for next buyer.
You can add zigbee support to pretty much any Home Assistant setup with a 20 buck USB adapter, Home Assistant even make an official one:
The light switches are often cheaper than wifi equivalents too. Wifi bulbs should really only be considered by renters IMO - people who can't easily replace wall switches or similar.
Except IP works far better than Zigbee's alleged mesh networking, and all the other home network technologies because somehow home automation is a special snowflake that can't use the same network technology everybody else uses.
There are a few reasons why Wi-Fi is not my first choice:
* I don't trust any company to use my Wi-Fi and not attempt to access the broader internet. A Zigbee or Z-Wave device isn't going to be able to stealthily update itself in anti-user ways, nor is it going to be hijacked into serving as part of a Bitcoin botnet.
* There are way too many devices, which can cause issues if they're all using Wi-Fi at the same time. Smart homes take a router that would normally be dealing with 2-4 phones and 2-4 laptops and add N bulbs, M switches, P contact sensors, Q motion sensors, and assorted random sensors. Not a chance am I hooking that much up to my Wi-Fi.
Z-Wave LR has worked very well for me—no mesh to worry about, just a controller and devices. The only downside is that it's not as broadly supported as zigbee or Wi-Fi.
The main drawback with keeping the switch "dumb" and only using smart bulbs is someone can turn off power to the bulb etc, which is why I and parent commenter focus on automating the switches. If someone turns wall switch off and its dumb, you can't turn the "smart" bulb on with home automation regardless of what tech is used inside it. Focusing on automating the switch generally has best returns on making most dependable system, as you will always be able to get the light back on. Again, I only recommend smart-bulb only if you are a renter or similar and can't mess with your switches.
Zigbee access to the bulb is great for stuff like changing whitebalance etc though. In my own home I have the bulbs and the switch on ZigBee so I can do this, but power on/off is solely preserve of the automated switch.
I've had great results with the Aquara zigbee stuff - almost all of them work fine connecting to HomeAssistant via generic zigbee USB adapters, and can be found online pretty cheaply. I have >50 of their switches and sensors at the moment.
Aqara is a bit of a mixed bag. A lot of their switches are not Zigbee certified and don't conform to the standard. Specifically, they won't bind directly with devices from other manufacturers.
This might not matter if you're pushing everything through a hub like HA, but if you want to connect directly with other devices and remotes then it likely won't work.
My solution was to add Shelly relays behind all of my “dumb” switches. They keep power always on and essentially turn the switch into a smart button to dim or brighten my Lifx lights. This way I get circadian & party lighting while still maintaining the convenience of physical light switches!
And to parent question: Lifx still has the best color/brightness of any smart bulb and they’re IMO the best. Just make sure your WiFi can handle it.
The problem with smart switches is they require 3 wires: live, neutral and the switched wire to the light. Where I live most switches have only two: live and the switched wire to the light. The neutral goes directly to the light and doesn't pass through the switch. Because of this I have no way to power the smart switch module. Unless I want to rewire half the house :(
There are some smart switches that work without neutral. They trickle some power through the load. This only works with some loads. I have one fixture with small LEDs where one of them glows slightly.
I assume they hack what little power they need from the AC wobble? How do they do that without triggering a current leakage cutout though? Perhaps they “charge” when current flows for the first time?
Athom make ESPhome smart switches with no neutral wire, they work great.
The way it works is you put a bypass capacitor to neutral in the light fixture, and then it lets the switch be powered - no flicker or low energy requirements needed.
Ah I see, does require to modify the light though. But it's interesting to look at, thanks. I don't use Homey though, I use Home Assistant. So I'm not sure if it works with that.
They're not open source so I thought maybe their other stuff isn't either. I didn't even know they made switches in fact.
Several of my friends have the homey, they're very popular here because athom is a Dutch company and they market here a lot. But I prefer the openness of home assistant.
Edit: Aah I see the confusion. The athom that makes the esphome devices is a Chinese copycat company that has nothing to do with the real athom but is trying to get a free ride on their name.
Returning current through ground is a bad idea in general. You should consider rewiring your house for the safety benefits rather than enabling some smart devices.
Putting significant return current through ground means anything in the environment can be part of the path of least resistance. You will see small voltages across your house depending on what loads are on and there will be load-dependent noise conducted and radiated everywhere. This also puts the system one open circuit away from making nearly every conductive part of your house a shock hazard (if the wrong place in the ground network goes open circuit).
What is done in modern times is to have the current return on a neutral wire then monitor the ground wire for current and open the circuit when current is flowing back through ground (a fault).
No, the current goes back through the neutral. This is the normal operating mode with single phase power.
This is different from ground. Neutral is the way the return is meant to go. Ground is a safety feature. Connected to the enclosure in some devices.
So sockets here have 3 wires: Live (Brown), Neutral (Blue) and Ground (Green with Yellow stripe). But the switches only have Live and the Switching wire (Black, the wire that goes to the light). The light then receives the switching wire and has Neutral. Because the power is consumed in the light and returns via neutral.
The switch doesn't need the neutral normally because it doesn't use any power. It just switches it on and off on the way to the light. But the wifi switchboxes do need it because they need to remain connected even when the switch is off.
Can you do that yourself or would you need an electrician to sign off? What about your landlord?
I agree in principle that this is much nicer in theory. Just like wired is more reliable than wireless. However, retrofitting all that is also much more difficult.
Depends on where you live. In most jurisdictions in the US it's generally OK for a homeowner to perform "like for like" replacement work on their own residence without a license or inspection. This means you can replace an existing light switch, or an outlet, or a breaker. You generally cannot run new wire or new outlets without a permit.
If you own a property but don't live there (eg, you're a landlord), it's essentially never legal. The best answer is to contact the local AHJ.
Disagreed. To get the best of both worlds I run smart switches that control the smart lights. E.g. install the Philips Hue Wall Switch Module (Zigbee) and make an automation in HomeAssistant to turn off the corresponding light(s).
Now you benefit from both, like being able to make the lights fade off/on.
Also, in case it doesn’t always respond instantly, you should be able to bind the Zigbee devices directly to each other so that it doesn’t need to travel to the Zigbee coordinator (or mesh?) first. Haven’t had the need for this myself though.
Smart switches are a lot more annoying when renting, though. In addition, for us, all but the hallway bulbs make frequent use of color features, so I’d need both anyway.
Though I’ll admit, it might be worth the hassle if you have guests often or many people living at your place.
This works with almost any smart light you can get connected to HA (most smart lights have white balance adjust), it's brand agnostic etc. I have lights from several different vendors working together this way.
This is the way. Especially if other people live in your house.
Look at this stuff as "progressive enhancement". Make the simple things work, then build on top of that. Don't replace the simple things with complicated, elaborate things. You don't want to live without lights for a week because a SD card died in a Raspberry Pi somewhere or something.
The overly complicated setup I'm using to run my smart home automation stuff shit the bed and I was too busy with work to really spend the time fixing it so... I just didn't. For six months. The only major complaint I heard was that the outside lighting was no longer turning itself on and off with the sun.
Even in the worst case scenario, all of the lights still have switches that can be turned on and off as long as there's power. It's all zwave, and I've made use of the scenes / direct associations / etc such that most of the stuff people actually care about happens without being mediated by Home Assistant. Or requiring any sort of network. When I move out of this house, I could leave it all behind and it would keep working as-is without my server, access point, active internet connection, or anything else. If there's power, it works.
All my living room lights (three dimmers) are controlled by a single dimmer.
The three way switches in our bedroom are now dimmers. One controls the lights, the other acts as a remote control for it.
The pantry light turns itself off after 20 minutes because people always forget it on.
Both the kitchen light switches turn on and off with the single, easily accessible switch.
The switch for the porch lights also turns the string lights on the gazebo a hundred feet from the house on and off.
My kid's too small to reach the regular switches, so there's a battery-powered remote switch mounted on the wall at her height in her bedroom and the bathroom. Those still work and are still able to dim the lights in her room.
Etc, etc. All without anything but electricity.
I said only _major_ complaint--my kid definitely had some complaints. We have one switch that has a couple of those RGB projector bulbs hooked up to it. When you turn that on, an automation turns off all the rest of the lights and starts playing some dance music. Her party lights still turned on, but it no longer made the music start.
If you want colour control then get smart bulbs to go downstream of your smart switches. Set them to always go to "on" when power's restored, and build that _on top_ with your automation. You'll always have a working light, your automation can always turn them on even when someone's turned the switch off like a normal person would, but when everything else is working you'll _also_ get colour control.
Are there any plans to add automations based on People and Areas (not zones)? I found the cool project Bermuda[0] and it triggers person entered/left area events based on bluetooth devices. This works great in my testing with a phone being tracked by Shelly switches. But I can't seem to find a way to actually make these events do anything. It would be even better if I didn't have to set up area specific automations at all and just be able to say "turn on the lights in an area to 20% if someone enters it after sunset".
The old automation in YAML is very cluncky as the author also mentioned. The new UI guided creation is not powerful and can become confusing for complex cases on the other side. I do all my automation with the node-red Integration. But the combination of the node-red flows with the Homeassistant dashboards is not very good.
Do you plan to change the automation to something like node-red but better integrated? Or change the yaml to sonething less declarative and more code centric?
Just wanna say thanks for leading such a strong and comprehensive open source project. A lot of open source tools are wonderful in and of themselves (being that they are free) but might not always live up to expectations or offer a whole lot. With Home Assistant, I feel like it is the opposite and the capability/power of the tool (particularly out of the box) is really quite impressive. So keep it up and thank you again!
- Home Assistant Cloud (paid)
- VPN
- Port forwarding
Is there any plan to make something like Home Assistant Cloud available for self hosting? Like a simple docker container to put on a VPS?
I don't want to deal with DynDNS to expose my home network but would prefer a Server component on a VPS with a static IP which connects to my home server and allows remote control.
The problem is that my home server isn’t reachable from the internet, so there’s nothing for the proxy to forward. I would need to set up some kind of VPN for that, right? But this functionality already exists in HA, that’s why I asked.
The biggest problem with Tailscale and/or WireGuard is that I can’t inform IOS to only connect to VPN when home assistant app is running or when notification comes in.
I have to run it on my phone all the time effectively routing all mobile traffic through my home VPN which is not ideal for bandwidth and battery life.
I end having to manually turn it off and on.
Instead I wish home assistant had a way to make mobile notification resources easily accessible without VPN - say behind a short lived access token so that I could quickly view the notification media without having to expose local HA install or having VPN always on
seems completely out of scope for HA? if you want to proxy it from the internet then you can just do that using any of the tools used for this - NGINX, wireguard, rathole, etc etc etc.
But this functionality already exists in HA. There’s a simple login page where I can connect to the HA cloud. The idea would be to start a docker container, set up a domain name where it’s reachable, enter the domain name on the HA cloud screen and connect to it. It would be much simpler than setting up everything yourself.
What would be the correct way to DIY it? You would need a VPN to connect you home network to the Proxy and then expose the web interface on the proxy, right?
Whole bunch of alternatives too - https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling. I will advocate for zrok.io as I work on its parent project, OpenZiti. zrok is open source and has a free (more generous and capable) SaaS than ngrok.
> Founder of Home Assistant here. Let me know if anyone has any questions about the project or the Open Home Foundation (which now owns Home Assistant, ESPHome etc)
Every time I visit the big box stores, I see Wi-Fi as the primary means of connecting to the smart home ecosystem. Do you see this trend changing in the future, why from the average consumer prospective? Especially with thread?
Hi @balloob. No question but I moved yesterday night from a Home Assistant Supervised on Raspi 3 to an HAOS on Raspi 4 + SSD and the migration had been flawless. Thank you very much to you, the team, and all the contributors for making such a great and fair piece of software and building such a great community.
Not much a question, but a RANT. As an user I'm grateful for HA slick UI and functionality but while the best on the market is... A damn hell.
YAML instead of pure Python is a hell. Trying to push things to be configured via WebUI is a big discomfort because well... Generic users do like clicking around, but generic users will not use HA simply because it's not and will not be possible in future to create a no-code usable IoT. All low-code/no-code stuff COMPLICATE life instead of simplify. External deps like InfluxDB to just prune past data and keep them as I wish it not much nice, having a built-in option to state how to prune and for how long to keep each specific sensor or default policy would be very nice.
Essentially the RANT could be condensed in: please consider designing for people who know how to code, because they will anyway be the most common users. IoT OEMs will only be hostile for most because they still fails to understand how to makes business in an open world, so professional integrator will not much choose HA anyway since it's way too time consuming to really customize and keep it up. A pure code approach with NO energy wasted in config WebUIs/low code/no code on contrary could makes HA an interesting "base for system integrators" in a much broader sense. NanoKVM PCIe, JetKVM show the start of a feature-rich light-out management for anything, they will be the bridge between home IoT and classic homelabs/IT. HA could play a very nice role there, essentially offering a platform to bridge the not-really-IT-ready world of ModBUS and co appliances to the TCP-enabled and digitally controlled stuff. A future where small devices could be fitted in most appliances to "makes them smart" like being in the middle of a washing machine control panel connected to home p.v. system to start programmatically depending on available p.v., a connected oven pre-loaded with food the user start when he/she knows the time he/she will be at home.
This is a potentially nice niche market who could explode in the relatively near future. It's not possible as low code/no code/pre-packaged black box stuff. Being a component anyone could easily plug in a larger system is needed.
YAML might be ok if we limit HA to some smart bulb, just having a Victron battery inverter with some 40+ sensors demanding a significant load of YAML it's nightmarish. In python native it's HYPER quick.
It's a major pain to write YAML for Home Assistant. Some parts of Home Assistant lack complete examples which are up to date. The documentation doesn't include examples for every single thing. Part of writing some automations was just a lot of trial and error, looking things up on the Internet, validating the configuration, and restarting Home Assistant. It's just not a great experience.
Discovering what has to be selected to use as an action in the automation GUI is another nuisance. The most recent example is with a light I wanted to set to 20% brightness. I had no means to find something with the keyword "brightness" or anything similar. It turned out that this was exposed as turn light on.
Breaking changes are their own source of friction. My only advantage has been that many of my automations are now just GUI automations with some custom YAML where it can't be avoided.
All of these things are far beyond what a non-technical user could be able to do. It can be difficult even for someone who knows how to look things up, read documentation and update everything when breaking changes are made.
Home Assistant isn't the kind of tool one can put in someone else's hands to use it without additional maintenance or supervision. It's also not the tool to use in any commercial setting due to its countless problems.
Well... GUI automation is not automation. It can't be. Automation must be automateable, code is, since you can save in a text file, versioned etc. GUIs can't. Reproducing them means doing countless step every time, hard to document with screenshots etc instead of "here the snippet" and Python code is self-documented, so discovering how to do things is MUCH easier, YAML need to be read from source code, not just importing a module and run help(modname). That's why to me HA should be pure-python NOT "sold" as a pre-deployed blackbox but as a simple pip-able package. Anyone could easily integrate it in anything else, documenting could be just the code for most simple stuff or a wiki with shared personal configs. Those can be automated as well to test it's validity pinging the author when a snippet fails as well.
That's the power of automation, of code, of end-users programming. Harnessing it means reduce all efforts after the first implementation and speed up anything breaking changes as well.
Thanks. I understand where you're coming from now. Your requirement to use Python code for automation could be satisfied by an external component which uses the Home Assistant API or through some internal custom Python based component which runs your code for automation.
The current setup for automations isn't good for anyone - not for end users, not for developers. I've resorted to using the UI because it seemed to be less likely to break across releases.
Any plan to update the GUI for conditional logic inside of automations? It's really clumsy to do IF/THEN or switch style constructions. Too much visual space and clunky overall.
In the past I've had issues with forgetting to add triggers for states that are used somewhere as a condition or switch. This leads to lost updates and frustation.
React state hooks, which I'm deeply familiar with, will result in a linter warning if any of their dependencies are missing. I'd really like something similar for automations.
NodeRed is awesome. I didn't even bother with anything beyond very, very simple automations until I installed that.
For me the flow design feels very natural and is easy to modify and monitor. And it's pluggable with custom nodes so if functionality is missing you can add it in. Like I installed a node that handles OAuth2 so I can have it log into a web service and check a status page.
I regularly test disconnecting my HA server from the network and make sure nothing home critical stops working.
I do have a few internet integrations (weather, upcoming sports events, etc) and those all stop when I do a “no internet” test, but Home Assistant runs just fine without any network access.
A fresh Home Assistant Operating System installation is useless without an Internet connection. It needs to download several gigabytes of Docker images for it to be usable.
It's very likely they'll take the infrastructure down if they sell their business or go out of business. Home Assistant OS will be completely useless in such a scenario.
The more likely scenario is that someone installs Home Assistant OS, sets it up with the current version and uses it as it is to avoid breaking changes. Their storage or the entire device breaks down. They'll want to install the same version to restore a backup. They'll learn the hard way that it's not possible to bring up what they had before.
Using the Docker image is the only choice which mitigates this risk.
The Home Assistant core container relies on resources hosted at https://brands.home-assistant.io. Those are cached in the browser for a while. Your mobile phone and web browsers still load the icons. They can do whatever they like with these bits of information. This includes selling allegedly anonymous Home Assistant usage data. The people who host their infrastructure can still do that without their knowledge since they claim it's a CDN.
The use of this CDN means that an existing Home Assistant core based setup can stop displaying some icons if those icons are removed. This can happen if someone decides to use a specific Home Assistant core version.
I ran the UI and didn't load anything from external source.
The Internet should only needed to download the image. You could download and flash it manually. The setup shouldn't require the Internet. What needed the Internet?
As I've written in the other comment, the Home Assistant Operating System is useless without an Internet connection. It has to pull the Docker images since it doesn't have any version of the images at all.
This thing isn't as private and as local as it is claimed to be. It's very tied to services provided by Nabu Casa, including the very visible cloud integration of theirs. They've expanded it now to backups.
Do you think there is any hope of convincing Tuya to make their devices easily flashable?
They'd be the unquestioned king of the space if us local only people could reliably convert them to ESPhome, and they're the way a lot of brands end up making things "smart".
Tuya's entire business model is about getting their customers' data and getting them to pay for their services through vendor lock-in. They're not going to give up on all that juicy data collection and on the money they currently charge.
It's enough for just a single direct or indirect dependency to be compromised to have a botnet or turn it into something used for surveillance against the users.
Preventing it from exfiltrating data by isolating it from the network with Internet access is the only option if you want to run it. This requires local only devices.
I've been using Home Assistant for about three years. I was very glad it exists. I wanted to make the most out of it. It has numerous problems and regressions are very frequent. The disappointment lies in it not being as it's described and in the fact that its development process doesn't appear to improve, nor does its overall quality appear to improve. It still gains new features in spite of all of these issues.
Home Assistant's dashboards and UI have regressions in every single release. Many such regressions aren't fixed quickly or remain that way permanently. Github issues get closed by the bot. New features ship in every release without fixing these bugs. This gave me the impression that the developers employed by Nabu Casa have very little time to focus on bugs and that there's no pre-release QA. The graphs and their history had plenty of bugs in the 2025.1 release. Are there plans to improve the development process to improve quality?
Home Assistant is described on its home page as "Open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first.". A Home Assistant OS download is useless offline and without the Nabu Casa infrastructure. A download of a Home Assistant OS image obtained today would be completely useless in 5 years for now. These are completely useless if Nabu Casa's infrastructure goes away for any reason. Do you have plans to address this?
Another point related to Home Assistant being local and making privacy a priority, Home Assistant downloads all icons from [1]. The GitHub issue [2] has been open for a while without any involvement from the developers. The Home Assistant container image doesn't include all the assets required for it to provide a Home Assistant deployment in a container. Is this something you plan to address or should it be handled in a fork of Home Assistant meant to be run completely locally?
Home Assistant bundles numerous dependencies [3]. The Home Assistant container bundles and has all of these available. Are there any plans to let users disable all cloud only integrations? What's done to assess the security of these numerous packages? This matters because people allow Home Assistant to access their indoor cameras, door locks and other potentially sensitive devices. Some malicious code run from one compromised dependency's __init__.py could have serious consequences.
Home Assistant is a Python monolith. Adding something as simple as a shell command to my configuration requires a restart of Home Assistant. Are there any plans to split this up or to improve the architecture to not have such issues anymore?
The energy dashboard is extremely limited. Are there plans to make this more flexible?
Why are you forcing people to use encryption since 2025.1? I was including these backups in my encrypted backups anyway.
The voice functionality for Home Assistant and voice PE require a cloud service or a local machine with a GPU for good performance. Are there any plans to address this to provide higher performance local voice control? The old Rhasspy (the version released before Nabu Casa hired its developer) seemed to work a lot better with defined sentences and was faster.
I've seen Home Assistant become faster over the last three years. My YAML had to be updated a few times. New features have been introduced to the dashboards. Old issues and limitations are still there. The dashboards gain new features while the number of bugs and regressions also increases. The custom resources for custom cards don't always load in the mobile app. The UI still loads all the icons from the Nabu Casa icons site [1]. Home Assistant frequently stops updating my location (home vs away) and requires deletion of the device from HA to get it to work again. Entities don't update in the dashboard sometimes.
Home Assistant is described as being an open source project which has been donated or moved to the Open Home Foundation. Why does it still require a CLA to be signed, just like corporate open source projects?
Setting up Home Assistant for someone who's non-technical is a terrible idea. This is an even bigger issue if they want it set up and left alone without updates/maintenance. The mobile app would probably stop working properly with this installation or they'd break it at some point by installing updates.
I'll wait for a bit longer while I prepare to migrate away from Home Assistant and Home Assistant OS. I'm considering a setup which uses Home Assistant core to trigger automations and to display a dashboard. All the automations and device integrations would be done with other tools. This would reduce exposure to Home Assistant's regressions and avoid Home Assistant OS's limitations.
I’ve been using HA for 10 years and I share almost all of your concerns.
Particularly annoying is automated issue closure on GitHub. Imagine spending your free time debugging an issue and describing it meticulously only to see it ignored and closed a few months down the line. I can’t but think about all the burned users who’d inevitably stop reporting anything at all. How does that affect project’s quality?
How do you like the Discord based forums? Having knowledge buried in a proprietary closed source platform hosted by a third party is another problem. They can wipe out countless posts and exchanges through a simple terms of service update to delete older data.
The automated issue closure and ignored issues are pretty much the last straw for me. I appreciate the work done. I can't help but see that this how things are going to be forever without any significant change. The only option is to migrate away from Home Assistant.
The way the world works, you need to be either a company or a non-profit to be able to partner with the industry. Just being an open source project is not enough.
Since the launch of the foundation, we see a large uptick in companies and universities reaching out to partner with Home Assistant. A lot of manufacturers are very happy to see that an independent platform is being established as alternative to the big tech platforms. Universities want to collaborate on energy and privacy research for the smart home. We've also seen some industry donations (ie DuckDuckGo) to support our work.
FWIW frenk clarified that their issues was not licensing, but support.
> For me, this was not about licensing specifically. However, that point unfortunately is missed and got lost. Which is unfortunate. A lot blew up on the route, which just sucks for both parties.
> In the end, I think the way this project distributes Home Assistant (and its integrations, including Ambee) is not providing the intended working and thus may surprise the end user. In the end, those users are likely to knock on the doors of the Home Assistant project and their integration maintainers, not this project. As a matter of fact, most of my packages in this project are outdated and don't match the distributed version of Home Assistant.
That's why I asked about attitude, not anything else. It's perfectly fine to decide to not to support someone, but...
"I release my code under FOSS license, but if anyone distribute it in a way I consider not nice, I will re-license it just to screw them over." [1]
When I was considering using HA and was casually browsing community discussions, there were many posts gave me similar feeling like above case. There were other technical reasons that I decided to not to use HA, but this certainly left a really bad taste in my mouth.
This isn't some regular contributor. They appear to be one of the most important Home Assistant maintainers and a Nabu casa employee. This contributor is also the author of many release note blog posts such as this one
https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2025/01/03/release-20251/
Home Assistant may be developed with financing from Nabu Casa. Nabu Casa receives money from partners, from people who buy their products and from those who pay for their cloud subscription. They also rely heavily on countless other Python packages developed and maintained by people they don't pay. Other people make significant contributions to Home Assistant and to its web UI.
I'd expect them to run this project as an open source project and handle such situations with a bit more grace, even more so for someone with such a high profile such as frenck.
They'd have the right to get angry if someone distributed a paid product which didn't include FOSS code from third party contributors or FOSS dependencies. This isn't the case. They use a lot of FOSS code from countless people already for the Home Assistant core, for the frontend and for the Home Assistant OS.
All of the time spent dealing with such needless drama could be better spent living one's life and doing something more meaningful for everyone.
Home Assistant and the Home Assistant Operating System have a log of bugs, regressions, shortcomings and usability problems. They have far too many problems for me to even track them or write all of them down. That's not related to your experience. There are other issues which stand out based on what you've written.
The so called issues you've encountered appear to be due to insufficient knowledge and experience. It might be a good idea to learn more to better understand what's going on. What you've done is similar to complaining about being last in a swimming competition without learning how to swim properly first and without proper practice for several years.
im perfectly fine with that, and am not asking for a refund or anything. i am merely pointing out that as a fellow startup person in tech this kind of friction log is typically what you want to improve the experience, so that in 3-5 years you are not blaming your user for their skill issue when really its always possible to improve the experience. this is what i did for a living. this comes from empathy.
seems your issues started from the beginning. you bought a HA voice believing it was a home assistant server.
it says right on their sales page it is a "voice assistant" and that it is "built for home assistant". [1]
then you didnt want to buy the HA green that is a home assistant appliance with HAOS already setup for people who don't want to diy it (like you didnt).
next you downloaded a .vdi and didnt research what it is or how to install it.
then you complain about docker images, although it is
absolutely possible to run in docker as long as you understand the limitations [2]. did you even read this?
> hmm. new macs dont have apt-get anymore.
they never did. why dont you read whats in all of your screenshots? it says right above "if your OS don't have that, look for alternatives".
> Installing Virtualbox and double clicking the .vdi file i downloaded from earlier gives.... nothing
well, what do you expect? it's a disk image, not a executable. again, the installation instructions for macOS can help you here, you should read it [3]
> anyway, it looks like the default vdi ships with some well known bugs but ALSO its now just straight up missing the \EFI\BOOT\BOOTx64.efi file it expects to load. I found one you can download here and learned that you can import them into the vm via shared folders.
you found a post from 2021, it is not relevant today.
then you started replacing files... oh man!
your actual issue is that you didn't configure the vm like the installation guide showed you.
next you got it running in docker. advice to you: don't. you will not be able to use addons and thus no hacs.
> of course it just expects the networking to work when of course it wont fucking work
> i tried ngrok to setup a tunnel but it just resulted in a bunch of bad 400 bad request errors
you must learn how docker networks work to progress here. docker only listen locally by default and you need to instruct it otherwise if that's what you want.
TLDR:
you should have just started by reading the installation instructions, it explains to you:
> Home Assistant offers four different installation methods. We recommend using Home Assistant Operating System.
then you should follow the recommendation and be done long ago.
you seem frustrated and not keen on reading or learning.
not sure who you expect to take action based on that rant.
yeah, for someone who wrote a book called "The Coding Career Handbook"[0], not being able to actually read the instructions, getting mad about it, and then posting a rant called "Home Assistant Voice Preview is an unusable mess"[1] is not a good look.
I've built a KNX house about 10 years ago and I'm still quite happy. Let me share some experience:
Having the light switch on the smartphone does not make it any smarter, just more complex.
The following automations are the most valuable for me:
- automatic blinds. Go down when too much sun hits the facade, go down when dark outside, go up with too much wind.
No concern leaving for work, and coming back to an overheated living room (no AC needed). But still automatically collect the direct sun in winter/spring.
- motion sensors, turn on lights when dark and motion in the room, every room
- night mode - low level motion-activated light in all bedrooms, corridor and bathroom. No automatic lights in bedroom, orientation lights on, night light sockets on, blinds down
This brought me to rarely touching a button/switch, twice a day, maybe?
And then there is toys
- blinds can fully close when room is empty, but go to half tilted with presence, angles following the sun, for maximum natural light without direct sun
- TV lowers the blinds behind that would give a reflection
- opening the terrace door opens the blinds and turns off indoor lights, to not attract mosquitos (idk if that even helps)
- shower motion sensor turns ventilation on high
- some sockets go on/off for Christmas lights
- logging of appliances, water, ventilation, heating.
I like that the low level stuff in KNX does not need/have a central hub. But the higher level requires extra smarts. I plan to migrate those to Home Assistant this year.
Oh man. I love Home Assistant. But I think of it as a really fun hobby. Maintaining, getting dashboards working, integrating with wireless local network standards… It ends up very technical, very quickly, as Mr. Petersson so ably demonstrates. That said, using it has put me hard on the side of preferring home devices with open management platforms. I keep feeling there’s a chance my smart home could stay off the cloud and have good automation if only I buy the right nerd tech..
I have been using Home Assistant since before "Lovelace" UI was available. It has come a long way but there's still an ongoing maintenance demand. It's less than it used to be... but it's still not zero.
> That said, using it has put me hard on the side of preferring home devices with open management platforms.
I feel like this is the true purpose of HA and the ecosystem around it. Similar to how matter is forcing IPv6 adoption on micro-controllers, really.
Every holiday season, I go looking for a bunch of cheap stuff on Ali express to tear down. Every year there's new LED light controllers and 2024 was the first year where the manufacturers were almost _bragging_ about how they label the GPIO pins and expose the programming interface so you can throw your own firmware on there if you want. Seriously, never before have I seen these controllers BRAG about how they support WLED natively. The FOSS / DIY / I'm not using _your_ cloud, I have one at home, already movement is ... actually being catered to!? That's _new_.
"Offline" has been my number one rule for home automation since I started using HA about a decade ago.
I have a couple of hundred devices connected to it now, and the _only_ cloud integration I use is Spotify, for obvious reasons; I have been careful when buying smart things that they're completely offline, and anything I buy that _is_ smart but isn't offline-only gets hobbled into a "dumb" appliance; e.g. my new dishwasher has "smart" stuff, if I connect it to Wi-Fi, I found the maintenance menu and disabled the network interface entirely and it's just a regular dishwasher now, which is how I like it.
I try to avoid all smart devices, but I moved into a house that already had "smart" garage door openers installed, so I thought I'd try the smartness. It is indeed ridiculous in that it requires an Internet connection to work. Here I am, with a remote control device (my phone) that is on my LAN and a garage door opener that is on my LAN, but I need to do a round trip to the Internet to communicate with it? What idiot designs these things?
There has been some uproar lately about a particular manufacturer shutting down access to the API used for their garage door openers to HA, I forget the name but there was a Q in it I believe.
The solution, as I understand it, is a little device which talks the protocol of the door opener that gives you fully local access the way it should be.
I'll try and dig out the link now in case it's of use to you.
I got one for my decade-old not-smart opener around the time the manufacturer was shutting down API access for their fancy new smart models. Works like a dream. Why would anyone want to spend $$$ buying a fancy new cloud-smart appliance when a simple little chip can make the old one local-smart?
Yea, that's the kind I've got. I solved the problem by simply not using or caring about the "smart" feature, since it's pretty pointless. Why would I even need to open or close my garage with an "app" when the button is right there by the door?
I don't have a garage door opener myself, but from what I've gleaned from US YouTubers is that they like to know the _state_ of the door, open/closed which is handy if you use home automation.
I imagine if you're driving into the garage from outside you have a physical button in the car with you to open it, and if you don't run home automation, the "automation" part is likely not very useful.
I like knowing if the door is opened or closed from remote. Kids sometimes forget to close the door, and it's reversed direction before because the tracks needed lubricated and it raised the door again after I had pressed the button.
Look at it from the vendor’s perspective. Most people still want to be able to access and control their home from outside their home network, which generally means going through a hosted server, so why go to the extra trouble of implementing a separate method for local LAN only when you could just use the same central server? It’s almost always the case that the local LAN can access the internet, so there’s not much incentive to make it more efficient.
Yes, ideally the local user should just hit the local hub directly, but it’s double the development effort for negligible benefit.
I agree there isn't much incentive, and this is where standardised local protocols like ZigBee, Z-Wave etc come in; I can buy the hardware I want and run it how I want and those who want simplicity can buy a local hub, which can cover the cost of the hosted servers I have no interest in.
Failing that, I'd settle for manufacturers adding an option in their app of wherever suitable, that will let me change the server URL and leave me to it, I'll reverse engineer then protocol, or if they're feeling generous they can open source or provide an API doc.
Unfortunately, my experience reverse engineering lots of devices over the years is that they're often sharing more than they should, and subsidising the devices they sell you with your data.
There is also an overwhelming number of hardware manufacturers who just have piss poor software with atrocious security who should probably be embarrassed to release their code.
We already know what it's like in home WiFi router world.
I worked around this by exposing most HA entities to HomeKit using the built-in HomeKit bridge.
That way you get all the "this is just integrated with Siri and it's easy for non technical people to control" as well as much more powerful automations.
For example, my home presence detection is actually powered by HomeKit automations which flip binary sensors I've exposed from HA.
For me the number one priority is to make the "smartness" additional, and not change how I interact with my home in general. This is mostly to satisfy the SO-acceptance factor and also not to confuse visitors, especially elderly like my parents.
In particular:
1) there are light switches that work as expected
2) you can adjust the temp on the TRVs
3) if the HA instance blows up, shit should still work
What this means in practice:
1) I have motion sensors in some rooms that might turn on the main lights or some smaller lamp in a corner if it's past midnight (eg in kitchen), but the light switch will always turn on/off the main lights. If no motion is detected for X minutes all lights turn off.
2) if my mom comes to visit and feels cold in the evening, she can just turn a dial like she did her entire life. No app, no touch buttons on the TRV, no "hey Google... Or was it sori? Siri? Son, help me out!" The smartness lies in having a general schedule, and then again motion detectors that reset the TRVs back to that schedule if they were adjusted manually and no motion was detected for 15 minutes.
3) This means I don't have smart bulbs, but relays in the light switches that do not run in detached mode. For TRVs this obviously works since they have dials.
Personally I consider the fact that my DIY thermostat has no buttons to change the temperature a feature, but lots of people have varying feelings on who's allowed to be adjusting the thermostat and it's good to have options :)
It doesn't help that half of the population seemingly doesn't understand how to use a thermostat. More than one person in my family treats it like an on-off switch. When they feel hot, they turn it down to the lowest temperature, and when they feel cold, they turn it up to the hottest temperature, and basically repeat this all day. No amount of explanation helps, about how you're just supposed to pick a comfortable temperature and it will maintain it.
One of the nice things you can actually solve with a thermostat on your LAN! I have a button for "Just run the heat/ac for 30 minutes because I'm hot/cold in the moment", without changing the actual set point.
Set it few degrees lower than average preference. Put on socks or hoodie when cold, take them off when hot. Instant regulation, efficient energy usage.
Generally the problem in this situation is that the person wants a different temperature now, and they think that setting a higher number will make it get there faster.
It can make it get there faster depending on how many stages of heating/cooling you have.
Problem we have at work is people that are cold temporarily adjusting the heating setpoint too high (above the cooling setpoint), now when it goes back to normal operation after the override expires, the temp of the space is above the cooling setpoint, so the cooling turns on. And now people are wondering why it's in cooling in the winter.
Sure, but then you should still try to set you current (estimated) comfortable temperature as the target. If it's 23°C and you feel warm, you should set it to 20°C for example and not do 0°C just to get the heating to turn off.
You're assuming that they all work the same. I've been living in an apartment for the last 15 years where it is indeed mostly on/off. 0-2 = nothing, 3 = in some rooms the radiator will be warm to the touch but not radiate, 4-5 = warm.
It's not the end of the world, we generally have them off until we need to turn them on, and then it's not too warm, and after the winter they're off again for 9 months.
At least in the guest room I think you might want that, people have widely varying preferences for sleep temp, but I feel similar about the other rooms. This is why the "reset on no motion" was important to me, so my mom won't turn up the heat in the living room at 10pm and then the next morning I discover my living room has turned into a sauna. ;)
I might have to add that our house is really old and has shitty insulation, so having a schedule that lowers the temp at night or when at work is also important. Keeping the temp up at acceptable levels 24/7 would be rather expensive. So when you unexpectedly are at home during those down times it's nice to be able to adjust directly at the TRV. I'm still thinking about whether I want to automate this more via motion, but since heating is not instant like turning on or off lights, you don't want to toggle the trv all the time as you enter or leave rooms...
An ultra-smart thermostat could have buttons and temperature display but have a setting so it doesn't actually do anything. So people can feel like they are doing something and feel good, while still not messing up anything.
> This means I don't have smart bulbs, but relays in the light switches
In my experience, many good smart bulbs have the option to act like dumb bulbs on regular light switches. Some just return to the state they were last in when power returns, others to a "default boring light". It's one of the things that keeps me buying the more expensive smart bulbs because they are easier to configure between such options (and the third option: stay off when power returns; avoid the "bright flash wakeup" in overnight power outages in bedroom lights, for instance).
You can also emulate that somewhat easily enough in software, even if the bulb doesn't support it right, if your hub notices a light disappeared from the network and then came back, it can default the light to some useful state.
The trouble with the bulbs is that if you turn off the switch, now your automations can't control the bulb.
I've got one bulb that occasionally loses connection. Then I have to turn it off on the switch, and the next time I go to turn it on with the automation I've got to turn the switch on again and let it connect first. This is not a seamless system.
I got around this by replacing my light switches with a mixture of toggle switches (ones that spring back when pressed) combined with Zigbee relays that support them, and smart switches that can be set to coupled or uncoupled.
My home office for example I set the Aqara switch to uncoupled and toggling it switches on/off the desk lamp, ceiling, bookshelf LEDs, Uplight and wall-strips behind my SKADIS, all of which are smart lights. Since it's _my_ home office, if HA is down and I can't toggle any of them using that switch, I'm probably not worried.
Areas of the house which are used by the rest of the family, have the spring-toggle switches and operate non-smart bulbs so they will function just like a normal switch/light if HA happened to be down and I'm not home to fix it.
Definitely an experience that varies with model of bulb and type of network/hub. As I mentioned, I know I bought into one of the more expensive sorts for reasons like knowing that automation starts working again just about as soon as the dumb switch is flipped back on, between a tiny bit of "memory" in the bulb firmware and a reasonably reliable/quick reconnection.
It's not always a seamless system, and it varies so much in actual practice on hardware. I definitely understand why so many prefer smart switches over smart bulbs.
I also know that the silly things I want to do with colors across a day/week push me to wanting fun smart bulbs more than smart switches.
The one thing I really want is covers for some of my dumb switches, and I've seen them for cheap on places like Amazon, but haven't actually bought any or installed them, because I'm also in a situation where I don't really need SO/friend/guest buy-in/confusion-saving having people over so rarely in the last few years.
I have Inovelli switches that have a "smart bulb" mode that lets them send commands instead of physically switching the build. I use that to make my smart bulbs respond like dumb ones to a switch, but means I also make them do smart things based on holding the switch down, double tapping, etc.
I’m moving away from this level of automation in my home. At the most, I’m thinking of a smart panel that can turn on/off/dim simple, non-smart LED bulbs throughout the main living area, and that’s it.
Right now I have expensive (at the time) GU10 LIFX bulbs you can no longer get. They’re not operating on and off at the wall, because my wifi settings changed and I couldn’t be arsed having to reconfigure 14 bulbs by manually resetting them, unscrewing them, and then slowly and painfully register g them on the wifi. I’ve probably created a lot of my own pain here because I could have used a dedicated SSID for that infra that never changes… oh well.
Also, in the time the smart bulbs have become idiot bulbs, I’ve never needed to really dim them, change their colour, or do anything smart.
I sort of feel like the idea is a good one but really it’s overthinking a really simple idea: turning a light on.
I don’t know. Maybe I’m under thinking this? Would love some thoughts.
Most smart home tech is sold because it sounds or looks cool, not because it is actually helpful. For instance, smart bulbs are dumb because they break the most obvious correct control in your house: The light switch. Smart switches are a lot better of an idea, and they recognize the reality that most of the time the best time to turn on the light is by touching the switch when entering a room.
Monitoring can be really useful and some subtle scheduled controls can be a nice touch, but people go very dumb and very overboard.
> Smart switches are a lot better of an idea, and they recognize the reality that most of the time the best time to turn on the light is by touching the switch when entering a room.
i went with precense sensors instead, stuff light up as i move across the house, and will be removing the switches.
And then when I need it brighter? Or if I don't want the lights on at all?
Sure, you can manage an increasingly programmed logic path for every conceivable option, but it's way easier to just hit the light switch.
There’s a point where you're spending a multiple of the cost on equipment and a huge amount of time, to save you a net amount of... zero effort. It becomes a waste.
> but it's way easier to just hit the light switch
> to save you a net amount of... zero effort
This is just not true. I have 7 lights in the room I'm in right now, and I want them to all turn on and off together. This was a huge pain before I had smart lights.
Smart switches (at least for lights) seem to me like a solution in search of a problem. Why would I ever need to turn on lights when I'm not there? If I am there, what's wrong with just using the switch?
I am using HA for something else. I'm building some ESP32 based "smart" thermostats to collect temperature and humidity data as well as exert some control over my minisplits. The only viable interface is IR so that's taking a little work to place a transmitter and receiver appropriately s.t. my wall mounted device meshes well with the existing remote control. The end goal is to integrate with the hydronic backup to create a hybrid heat system.
It's frustrating I have to build all this myself. This shit should all just work that way out of the box, without the "GE Cloud" or whatever. But I'm glad it's made relatively easy by tools like HA and microcontroller dev boards.
> Why would I ever need to turn on lights when I'm not there?
The use case I have is to turn off lights when I'm not there. My wife frequently leaves lights on when exiting a room, so it is often useful to turn the lights off remotely. Voice control is nice too, for the situations when my hands are full and I can't hit a switch.
So smart switches are solving two problems instead of one problem: When you want to automate it, you can. When you just need it to work conventionally as a light switch without breaking your automation, it also does that. They are the no-compromise solution.
I guess that's the thing: I can't imagine wanting to automate a light switch. There are plenty of practical things to automate. For example, window shades for passive solar heating (or the prevention thereof), hvac, hell I think it would be awesome to have a temperature sensor in my utility room and machinery to "scram the reactor" (shut off the well pump and drain all the water pipes) if the temperature drops below 34°F. But light switches?
Sibling comments suggest automatically turning on/off lights if someone is expected to arrive or depart, but wouldn't that person just think "weird, they left the lights on"?
I'm currently building a local LLM (multiple threads - one for each sensor suite) sensor array for more proactive needs. I don't want it else conditions, and I don't want to turn lights on when I do x or y. The sensors are cheap and plenty on AliExpress and all it takes is an esp32-s3 or similar.
A smart home should predict my needs dynamically rather than do stuff based on predefined conditions and is more than just "turn living room red."
"This was before Home Assistant offered their own hardware... Home Assistant uses SQLite, and when you have a ton of sensor data flowing in, SQLite can start choking."
Their $99 hardware works great. Some devices are chatty but it's two lines in the startup config to filter the bulk of it, with no useful functionality lost.
If the data being generated by your living room is overwhelming SQLite on an eMMC, wow.
Home Assistant is one of the few recent products to delight me during setup. The sheer number of weird things it found on my network was impressive. The number of them that are dropping off as various cloud vendors try to lock things down, even more so. It has definitely motivated my future purchase choices and pushed me to simplify.
I had problems in the past with the sqlite database getting corrupted on shutdown. I moved it to a postgresql database on the same VM and it's been fine since.
Yeah, past experience with RPi/SD cards certainly gave me pause. No problems yet, knock wood. $99 well spent. Didn't see anything widespread in the forums and they made online backup a priority in the latest version. I like these folks, their priorities, and the community they built.
Interesting that Google Nest and Tesla are pissing everyone off at the moment. The forum is a leading indicator of brands to avoid.
Pi SD cards seem to be extremely reliable, I have not had issues with Amazon SanDisks. Especially not if you get a bigger one than you need to spread wear more.
I've probably spammed this comment an obnoxious number of times already, but I think a lot of the problem is that IIRC HA still writes logs as they happen. Filesystems don't like small frequent writes, it makes write amplification happen.
I handle logging by buffering everything in RAM, and optionally only saving min/max/avg data, on top of only logging points that are specifically configured.
I have a script to set up /var/log as a ramdisk, along with a few other things things I've found can occasionally go wrong and write a bunch of stuff.
But I don't use HA, or have any idea how hard it would be to do this kind of thing in HA.
Yes, that has been my experience with RPi in general. But there's a lotta Pis and lotta Linux versions and a lotta SD cards and a lotta hobbyists out there. Using the $99 Home Assistant Green with eMMC soldered to the board was a leap. So far no problems, nor much griping in the forums.
Does SQLite really start choking? I feel like the issue is on configuration/ code side rather than on the database itself. It should handle thousands of writes per second, even on older Raspberry.
For this use-case, you can even likely implement own writer queue for every sensor type, and then batch insert them.
I would like further detail about this also. I suspect that SQLite wasn't choking and it was something else. I cannot imagine a single home being able to overwhelm SQLite [0]. Unless the OP has a couple thousand devices all looking to write to it at the same time and they cannot queue and take turns.
Author here. The problem with SQLite is when you start having a lot of sensors. That's when SQLite failed to keep up on a Pi. Mind you, this was back on Pi 3s. It might be better today, and I know there has been performance improvements to SQLite, but for me moving to Influx for time series and MySQL for the database solved things.
Also, even on the best SD cards, you will eventually break them if you write this much.
Came here to question this too. I have trouble with this claim because I do not see how a bunch of sensors could produce so much data as to overwhelm a Raspberry Pi...
Maybe the problem was having the database on a super-slow micro-SD card?
Low power sensors are only being polled every few minutes anyway. I have a dozen temp/humidity sensors and several dozen lights etc and my HA on a Pi 4 has no lag issues from it.
Yeah the microSD will die eventually even if it’s a high endurance one - but it’s fine for a small installation, I’ve been running a quality one until I really started building out the sensor network. With just switches it was fine. Now running on a mid tier usb3 ssd.
Like many other commenters here say, however nice and increasingly better Home Assistant is, in effect you will manage 10, 20, 50+ devices that may receive updates, live in your network - whether wifi or zigbee, all have their issues - interfere with each other or just plain break.
I love the possibilities, it's often calming and nice to show off, but like with all things personal infrastructure, I have an increasing nausea and regret, along with the sunken cost fallacy.
I suspect that what's actually needed is containerized integrations, if we can't get a real standard protocol that everyone uses(Is Matter going to take over?).
WebAssembly seems like it could be a reasonable possibility for making plugins that don't need constant maintenance.
HA isn't (usually) the problem, the smart devices are. Our LIFX bulbs work almost flawlessly, and the Ikea bulbs using zigbee (not the ikea hub) are yet to fail, but the small number of Tapo bulbs require an API authentication that expires eventually or whenever there is a blackout so they require me to re-enter the password.
So the tapo bulbs are getting replaced with more Ikea bulbs and I won't be buying Tapo again.
I've been using HA a little longer than yourself and took the exact same steps a few years ago. It's good to see we ended up at the same "conclusion".
I decided to buy dedicated hardware for HA as opposed to the VM approach as I wanted it to be completely independent from my home servers running non-critical tasks. I bought a Minisforum mini-PC with far-far overkill performance, RAM and storage for HA, but that's just how I roll.
With well over 100 devices, I switched to MariaDB and Influx too, I also solved the heating a couple of years ago, here's a quick summary:
I have a BLE temperature sensor in every room of the house (Switchbot Meter Plus), and I have a Z-Wave TRV on each radiator, I grouped the values into upstairs and downstairs for day/night with some exceptions for home offices, and calculate a sort of "average" temperature.
With some scripts to create a hysteresis, I turn the overall heating on/off when the "average" temperature is below set temperature - 0.2C or above set temperature + 0.3C, each room has an individual set temperature and I turn off the TRV if that room goes above the set temperature and back on if it drops below, again with some light hysteresis.
I then have some automations to switch to day/night/away modes with different set temperatures and rooms on/off depending on the situation.
As for lighting, I use "Circadian Lighting" which _does_ allow light groups, so I just specify the groups in yaml and it takes care of the group as a whole. I think it's probably lacking some functionality of the Adaptive Lighting plugin, but I haven't had to worry about differences in bulb types, I have a mix of Hue (80% of my bulbs) and IKEA (white only and colour).
> As for lighting, I use "Circadian Lighting" which _does_ allow light groups, so I just specify the groups in yaml and it takes care of the group as a whole. I think it's probably lacking some functionality of the Adaptive Lighting plugin, but I haven't had to worry about differences in bulb types, I have a mix of Hue (80% of my bulbs) and IKEA (white only and colour).
Author here. Interesting. I wasn't able to make the groups work either with Flux or with Adaptive Lighting. Not sure why, but I didn't spend too many cycles on it tbh.
Also, good ideas on the heating. Will look at that.
> on/off when the "average" temperature is below set temperature - 0.2C or above set temperature + 0.3C, each room has an individual set temperature and I turn off the TRV if that room goes above the set temperature and back on if it drops below, again with some light hysteresis.
Until you discover the generic thermostat helper :)
I am using that already, I may have missed some features but it didn't seem to support the more complex requirements I had for my heating.
I use the helper to manage the overall heating, by giving it my calculated "average" as the target sensor, and I use the home/away/sleep values.
The complexity in my setup is managing individual rooms which I control independently of the overall heating state; it's a fairly large home for the UK and an old one, some rooms come up to temperature much quicker than others and I want them at different temperatures too, so each room is switched as a separate zone using its TRV and sensor.
Indeed! I started with rules to turn on or off my individual heaters based on the temperature of the room but that's too many rules to setup and update. Then I found the generic thermostat helper and my appreciation for HA immediately went one lever higher!
I would use HA only to get off limited/bad "smart home" apps, but we've been using it in my home for ~6mos for a handful of things and we love it. Probably gonna go ham this year: switches, sensors, the whole thing. I think my most in-depth project is wiring up some temperature-sensitive PWM fans inside an IKEA cabinet that houses a bunch of tech stuff (gaming consoles, voltage converter, modem, router, HA machine, laser printer, etc) to keep it from overheating, which I'm very excited to get going on. Other pie in the sky plans/ideas:
- Wireless plant water sensors
- Blind/curtain management
- Ventilation management based on PM/VOC/CO2
I'm not that into smart locks or doorbell cams... or cameras in general? Feels a little creepy, but I can see the appeal I suppose.
We use Frigate with our cameras and doorbell cam, it can detect people, animals etc depending on how you configure it; We've got our doorbell cam set up to announce via TTS how many people are approaching the door before they even get close enough to press the doorbell; great for delivery people who leave parcels on the door step and don't ring, as well as general security.
I'm not a huge smart home guy. I just have a doorbell camera, a camera, a smart plug, a smart switch, and a light bulb - all running through an Apple TV.
When I originally bought my home I was thinking of making everything smart, but I realized all of this was enough for me.
That being said - I'm absolutely STOKED that there are smart thermostatic radiator valves.
I will say for OP though - it may be worth having an expert come in and check on your radiators to help balance your system (or you could do this yourself).
Checking to see if radiators have the correct pitch, if you have the right sized radiator for your home, if you have the right pipes insulated, etc.
My impression was that if you get all the balancing right - you won't really need to fiddle with the valves again (unless of course you want to change the temperature in a room versus keeping it consistent).
I've also heard people say that it's generally a good idea to not have an adjustable radiator valve with the radiators by your thermostat - I think because when set wrong your thermostat will trigger and turn off the boiler.
I've been meaning to rebalance my home, with my first goal being to adjust the valves closest to the radiator so that they fill up the slowest.
We're in different countries so obviously you won't be able to use the contractors I used - but mine were wonderful. Their specialty is steam heat - nothing else. To get a new boiler they had me measure all of my radiators and say what type each one was. This helps figure out the correct boiler size, since most houses don't have the correct ones.
I've never got the reason for home automation over setting the heating to come on half hour before I get out of bed in the winter. I'm quite happy manually turning on lights, etc; and keeping things simple and off line. I also turn most stuff off, fridge/heating system excluded, before leaving the house or going to bed. I definitely don't see the point in smart lights and things like that.
Nothing on there is really crazy or complex. Just things like running the Roomba when I leave, or turning on lights at sunset.
I’ve found it to be very nice because I can automate common things around temperature, motion, waking up/falling asleep, and leaving/coming home. It also all integrates with HomeKit so I can control everything with Siri.
It’s definitely more in the hobby territory than something truly essential, but I would say that it is definitely useful and better than managing a bunch of random apps to automate lights or whatever.
I definitely like the idea, and I do think it's cool. But I just can bothered with the complexity and the fact it needs to be maintained and networked, etc. Also yaml...
On the side of writing YAML, this was actually all generated by the UI and then exported to YAML when I decided I wanted to version control it. It's really nice because Copilot works pretty well for creating/editing automations.
I can assure you there's nothing smart about my 15 year old boiler and it's thermostat supports that functionality externally, though the name escapes me it looks like this [0]. No need for any fancy nonsense, networking, "smart" anything. Simple and easy to use.
it's literally smart home automation, just analog. you like the functionality of automation, you just have a fashionable allergy to it in its digital form
Timers are "smart" now? I just though they were timers. Does the timer on my cooker, so I don't need to set an external timer, make my cooker smart too? Is my outside light over my bins "smart" because it's connected to a light and motion sensor and come on automatically at night?
I've definitely no "fashionable allergy" to digital forms of automation. I simply don't want the massive complexity that comes with it.
I'm also not advocating against it, I just don't see the point it in.
Setting schedules and automatically doing things in reaction to events is home automation. You've set it up to do something automatically when needed so you don't have to interact with it. I wouldn't include a timer you have to set manually every time though.
Your thermostat? Yes, based on the image above. The cooker? I'd say not. The lights? Definite yes.
I agree it's an automation, I don't agree with it being "smart".
What I like about my thermostat timer is that it's simple, local, and requires nothing else. No networking, no app, no maintenance over changing the timer for if I'm away, etc.
I think(?) you're thinking of "Adaptive Recovery" which has a few manufacturer-specific aliases.
The behavior is broadly as follows: Consider a thermostat heating schedule that is programmed for 64F overnight, increasing to 70F at 7:00am. A regular thermostat would begin heating at 7am, and take e.g. 40 minutes before reaching 70F. So between 7:00 and 7:40 the temperature is "less than 70F."
With adaptive recovery, the thermostat figures out (or is hand-tuned to know) that it will take 40 minutes to raise eight degrees, so begins the schedule at 6:20 so that it hits 70F right at 7am.
If that's not what you were saying then, uh, ignore me.
The overhead and maintenance involved in setting up these home automations have always seemed to spend more time than it saves. I'm not convinced that automatic lighting is better than just flipping a light switch.
Beyond the "cool" factor I'm with you. I don't know what the benefits would be but I can definitely see it being a pain to maintain and the extra cost in both time and money for running these automation do not seem worth it. I would definitely like to be proven wrong, but I have not seen anything to date.
Well. I'm not living in a big house, but believe me the simplest and less fancy automations make life way better. My favourites :
- Lights on when the first person living here arrive after sunset
- Shutdown every lights when the last person living here leave
- Main switch to shut every lights at night
- 30min light sequence from red to white every morning, everywhere, before playing the "birds" playlist on sonos : waking up like this and not having to deal with switches and darkness while my head is up my ass changed my life.
- Ungrouping every sonos devices each night a 5am and setting volume to each so I don't wake up to full volume and I can have birds in the bedroom, music everywhere else. Screw you Sonos for not making it in your app.
- Gently tone down lights when something is played after 8pm on Apple TV
- Gently lights up when something is paused or stopped on Apple TV
- Setting "night mode" on automatically on sound bar every night at 11pm
- Setting it off automatically every morning at 7am
- Using dirt cheap Ikea remotes for eveything connected, without limitation or Ikea Bridge.
Everything is possible thanks to Home Assistant and some efforts. Because manufacturers either don't care, don't want to be compatible with other brands, or want to keep new exciting features for the future.
Motion activated lights switch is also very useful for corridors and definitely not for lazy people as I often read.
For all of that, thank you HA and its beloved and passionate community !
I have over 100 devices connected to Home Assistant
Man, I don't know how this doesn't end up being a full time job to manage.
Every time I dip my toes into "smart" devices, the required operational maintenance of fiddling with them to keep them working always pushes me back to the tried and true workflow of just flipping a light switch.
FWIW, I’m at ~50 devices (in a two bedroom apartment, so quite dense), and I spend maybe 5 minutes a month on average maintaining my HA instance and automations. It takes some fiddling to make the automations bulletproof, but once you’re there, it’s entirely hands off.
I’ve been upgrading my adaptive lighting over the past few days so this is neat timing. I’m taking quite a different approach though. While I do have a script that can be called to set a light to the “right” value (based on a global ideal brightness and kelvin values calculated elsewhere plus params for multiplier and offset) I call that for each light or group from individual room handler automations.
The reason is that every room is different. Besides the obvious off or presence states, what is the brightness of the room? Are the curtains open? Is the TV playing? Is it late at night? Is the vacuum in this room? Do we have guests? The answers are all unique to the room.
So each room handler can figure those things out and call the light set script with parameters that offset the brightness, and in some cases like an interval, nudge the current brightness towards the ideal without fully overriding what someone might have set manually.
One issue I have with Home Assistant is the dashboard set up. I recently picked up a used crestron power over ethernet touch panel that I have mounted in my wall and I’m thinking I might have to write my own dashboard for my house because the Home Assistant default is not great. The system works best when it’s mostly automated.
I recently noticed that entities can be tagged/labeled in Home Assistant, and then selected on those (I use auto-entities).
Instead of relying on a brittle naming convention, I can tag devices as 'rgb_led' or 'humidity' and then target all of those. Entities' naming can now be more natural and intuitive.
Pro-tip: use zigbee2mqtt's groups for targeting multiple lights (but I'm guessing OP is using ZHA).
I've also used HA for quite a few years, and I have several hundreds of devices.
I just (this week) decided to move Mosquitto and z2m out of HA to LXC containers in Proxmox (where HA is already running) and it was very easy. Now I don't have to restart the entire world whenever I have to restart HA (usually updates).
Next is to move Node-Red out to its own container. I already do not use HA's automations because they are very poor compared to Node-Red, and I'm starting to change all flows to use MQTT directly instead of passing through HA.
So in the end HA will be relegated to run non-MQTT integrations and dashboarding and not be a single point of failure.
I went this route, but eventually went back. HA automations became more powerful/flexible, and node-red became hard to manage, not easily updatable on mobile, and a bigger point of failure than HA.
Home Assistant has been rock solid with zero downtime for over a year now, and that last downtime was due to a hardware failure.
For automating TRV’s, I use Better Thermostat. It allows one to use external temperature sensors to offset the TRV temperature.
https://better-thermostat.org/
Thanks for the link, I might need to look into this, it may be able to help me simplify my rather complex setup (I described in another comment) with a BLE temperature sensor in every room that I use to control the Z-Wave TRVs since the temperatures sensed _at_ the TRVs is way off reality due to proximity to the radiator.
I only use smart devices for lights and thermostat. Things like oven, washer/dryer, coffee machine require some physical interaction so I feel like it's mostly pointless to have them be smart.
On the subject of under-powered hardware, this will be a minority opinion, but I don't even bother self-hosting on Pis anymore. I started using more powerful systems like NUCs and that was good, but I still kept running into hardware limits with things like Jellyfin. What I do now, and IMHO what the holy grail is (for some with a finite budget) is to build a great desktop PC and do all the self hosting on that. I built a beastly "gaming" rig that ran me about $3800 (though $2k of that was the damn GPU because it was early 2021 at the time). With a Ryzen 9 5950X 16-Core Processor and 128 GB of RAM, and a RX 6900 XT, it easily handles everything I throw at it, and occasionally when there's an intensive job like a long re-encode, it blazes through it in record time. Currently I could rebuild a similar system for about <$2k. I put Fedora on there, and I then use this rig for:
1. A normal desktop experience with multi-monitor for work during the day.
2. A remote dev workstation. I use neovim & tmux so can do development completely headless, so I SSH into this rig for doing dev work. It compiles and runs tests blazingly fast and with up to 32 threads so I rarely have to wait for compilations. It's also great to have something that's "always on" so I can SSH in from anywhere and instantly be dropped right into the last state.
3. Running all my self-hosted stuff like HA, Jellyfin, Audiobookshelf, ArchiveBox, and many more. Some run in containers on the host while others run in VMs. Even the heaviest of stuff runs very well and I never have to worry about OOM or max CPU.
4. A VM server that I can use to quickly spin up any sort of VM I want, permanent or transitive. I have a handful of different distros set up in a "freshly installed" VM snapshot and can near instantly clone and have a full install of that distro.
5. A gaming rig for the occasions I want to play a game. It works great physically (i.e. at-the-desk) and also remotely using Steam Link. I can use the Steam Link app on my Chromecast w/ Google TV to remote in and get high-res/high-fps rendering with practically no latency. My biggest complaint with that is the controllers don't often work great with the Chromecast, but I recently bought a USB-to-ethernet converter so I can plug the 8bitDo dongle in near me and have it get reliable long-range all the way back to the desktop. I've been quite happy with it!
I also routinely find other ways to get utility out of this rig. I like to say that the best ideas are ones that seem obvious in hindsight, and that is definitely how I feel about this setup.
Doesn't this idle at about 100 watts though? Which would be about £25/month for me. I found a lower spec Ryzen 5700 system which idles at about 20 watts is more than enough for Jellyfin etc.
Yes great point, if power is expensive then this can be a big downside. Depending on what it's running it idles between 50 and 100 watts. I leave it on all the time so the constant draw does start to add up. My kids and extended family to some extent use it too so it is engaged in delivering content most of the time even when I'm not using it, so I think it's worth it, but the power use is definitely a consideration.
I have to reboot desktop PCs, especially those used for games, far more often than I do small dedicated ones. My NUC idles at around 5W, which is definitely waaaay less than a desktop PC.
I've had some luck by misusing older hardware designed for network appliances. I picked up an older Protectli Vault used on eBay for something like $65 and it's more capable in practice than I would've thought. (Makes sense I guess, considering it was built to do packet filtering and VPN termination all day.)
Between 50 to 100 watts when idle. It's rarely truly idle because I use it throughout the day and my family also uses it (via Jellyfin et al) but that could be a big downside depending on power cost and utilization.
Completely unrelated to the article but at least related to home automation: is there something that can be used to detect if a door is locked or not? I am sure there is something that replaces the entire lock to allow automation, but I am thinking of some kind of sensor to attach close to an existing lock.
But it seems like a complicated problem to solve easily. There are many kinds of locks and so on...
You could probably glue a flat magnet to the end of deadbolt and place a reed switch inside the box. Though you'd have to be careful to never apply force to the door as you're unlatching the deadbolt to avoid detaching the magnet. And you'd need to run wires to the reed switch, which means drilling holes in the door frame.
This is a "problem" that's on my list of things to solve;
The solution I've come up with but haven't yet put into action is to use an ESP device, with some sort of contact switch which sits _in_ the hole where the lock goes and detects whether the lock (bolt?) is physically present.
This solution isn't likely to be pretty, unless it could be shrunk down to fit within the "hole", but I imagine some sort of ribbon coming from the "device" which should ideally look/be sized similar to a door/window sensor, and goes into the opening in the frame; Main concerns for a DIY solution are battery life and longevity of the switch/contact being smashed into by the lock/bolt each time.
EDIT: A sibling comment mentioned reed switches and magnets, which I had considered, but felt would be either too bulky (reed switch plus magnet) or too fragile (do reed switches come in non-glass form?).
> The solution I've come up with but haven't yet put into action is to use an ESP device, with some sort of contact switch which sits _in_ the hole where the lock goes and detects whether the lock (bolt?) is physically present.
Another option is to disassemble a door/window sensor and replace its reed switch with a contact switch, much like you want to do with the ESP.
Heh, I don't know how that didn't occur to me. I guess I'm susceptible to overcomplicating things by trying to build it rather than just use something that's already 90% there.
I'll have to give this a try now you've suggested it, I've got a few spare Zigbee doors sensors, Ring and IKEA so will be interesting to see which is better suited.
@ingve I'm interested in your plan for your new TRVs. Why would you check the temperature of the nest hub if the TRV is in a different room? Or do you also have "nest sensors" and those report to the nest hub?
Smart temperature control with rads sounds unfeasible because rads are slow. Maintain a certain level of heat with rads, and then perhaps add some smart controlled infrared radiant heating panels for fast responding cozy comfort.
I recently discovered the ikea smart stuff range and highly recommend it. The Ikea stuff uses zigbee and its trivial to connect it to a third party zigbee dongle plugged into your Pi HA setup. The lights work flawlessly and I've been reinventing light switches with the smart remotes ikea sells.
I have some smart plugs which I can use to turn things on/off from Home Assistant, but more usefully, they report current power draw. I use this with Home Assistant to:
- Turn on my electric blanket from my watch 10 minutes before I go to bed
- Make my echo dot announce when one of the following finishes:
- A washing machine load
- A tumble drier load
- A dishwasher load
- A 3D print
Some other things I use Home Assistant for:
- Force charge my home battery during cheap electric periods
- Turn off the heat pump if the grid goes down, so I can decide myself if I want to use my remaining battery power on heating
- Announce if my printer is low on toner via a message to my watch
- Program a more efficient routine for my water heating than the native solution that came with my heat pump allows.
[edit] I just added another automation I've been meaning to: If the time is after 22:00 and I am home, and the outdoor temp is < 6C and I switch the TV from on to off, then turn on the electric blanket and send a notification to my watch to inform me it has been done. Done this because I sometimes forget to do it manually and turning off the TV at that time is a good indicator that I'm heading to bed shortly.
I really don't care for controlling lights or whatever, but I find it very nice as a common place to monitor all the different things we have in the home: heat pump, evse, humidity in rooms, power consumption, state of lawn mower bot, etc.
For what it’s worth I’ve been using HA for 5 years and don’t deal with any of that and it generally just works. I was dealing with worse with overlapping hubs and ecosystems.
All my switches are unicellular and ceiling fans and lights are their fan hubs as well. Over a hundred devices and it generally just works.
Oooh the Adaptive Lighting Integration looks very cool, just installed it. That was my next step on my lights but I was going to do it myself via automations. So glad I found this instead.
My most recent HA journey has been replacing all bulbs in my house with smart bulbs so that I can dim them all to 1-5% by default and then use motion to bring up the lights. It feels magical walking into a room and being able to see but a little dim then the lights fading up. I have it set to use a different brightness at night so it's not blinding. The lights all stay on for ~5min then fade back down.
I've had motion lights for a few years but it's rather "harsh" to have the lights snap on from 0->100% and the "click" from my smart switches was a little annoying. This smart switch+bulb setup is the best of both worlds for me. I do not pair my switches with the lights, I never touch the switches in my house, they are there for other people and as a final fallback if HA stops working (all bulbs will go white/100% when turned on).
Home Assistant is really awesome and I encourage more people to try it out but for the love of god, do not use a Raspberry Pi. It can sort of handle small workloads but HA is going to stress it too far and you will have a bad experience.
That moment when you order several hardware devices, search and flash random firmware from the internet, search countless forums for instructions, spend hours looking at logs in the dumbest html logviewer, just to get a single bit from a switch (this is homeassistant).
It really doesn't have to be. Your standard zigbee smart lightbulb, for example, behaves exactly the same as non-smart lightbulb - you flip a switch to turn it on and off. You have the option of integrating it with automations and services fully under your control and even disconnected from the broader internet, if you like.
Building up a "smart" home where you have control of everything is radically different from off-the-shelf IOT crapware that turns into a paperweight when some company decides to pull the plug.
It's really not. I have well over 100 "smart" devices, but a large portion of those will be light bulbs and door/window and motion sensors. I haven't looked, but I'd say they account for 80%+ of the "smart" device count.
Almost every bulb in the house is a smart bulb, every external door (and some internal doors) has a sensor, some windows, and some rooms have motion sensors, in some cases more than one. Every room with at least one smart bulb has a smart switch, whether a wireless dimmer or the actual light switch on the wall.
The bulbs, you group together; I use the "Circadian Lighting" integration rather than "Adaptive Lighting" and it _does_ support light groups, so all of the bulbs in my hall can be managed by a single group entity, the 5 spots in the main bathroom, same thing, 4 in the en suite, same, etc etc.
Everyone starts out thinking it’s wonderful. It’s when it comes to maintenance or troubleshooting that things become tedious. Spending 60 dollars on a bulb that may or may not last 2 years.
After 10+ or so years of messing with these stupid bulbs no one in my family besides me even uses I’ve basically switched back to all “dumb” stuff now. This isn’t even taking in to account the amount of “smart” devices that start with even basic interoperability but then end up locked in a walled garden when money got expensive. Sure you can fashion up an esp garage door opener but do I really need another 20 cobbled together devices to maintain?
As I mentioned in another comment, I've been running this system for around 10 years now, across 3 homes, growing in size each time.
I use a mix of Z-Wave and Zigbee devices (as well as lots of WiFi such as ESPHome and other devices), I started initially with Hue bulbs, moved to HA, ditched the Hue hub, increased to near 100 bulbs a mix of Hue and IKEA, door/window sensors and motion sensors, water leak sensors, wireless dimmers, and plenty more.
My kids don't know any different, the oldest now 5 has grown up with automatic lights, and has a smart switch I built for her to change the colour of the lights in her room as she wishes; we occasionally sit together and she choses a new set of colours for each button, my son (3) likes to pick a colour for his bedroom lights before bed using the colour picker on mine or my wife's phone.
The kids are aware that if they don't come to dinner when we ask I can just shout "Ok Nabu, turn off the TV" from another room and just the suggestion will convince them to do it themselves.
There's some maintenance for replacing batteries, but I really like that IKEAs stuff uses mostly AAA and I have automations to notify where the low batteries are, and as a household with young children, we've always got batteries charged and ready to go.
We use Frigate to notify us with a voice prompt across the house when people walk through the gate before they even reach our front door, we have audible alerts if the garage door was opened, and plenty more.
My wife will occasionally have griped with how something works, so I ask her to tell me how she _wants_ it to work, and I fix it.
Overall, other than adding new features, it's very hands-off.
> There's some maintenance for replacing batteries, but I really like that IKEAs stuff uses mostly AAA and I have automations to notify where the low batteries are, and as a household with young children, we've always got batteries charged and ready to go.
Not GP, but I've been at this for over a decade now and here's the maintenance that I've had to do:
1. one z-wave switch died after 10 years, replaced it with a zigbee one.
2. Two GE zigbee bulbs failed after 8 years.
That's it.
I've made a point of trying to avoid anything which requires the internet/cloud to function.
The hue bulbs that I added in 2015 are still going strong. I see so many people complaining about the short lifespan of bulbs and all I can figure is that their power dirty or they are buying very cheap equipment.
To play devil's advocate (because I'm very much in agreement with you), I've found that Hue bulbs I've bought in the latter half-decade have lasted less time than the ones I bought a decade ago.
The original metal and glass ones are still going strong at nearing 10 years old, but some of my newer ones made from plastic and plastic since Siginify started cheaping out the build quality have been failing.
Out of somewhere in the region of 60-70 Hue bulbs, mostly Colour + White Ambience, a mix of Edison, Screw and GU10, I've now had 3 of the new cheap/light/plastic ones fail, and zero of the older metal/glass ones, though I've shattered the glass on 3 of the glass ones being careless when moving.
Two failed the same way, one E27 and one GU10; they light the wrong colour and have lost most of their brightness, now about 20% or less of their original brightness, really noticeable when they're grouped with another bulb which should be the same colour and brightness, the third just stopped lighting up entirely, even though it does still register on the Zigbee network.
I share the sentiment, and I also get downvoted every time I post something on those lines here. Only thing that can make you even less popular is saying that using cloud services can make sense depending on your priorities. =D
I wouldn't downvote anyone who says it hasn't worked out for them, but I run what I imagine is a fairly large scale "smart home", ("device" counts in the hundreds), perhaps not compared to the popular YouTubers you see, but still fairly large.
It's worth noting that I _enjoy_ finding ways to automate my home, or create solutions to problems that didn't exist, and using Home Assistant, but my experience has been anything but troublesome.
Granted HA started off pretty rough, and there are ways it does things I still don't think are as good as they could be, but it has come along an incredible amount and they're doing great things at HA/Nabu/Open Home Foundation.
It's surprisingly easy and flexible. One can just buy a Zigbee dongle for 20$, connect it to the machine running Home Assistant, and have sensors, light bulbs and such from many manufacturers working together via HA in no time. No need for smartphone apps, wifi or proprietary protocols that may stop working eventually.
Even 5$ sensors and bulbs from Aliexpress were pretty much plug and play experience.
I have nowhere near that many devices, but I have been adding them over the last decade. Everything in my house works as a dumb device as well -- push the switch, light turns on or turns off.
To me, though, the value is that I can turn those devices on / off from whatever logic I desire. On a lot of them I can gather power consumption which helps me to understand how much energy I use and where it goes.
Interesting - I suppose it depends on how you count things. I have more than 100 smart light switches in my house, so if you add in smart plugs, sensors, cameras, etc I certainly have more than 300 'smart devices'. That has no effect on if the house is somehow less or more horrid, at least from my, my wife, and my daughters point of view ( I asked them ). Perhaps all three of us are weird however. ;)
I'm the same, I want no smart devices in my house. Getting harder with most TVs and many appliances having "smart" features even on the base models, but I never set them up, never install their apps.
It partially comes down to what you buy. I've found that pre-flashed tasmota smartplugs are pretty bullet proof. They talk normal MQTT and wifi 2.4ghz.
If you're buying some random smart crap with integration on some sketchy app then yeah you'll have a bad time
That said, haven't scaled anywhere close to 100 devices
Yeah they’re fun tech demos, for the first couple of days. After that it gets really tiring, fast. Especially when connection “breaks” or an update comes along, you rip the “smart” part out and put that dumb switch back in.
I am surprised this is not the consensus. The hidden costs of maintenance of home automation often removes its practicality. My Roomba and home camera system can barely go a few months before causing me grief. User error sure, but it's not like I'm some fool who can't grasp basic setup instructions.
Founder of Home Assistant here. Let me know if anyone has any questions about the project or the Open Home Foundation (which now owns Home Assistant, ESPHome etc)
Hi Balloob, great project, thanks for all your work! I've been using it for over 10 years now.
I am wondering if you've ever considered a change to your release rules. Monthly releases are great, but having breaking changes in every release can get to be a bit of a burden. I think it would make end users lives easier if you were able to limit breaking changes to only once (or twice) per year.
I try to read the breaking changes list every time, but sometimes I don't mess with HA for a few months as it's all running smoothly. Then when I do log back in I have a large backlog of breaking changes to review. Usually at this point I just don't upgrade and the problem keeps getting worse. If instead I knew that certain upgrades do no include breaking changes I could more easily keep up to date, and only look more closely at the yearly (or bi-yearly) update that includes the breaking changes.
We've actively managing our backwards incompatible changes, but sometimes it's out of our control (ie an API change). For things we deprecate in Home Assistant, it is a minimum of 6 months period where we print warnings with alternatives. Integrations set up via the UI, will only change for improvement if we can ensure there is a migration path (sometimes requiring adding some extra info).
Some backwards incompatible changes like requiring a new Z-Wave JS version are also able to be managed automatically by Home Assistant. However, because of choice, there are many ways Home Assistant can be installed and we're not always responsible for the installation.
I believe that we can do better in knowing what integrations you use, and mapping that against the integrations that require changes.
First, thank you. Home Assistant is an outstanding example of having control of our electronics rather than giving money to data harvesting companies.
Second, I'm curious, how often do you guys have to deal with negative actions taken towards you by those same data harvesting giants? I'd imagine they aren't huge fans of this technology. Any Cease and Desist or other fun examples you guys have had to defend yourselves from?
We have very good relationships across the industry, especially the bigger companies. I literally just came back from a meeting with Google Home :)
Where we see the most pushback is from industries adjacent to the smart home, as they don't appreciate the openness. Think garage doors, cars, or cloud data providers for info that can be useful in the home.
When someone complains, like Mazda [1], we pull their integration and communicate their stance to our shared users, and people considering buying into their products. We don't fight for access, as a manufacturer with a cloud service will always be able to find a way. If it is a local device though, our community tends to find a way[2]
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/10/mazdas-dmca-takedown-ki... [2]: https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2023/11/06/removal-of-myq...
It’s interesting how some of these actions backfire. I will literally never purchase a chamberlain product ever again because of how overtly money-grabbing they are.
I suppose in some ways, it’s a good thing. It shows me what companies I should support, and which I shouldn’t.
> It shows me what companies I should support, and which I shouldn’t.
I used to think that way too. Now, I think that all it takes is one bad quarterly report leading to a new CEO, and even the most open of companies can instantly switch to being closed, lock off all their APIs, stop working with open source projects like HA.
I don't know any solution to this, and if I'm honest, being bitten a couple of times has stopped me from experimenting with anything like home automation that requires me to buy physical hardware.
I think a big part is buying things that work locally and don’t require a cloud connection at all.
If it requires a cloud to function, you’re at the mercy of a company changing attitudes. If it runs entirely locally, the company can’t get in the way even if they want to.
It’s one of the aspects I really like about matter (or any other device that operates on a purely local protocol). If Inovelli decides to take a turn, it just means I won’t buy any new products from them, but the switches I already put in my wall will continue to function the way they do today.
Don't buy things that need a cloud integration and it's not really a risk.
Even if you don't use Home Assistant, their site is really good for helping with this--every integration lists a "class" like "Local Polling" or "Cloud Push".
Another shortcut is picking up a Zwave/Zigbee dongle (~$30 when I got mine) and buying products that work with that. If the only radio in the device is one that can pair to a local controller, it's a relatively easy way to ensure it's meant to work locally without a cloud integration. (If Kwikset has a bad quarter I'll never know--my door lock only communicates as far as my utility room.)
Besides "the company can't screw me over", if everything is running locally it also immediately limits the privacy and security implications. And ensures your house doesn't break if the internet goes out.
Organizing devices and creating automations is still very tedious.
I'd love to be able to add a device and describe it (where it is, what it does, etc.) and have HA automatically integrate it with existing automations or fuse it with other sensors. Maybe leveraging LLMs for this.
e.g.:
I buy a new leak sensor and add it to HA. I should just tell HA it's a leak sensor and it's in my laundry room and have it create an automation to send alerts, etc. when there's a leak.
Or I add a temperature sensor in my living room and have it automatically be fused with other sensors to update my living room average temperate.
You're right. Home Assistant is the best toolbox out there, but people need to build things themselves. That's something we plan to tackle, but no timeline. Leak sensors, smoke detectors, CO2 sensors, garage door openers, they can all have benefit from some built-in automations to warn when a problem is detected.
Add to HA, and set 'area' or 'label' to the same as all your other leak sensors. Use the area or label in your automation.
I find HA joyously easy to use. I have my garage door, lights all around the house, thermostats, hot water recirculation system, doorbell, lutron blinds, and ceiling fans. The automations are easy to make, and have been getting easier over the last few years with HA improvements. (and same as others in this discussion, I use zigbee smart switches. The GE brand ones are great).
I don't think you can trigger by a label/area and also retrieve which device was the trigger (groups had that issue).
One trick: Add your automations.yml (and ideally, all HASS config/ymls) to a git repository, so you can track changes, organize and observe how automation changes behave.
What brand of smart lightbulbs do you use? Thanks for all your hard work!
Like the other commenter said, smart switches are the way to go. I prefer the Shelly modules behind light switches. They are tiny, affordable and their new generation does Zigbee/Wifi/Matter/Bluetooth, so always something that suits your installation.
Agree with your Shelly-behind-the-switch model. My one hesitation going all-in with them has been perhaps reaching an eventual state of "too much 2.4Ghz WiFi traffic on a narrow IoT-specific WiFi network", but I suppose that's easily solvable by buying another AP. Currently I'm happily running a few of them behind the wall plate in my switches (check the space in your switch box first!)...no issues after many many months of continuous operation. Didn't know about the new gen supporting Matter, that's great.
Also, I too wanted to extend to you a really big THANK YOU from a very happy member of the HASS community. I came over from OpenHAB a handful of years ago and I couldn't be happier. Please keep up the good work! Good luck with all the hardware sales and Nabu Casa stuff!
edit: clarified that I used to run OpenHAB
I'd just accept that 2.4GHz is forever tainted :)
In real terms though, it not that bad. I've got about 25 such devices always online and the traffic really is negligible. Most devices aren't sending anything while nothing is happening except for the periodic heartbeat like once a minute. Its not noticeable, even on my 20MHz wide network.
I have like 54 devices running on 3 unifi APs...it's unnoticeable (either that or my phone/laptop etc. are just using 5ghz and happy about it - either way).
there are LOTS of complaints about > 50 IoT wrecking their U7 series
i'm personally avoiding wifi devices now and holding out for matter/thread variants
I use smart lights with smart switches in detached mode and they are not resilient to ha going down. I wish I could get smart bulb functionality (dimming, color change) with smart switches being the physical driver of them being on/off.
I’ve got some inovelli white series switches that are on a circuit with Nanoleaf thread based lights.
I’ve managed to bind them using Matter bindings, so even if HA is offline, the switches can still on/off and dim the bulbs.
No UI supports this yet (though I think HA is working towards it), but the underlying protocol support exists, and products are starting to come to market that take advantage of it.
I think it 2-4 years, it’ll probably be ironed out and working well, but if you really want it, you can have that now with matter/thread.
I think Zigbee devices also have bindings, and those should probably be a lot more mature, but I haven’t played with those yet.
Not sure about color change, but dimming works fine - I have Shelly Dimmer2 modules behind switches, paired with "dumb" dimmable bulbs. Remotely controlled by HA / Adaptive Lighting, while also working with physical switch.
One solution to this if you're using Shellies to provide your "turn a dumb light switch into a smart light switch" is the scripting it has on offer.
I have 100% Zigbee lights, and each lighting circuit has a Shelly Plus 1 with the relay in "detached" mode (so the shelly will sense the light switch changing from open to closed and send a command to HA to turn on the lights via Zigbee). Most (all?) smart bulbs have a setting for "what do I do when power is restored" and you can set it so that they come on when power is restored.
You can then create a script that uses the MQTT HomeAssistant up/down topic and if HA is down, when the switch changes position operate the relay.
It's not perfect - if you have a powercut during the night all of your lights will come on when power is restored.
I totally missed Shelly becoming an HA Darling - I have an older home with some of the wiring not having a Neutral wire, so Lutron Casetta has been my only option and those No-neutral dimmers are extremely expensive.
Will look into Shelly
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Thanks for the reply. I saw on reddit there are a worrying amount of reports (and photos) of Shelley relays catching fire....!
Perhaps have a look! Thanks for all your work again, I love HA
Not the fella you asked but let me offer some wisdom: smart switches are a lot easier to live with than smart lights. If you also want color control, HA can do a decent job of making smart switches work well with smart lights.
The core problem with a smart light is that it very likely has a switch somewhere. If someone turns that switch off, that smart light just lost power and became dumb. Turning it back on now involves a trip to the switch.
A smart switch is smart so long as utility power is running and you never find yourself in a position where the managed device is in an unknown and/or uncontrollable state.
Even better, get smart switches that don't use wifi or IP addresses. I'm personally of opinion my homes core features should not rely on needing IP addresses, working DHCP or DNS etc just to turn a light bulb on and off.
Home assistant works amazingly well with zigbee devices, and these are plentiful and cheap etc, and don't rely on working wifi/IP infrastructure. When I sell up, my zigbee switches will work just fine as plain-ole light switches even with all my Home Assistant infra ripped out, leaving no issues for next buyer.
You can add zigbee support to pretty much any Home Assistant setup with a 20 buck USB adapter, Home Assistant even make an official one:
https://www.home-assistant.io/connectzbt1/
The also sell Home Assistant servers with zigbee radios built in:
https://www.home-assistant.io/yellow/
The light switches are often cheaper than wifi equivalents too. Wifi bulbs should really only be considered by renters IMO - people who can't easily replace wall switches or similar.
Except IP works far better than Zigbee's alleged mesh networking, and all the other home network technologies because somehow home automation is a special snowflake that can't use the same network technology everybody else uses.
There are a few reasons why Wi-Fi is not my first choice:
* I don't trust any company to use my Wi-Fi and not attempt to access the broader internet. A Zigbee or Z-Wave device isn't going to be able to stealthily update itself in anti-user ways, nor is it going to be hijacked into serving as part of a Bitcoin botnet.
* There are way too many devices, which can cause issues if they're all using Wi-Fi at the same time. Smart homes take a router that would normally be dealing with 2-4 phones and 2-4 laptops and add N bulbs, M switches, P contact sensors, Q motion sensors, and assorted random sensors. Not a chance am I hooking that much up to my Wi-Fi.
Z-Wave LR has worked very well for me—no mesh to worry about, just a controller and devices. The only downside is that it's not as broadly supported as zigbee or Wi-Fi.
Put your IoT on a separate wifi SSID and firewall it.
My devices can't reach the internet at all, but I have easy access to them the other way.
It's easier and has better guarantees to just... not have them on a Wi-Fi at all.
That's not an advantage of switches though. My smart bulbs are Zigbee, too.
The main drawback with keeping the switch "dumb" and only using smart bulbs is someone can turn off power to the bulb etc, which is why I and parent commenter focus on automating the switches. If someone turns wall switch off and its dumb, you can't turn the "smart" bulb on with home automation regardless of what tech is used inside it. Focusing on automating the switch generally has best returns on making most dependable system, as you will always be able to get the light back on. Again, I only recommend smart-bulb only if you are a renter or similar and can't mess with your switches.
Zigbee access to the bulb is great for stuff like changing whitebalance etc though. In my own home I have the bulbs and the switch on ZigBee so I can do this, but power on/off is solely preserve of the automated switch.
What zigbee switch do you recommend ? I was considering Sonoff zbmini.
I've had great results with the Aquara zigbee stuff - almost all of them work fine connecting to HomeAssistant via generic zigbee USB adapters, and can be found online pretty cheaply. I have >50 of their switches and sensors at the moment.
Aqara is a bit of a mixed bag. A lot of their switches are not Zigbee certified and don't conform to the standard. Specifically, they won't bind directly with devices from other manufacturers.
This might not matter if you're pushing everything through a hub like HA, but if you want to connect directly with other devices and remotes then it likely won't work.
My solution was to add Shelly relays behind all of my “dumb” switches. They keep power always on and essentially turn the switch into a smart button to dim or brighten my Lifx lights. This way I get circadian & party lighting while still maintaining the convenience of physical light switches!
And to parent question: Lifx still has the best color/brightness of any smart bulb and they’re IMO the best. Just make sure your WiFi can handle it.
The problem with smart switches is they require 3 wires: live, neutral and the switched wire to the light. Where I live most switches have only two: live and the switched wire to the light. The neutral goes directly to the light and doesn't pass through the switch. Because of this I have no way to power the smart switch module. Unless I want to rewire half the house :(
There are some smart switches that work without neutral. They trickle some power through the load. This only works with some loads. I have one fixture with small LEDs where one of them glows slightly.
Sonoff make modules that don’t need a neutral connection:
https://sonoff.tech/product-review/product-insight/zbmini-ex...
I assume they hack what little power they need from the AC wobble? How do they do that without triggering a current leakage cutout though? Perhaps they “charge” when current flows for the first time?
Athom make ESPhome smart switches with no neutral wire, they work great.
The way it works is you put a bypass capacitor to neutral in the light fixture, and then it lets the switch be powered - no flicker or low energy requirements needed.
Ah I see, does require to modify the light though. But it's interesting to look at, thanks. I don't use Homey though, I use Home Assistant. So I'm not sure if it works with that.
? They're ESPhome smart which is specifically Home Assistant? https://www.athom.tech/blank-1/no-neutral-wall-touch-switch-...
Ooh I see. Athom also has their own system called homey: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homey_(smart_hub)
They're not open source so I thought maybe their other stuff isn't either. I didn't even know they made switches in fact.
Several of my friends have the homey, they're very popular here because athom is a Dutch company and they market here a lot. But I prefer the openness of home assistant.
Edit: Aah I see the confusion. The athom that makes the esphome devices is a Chinese copycat company that has nothing to do with the real athom but is trying to get a free ride on their name.
They've just received an injunction banning their sales in the EU and have to take back all their products sold here. https://community.homey.app/t/athom-wins-lawsuit-against-chi...
I had never heard of the Chinese company before.
Returning current through ground is a bad idea in general. You should consider rewiring your house for the safety benefits rather than enabling some smart devices.
Putting significant return current through ground means anything in the environment can be part of the path of least resistance. You will see small voltages across your house depending on what loads are on and there will be load-dependent noise conducted and radiated everywhere. This also puts the system one open circuit away from making nearly every conductive part of your house a shock hazard (if the wrong place in the ground network goes open circuit).
What is done in modern times is to have the current return on a neutral wire then monitor the ground wire for current and open the circuit when current is flowing back through ground (a fault).
Huh? I never mentioned ground. I said neutral.
Returning current through ground is impossible in Europe anyway due to residual current breakers. More than 30mA and the whole system shuts down.
And none of the light switches have ground either by the way.
How does the current return? Do you have two phases running to every endpoint?
Try putting a 50 mA fault and see if the GFCI does anything. It won't if you don't have a second line for return current.
No, the current goes back through the neutral. This is the normal operating mode with single phase power.
This is different from ground. Neutral is the way the return is meant to go. Ground is a safety feature. Connected to the enclosure in some devices.
So sockets here have 3 wires: Live (Brown), Neutral (Blue) and Ground (Green with Yellow stripe). But the switches only have Live and the Switching wire (Black, the wire that goes to the light). The light then receives the switching wire and has Neutral. Because the power is consumed in the light and returns via neutral.
The switch doesn't need the neutral normally because it doesn't use any power. It just switches it on and off on the way to the light. But the wifi switchboxes do need it because they need to remain connected even when the switch is off.
Caseta dimmers don’t require a neutral wire.
Can you do that yourself or would you need an electrician to sign off? What about your landlord?
I agree in principle that this is much nicer in theory. Just like wired is more reliable than wireless. However, retrofitting all that is also much more difficult.
Depends on where you live. In most jurisdictions in the US it's generally OK for a homeowner to perform "like for like" replacement work on their own residence without a license or inspection. This means you can replace an existing light switch, or an outlet, or a breaker. You generally cannot run new wire or new outlets without a permit.
If you own a property but don't live there (eg, you're a landlord), it's essentially never legal. The best answer is to contact the local AHJ.
Disagreed. To get the best of both worlds I run smart switches that control the smart lights. E.g. install the Philips Hue Wall Switch Module (Zigbee) and make an automation in HomeAssistant to turn off the corresponding light(s).
Now you benefit from both, like being able to make the lights fade off/on.
Also, in case it doesn’t always respond instantly, you should be able to bind the Zigbee devices directly to each other so that it doesn’t need to travel to the Zigbee coordinator (or mesh?) first. Haven’t had the need for this myself though.
> Now you benefit from both, like being able to make the lights fade off/on.
Dimmable smart switch plus dimmable standard bulbs accomplish this. No color (though Phillips has a line that tints red when dimmed.)
Is there anything that does PWM data over powerline to control lights?
That seems like the best of all worlds.
Networked smart switch. Switch in absolute authority of light. Switch still able offer advanced light features (e.g. hue set).
Smart switches are a lot more annoying when renting, though. In addition, for us, all but the hallway bulbs make frequent use of color features, so I’d need both anyway.
Though I’ll admit, it might be worth the hassle if you have guests often or many people living at your place.
This is my next adventure because somewhere someone had left a light on! Those esp32 relays can fit right in a work box.
I have Lutron switches. What ceiling lights can I get that change color based on time of day?
If the lights have adjustable white balance, you almost always can sync light color temp to time of day with home assistant's flux:
https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/flux/
This works with almost any smart light you can get connected to HA (most smart lights have white balance adjust), it's brand agnostic etc. I have lights from several different vendors working together this way.
So I need some smart light that can be dimmed from power source. Which are those?
This is the way. Especially if other people live in your house.
Look at this stuff as "progressive enhancement". Make the simple things work, then build on top of that. Don't replace the simple things with complicated, elaborate things. You don't want to live without lights for a week because a SD card died in a Raspberry Pi somewhere or something.
The overly complicated setup I'm using to run my smart home automation stuff shit the bed and I was too busy with work to really spend the time fixing it so... I just didn't. For six months. The only major complaint I heard was that the outside lighting was no longer turning itself on and off with the sun.
Even in the worst case scenario, all of the lights still have switches that can be turned on and off as long as there's power. It's all zwave, and I've made use of the scenes / direct associations / etc such that most of the stuff people actually care about happens without being mediated by Home Assistant. Or requiring any sort of network. When I move out of this house, I could leave it all behind and it would keep working as-is without my server, access point, active internet connection, or anything else. If there's power, it works.
All my living room lights (three dimmers) are controlled by a single dimmer.
The three way switches in our bedroom are now dimmers. One controls the lights, the other acts as a remote control for it.
The pantry light turns itself off after 20 minutes because people always forget it on.
Both the kitchen light switches turn on and off with the single, easily accessible switch.
The switch for the porch lights also turns the string lights on the gazebo a hundred feet from the house on and off.
My kid's too small to reach the regular switches, so there's a battery-powered remote switch mounted on the wall at her height in her bedroom and the bathroom. Those still work and are still able to dim the lights in her room.
Etc, etc. All without anything but electricity.
I said only _major_ complaint--my kid definitely had some complaints. We have one switch that has a couple of those RGB projector bulbs hooked up to it. When you turn that on, an automation turns off all the rest of the lights and starts playing some dance music. Her party lights still turned on, but it no longer made the music start.
If you want colour control then get smart bulbs to go downstream of your smart switches. Set them to always go to "on" when power's restored, and build that _on top_ with your automation. You'll always have a working light, your automation can always turn them on even when someone's turned the switch off like a normal person would, but when everything else is working you'll _also_ get colour control.
Are there any plans to add automations based on People and Areas (not zones)? I found the cool project Bermuda[0] and it triggers person entered/left area events based on bluetooth devices. This works great in my testing with a phone being tracked by Shelly switches. But I can't seem to find a way to actually make these events do anything. It would be even better if I didn't have to set up area specific automations at all and just be able to say "turn on the lights in an area to 20% if someone enters it after sunset".
Thanks for all your great work!
[0] https://github.com/agittins/bermuda
Not from our side. You can see our roadmap here; https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2024/11/15/roadmap-2024h2...
Now the community should be able to create such things, as our automation engine is very powerful.
I think the challenge in general with room presence detection is that these systems are not very common/reliable yet for us to aim to standardize.
Check out espresense
The old automation in YAML is very cluncky as the author also mentioned. The new UI guided creation is not powerful and can become confusing for complex cases on the other side. I do all my automation with the node-red Integration. But the combination of the node-red flows with the Homeassistant dashboards is not very good. Do you plan to change the automation to something like node-red but better integrated? Or change the yaml to sonething less declarative and more code centric?
Just wanna say thanks for leading such a strong and comprehensive open source project. A lot of open source tools are wonderful in and of themselves (being that they are free) but might not always live up to expectations or offer a whole lot. With Home Assistant, I feel like it is the opposite and the capability/power of the tool (particularly out of the box) is really quite impressive. So keep it up and thank you again!
One question about remote access: Currently, it looks like there are 3 methods (https://www.home-assistant.io/docs/configuration/remote/):
- Home Assistant Cloud (paid) - VPN - Port forwarding
Is there any plan to make something like Home Assistant Cloud available for self hosting? Like a simple docker container to put on a VPS?
I don't want to deal with DynDNS to expose my home network but would prefer a Server component on a VPS with a static IP which connects to my home server and allows remote control.
Or is there already a way to do this?
Proxying home assistant is no different from any other http based service.
You set up a reverse proxy (including websocket proxying) for your HA subdomain on your VPS and you're done.
The problem is that my home server isn’t reachable from the internet, so there’s nothing for the proxy to forward. I would need to set up some kind of VPN for that, right? But this functionality already exists in HA, that’s why I asked.
Tailscale solves this, and a few other things. Amazing product with an amazing free tier for personal use. Super easy setup, too.
VPN is the right solution here. Each app shouldn’t have to develop its own remote access method when a generic solution already exists.
It would be an issue if you’re stuck behind double NAT, but I think tailscale can help with that.
Just put tailscale [1] on all of your devices and forget about the problem. It may be technically a vpn but it's much easier to use.
[1] https://tailscale.com/
You can install wireguard or tailscale from the addon store.
Just adding another voice for tailscale. It's an awesome product with a very generous free tier.
The biggest problem with Tailscale and/or WireGuard is that I can’t inform IOS to only connect to VPN when home assistant app is running or when notification comes in.
I have to run it on my phone all the time effectively routing all mobile traffic through my home VPN which is not ideal for bandwidth and battery life.
I end having to manually turn it off and on.
Instead I wish home assistant had a way to make mobile notification resources easily accessible without VPN - say behind a short lived access token so that I could quickly view the notification media without having to expose local HA install or having VPN always on
Tailscale doesn’t route all your traffic by default. It routes only traffic destined to Tailscale IPs, which in your case should be near zero.
You can use an exit node. In that case it will route all your traffic to your home network.
I run a very small vps running caddy and tailscale. Then just expose any service I need externally through that. Very easy to setup.
seems completely out of scope for HA? if you want to proxy it from the internet then you can just do that using any of the tools used for this - NGINX, wireguard, rathole, etc etc etc.
But this functionality already exists in HA. There’s a simple login page where I can connect to the HA cloud. The idea would be to start a docker container, set up a domain name where it’s reachable, enter the domain name on the HA cloud screen and connect to it. It would be much simpler than setting up everything yourself.
What would be the correct way to DIY it? You would need a VPN to connect you home network to the Proxy and then expose the web interface on the proxy, right?
There is a tailscale addon. Simple install it, then install on any device you want to connect, phone, etc. Could not be easier.
Cloudflare Tunnels is what you're looking for. Or ngrok maybe.
Whole bunch of alternatives too - https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling. I will advocate for zrok.io as I work on its parent project, OpenZiti. zrok is open source and has a free (more generous and capable) SaaS than ngrok.
set up wireguard at your home network and connect to it from the outside. you need a single port open for it
Author here. I just use Tailscale. I’ve documented my setup here: https://vpetersson.com/2022/12/23/securing-services-with-tai...
But tldr is that you don’t need any cloud VM or other service for remote access. Works great.
> Founder of Home Assistant here. Let me know if anyone has any questions about the project or the Open Home Foundation (which now owns Home Assistant, ESPHome etc)
Every time I visit the big box stores, I see Wi-Fi as the primary means of connecting to the smart home ecosystem. Do you see this trend changing in the future, why from the average consumer prospective? Especially with thread?
Hi @balloob. No question but I moved yesterday night from a Home Assistant Supervised on Raspi 3 to an HAOS on Raspi 4 + SSD and the migration had been flawless. Thank you very much to you, the team, and all the contributors for making such a great and fair piece of software and building such a great community.
@balloob -- author of post here. Would love to have you on my podcast to nerd out about Home Assistant (https://vpetersson.com/podcast/).
Not much a question, but a RANT. As an user I'm grateful for HA slick UI and functionality but while the best on the market is... A damn hell.
YAML instead of pure Python is a hell. Trying to push things to be configured via WebUI is a big discomfort because well... Generic users do like clicking around, but generic users will not use HA simply because it's not and will not be possible in future to create a no-code usable IoT. All low-code/no-code stuff COMPLICATE life instead of simplify. External deps like InfluxDB to just prune past data and keep them as I wish it not much nice, having a built-in option to state how to prune and for how long to keep each specific sensor or default policy would be very nice.
Essentially the RANT could be condensed in: please consider designing for people who know how to code, because they will anyway be the most common users. IoT OEMs will only be hostile for most because they still fails to understand how to makes business in an open world, so professional integrator will not much choose HA anyway since it's way too time consuming to really customize and keep it up. A pure code approach with NO energy wasted in config WebUIs/low code/no code on contrary could makes HA an interesting "base for system integrators" in a much broader sense. NanoKVM PCIe, JetKVM show the start of a feature-rich light-out management for anything, they will be the bridge between home IoT and classic homelabs/IT. HA could play a very nice role there, essentially offering a platform to bridge the not-really-IT-ready world of ModBUS and co appliances to the TCP-enabled and digitally controlled stuff. A future where small devices could be fitted in most appliances to "makes them smart" like being in the middle of a washing machine control panel connected to home p.v. system to start programmatically depending on available p.v., a connected oven pre-loaded with food the user start when he/she knows the time he/she will be at home.
This is a potentially nice niche market who could explode in the relatively near future. It's not possible as low code/no code/pre-packaged black box stuff. Being a component anyone could easily plug in a larger system is needed.
YAML might be ok if we limit HA to some smart bulb, just having a Victron battery inverter with some 40+ sensors demanding a significant load of YAML it's nightmarish. In python native it's HYPER quick.
It's a major pain to write YAML for Home Assistant. Some parts of Home Assistant lack complete examples which are up to date. The documentation doesn't include examples for every single thing. Part of writing some automations was just a lot of trial and error, looking things up on the Internet, validating the configuration, and restarting Home Assistant. It's just not a great experience.
Discovering what has to be selected to use as an action in the automation GUI is another nuisance. The most recent example is with a light I wanted to set to 20% brightness. I had no means to find something with the keyword "brightness" or anything similar. It turned out that this was exposed as turn light on.
Breaking changes are their own source of friction. My only advantage has been that many of my automations are now just GUI automations with some custom YAML where it can't be avoided.
All of these things are far beyond what a non-technical user could be able to do. It can be difficult even for someone who knows how to look things up, read documentation and update everything when breaking changes are made.
Home Assistant isn't the kind of tool one can put in someone else's hands to use it without additional maintenance or supervision. It's also not the tool to use in any commercial setting due to its countless problems.
Well... GUI automation is not automation. It can't be. Automation must be automateable, code is, since you can save in a text file, versioned etc. GUIs can't. Reproducing them means doing countless step every time, hard to document with screenshots etc instead of "here the snippet" and Python code is self-documented, so discovering how to do things is MUCH easier, YAML need to be read from source code, not just importing a module and run help(modname). That's why to me HA should be pure-python NOT "sold" as a pre-deployed blackbox but as a simple pip-able package. Anyone could easily integrate it in anything else, documenting could be just the code for most simple stuff or a wiki with shared personal configs. Those can be automated as well to test it's validity pinging the author when a snippet fails as well.
That's the power of automation, of code, of end-users programming. Harnessing it means reduce all efforts after the first implementation and speed up anything breaking changes as well.
Thanks. I understand where you're coming from now. Your requirement to use Python code for automation could be satisfied by an external component which uses the Home Assistant API or through some internal custom Python based component which runs your code for automation.
The current setup for automations isn't good for anyone - not for end users, not for developers. I've resorted to using the UI because it seemed to be less likely to break across releases.
Any plan to update the GUI for conditional logic inside of automations? It's really clumsy to do IF/THEN or switch style constructions. Too much visual space and clunky overall.
We are working on the automations UI as we speak!
(this can also be seen on our roadmap update https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2024/11/15/roadmap-2024h2... )
Just dumping an idea here:
In the past I've had issues with forgetting to add triggers for states that are used somewhere as a condition or switch. This leads to lost updates and frustation.
React state hooks, which I'm deeply familiar with, will result in a linter warning if any of their dependencies are missing. I'd really like something similar for automations.
Cool, thanks! Great work!
Have you tried using the NodeRed plugin? That’s worked really well for me
NodeRed is awesome. I didn't even bother with anything beyond very, very simple automations until I installed that.
For me the flow design feels very natural and is easy to modify and monitor. And it's pluggable with custom nodes so if functionality is missing you can add it in. Like I installed a node that handles OAuth2 so I can have it log into a web service and check a status page.
Why can’t I install and use it without internet access? The whole point of self hosting is privacy and control; this thing is neither.
You can use it without internet access?
I regularly test disconnecting my HA server from the network and make sure nothing home critical stops working.
I do have a few internet integrations (weather, upcoming sports events, etc) and those all stop when I do a “no internet” test, but Home Assistant runs just fine without any network access.
A fresh Home Assistant Operating System installation is useless without an Internet connection. It needs to download several gigabytes of Docker images for it to be usable.
It's very likely they'll take the infrastructure down if they sell their business or go out of business. Home Assistant OS will be completely useless in such a scenario.
The more likely scenario is that someone installs Home Assistant OS, sets it up with the current version and uses it as it is to avoid breaking changes. Their storage or the entire device breaks down. They'll want to install the same version to restore a backup. They'll learn the hard way that it's not possible to bring up what they had before.
Using the Docker image is the only choice which mitigates this risk.
The Home Assistant core container relies on resources hosted at https://brands.home-assistant.io. Those are cached in the browser for a while. Your mobile phone and web browsers still load the icons. They can do whatever they like with these bits of information. This includes selling allegedly anonymous Home Assistant usage data. The people who host their infrastructure can still do that without their knowledge since they claim it's a CDN.
The use of this CDN means that an existing Home Assistant core based setup can stop displaying some icons if those icons are removed. This can happen if someone decides to use a specific Home Assistant core version.
You can’t install it without internet, and tons of the web UI loads external resources.
I ran the UI and didn't load anything from external source.
The Internet should only needed to download the image. You could download and flash it manually. The setup shouldn't require the Internet. What needed the Internet?
As I've written in the other comment, the Home Assistant Operating System is useless without an Internet connection. It has to pull the Docker images since it doesn't have any version of the images at all.
Yes, there are resources loaded from the Internet. The map tiles are loaded from a third party in the initial setup and every time you view the map. Icons are loaded from https://brands.home-assistant.io/. https://github.com/home-assistant/frontend/issues/18549 is the issue.
This thing isn't as private and as local as it is claimed to be. It's very tied to services provided by Nabu Casa, including the very visible cloud integration of theirs. They've expanded it now to backups.
My internet was out today and I couldn't even log in to the local UI.
Do you think there is any hope of convincing Tuya to make their devices easily flashable?
They'd be the unquestioned king of the space if us local only people could reliably convert them to ESPhome, and they're the way a lot of brands end up making things "smart".
Tuya's entire business model is about getting their customers' data and getting them to pay for their services through vendor lock-in. They're not going to give up on all that juicy data collection and on the money they currently charge.
I just wish they had a proper local protocol that didn't involve some dev account thing that might or might not expire and need manual fussing...
Why is Home Assistant not provided by popular Linux distributions?
It has access to security cameras and having to trust a ton of code downloaded with Docker is a no go.
https://github.com/home-assistant/core/blob/dev/requirements... lists all the direct dependencies installed in the container.
It's enough for just a single direct or indirect dependency to be compromised to have a botnet or turn it into something used for surveillance against the users.
Preventing it from exfiltrating data by isolating it from the network with Internet access is the only option if you want to run it. This requires local only devices.
Accessing it through the web UI or through the mobile app will still load icons from https://brands.home-assistant.io. The details are in this ticket https://github.com/home-assistant/frontend/issues/18549
omg one THOUSAND dependencies.
Those are just the direct dependencies as far as I can tell.
The frontend has its own dependencies.
There’s an official docker image, which is what I’ve been using forever a long time.
According to the post HA uses sqlite for sensor data. Why not use a temporal database like InfluxDB, Prometheus, VictoriaMetrics etc?
+1 I also cteated homeassistant-addon-victorialogs[1] as well as homeassistant-addon-victoriametrics[2].
[1]: https://github.com/VictoriaMetrics-Community/homeassistant-a... [2]: https://github.com/VictoriaMetrics-Community/homeassistant-a...
Author here. You can use influx. That’s what I’m doing. It’s just that HA doesn’t use thet by default (which is sensible for most use cases tbh).
I've been using Home Assistant for about three years. I was very glad it exists. I wanted to make the most out of it. It has numerous problems and regressions are very frequent. The disappointment lies in it not being as it's described and in the fact that its development process doesn't appear to improve, nor does its overall quality appear to improve. It still gains new features in spite of all of these issues.
Home Assistant's dashboards and UI have regressions in every single release. Many such regressions aren't fixed quickly or remain that way permanently. Github issues get closed by the bot. New features ship in every release without fixing these bugs. This gave me the impression that the developers employed by Nabu Casa have very little time to focus on bugs and that there's no pre-release QA. The graphs and their history had plenty of bugs in the 2025.1 release. Are there plans to improve the development process to improve quality?
Home Assistant is described on its home page as "Open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first.". A Home Assistant OS download is useless offline and without the Nabu Casa infrastructure. A download of a Home Assistant OS image obtained today would be completely useless in 5 years for now. These are completely useless if Nabu Casa's infrastructure goes away for any reason. Do you have plans to address this?
Another point related to Home Assistant being local and making privacy a priority, Home Assistant downloads all icons from [1]. The GitHub issue [2] has been open for a while without any involvement from the developers. The Home Assistant container image doesn't include all the assets required for it to provide a Home Assistant deployment in a container. Is this something you plan to address or should it be handled in a fork of Home Assistant meant to be run completely locally?
Home Assistant bundles numerous dependencies [3]. The Home Assistant container bundles and has all of these available. Are there any plans to let users disable all cloud only integrations? What's done to assess the security of these numerous packages? This matters because people allow Home Assistant to access their indoor cameras, door locks and other potentially sensitive devices. Some malicious code run from one compromised dependency's __init__.py could have serious consequences.
Home Assistant is a Python monolith. Adding something as simple as a shell command to my configuration requires a restart of Home Assistant. Are there any plans to split this up or to improve the architecture to not have such issues anymore?
The energy dashboard is extremely limited. Are there plans to make this more flexible?
Why are you forcing people to use encryption since 2025.1? I was including these backups in my encrypted backups anyway.
The voice functionality for Home Assistant and voice PE require a cloud service or a local machine with a GPU for good performance. Are there any plans to address this to provide higher performance local voice control? The old Rhasspy (the version released before Nabu Casa hired its developer) seemed to work a lot better with defined sentences and was faster.
I've seen Home Assistant become faster over the last three years. My YAML had to be updated a few times. New features have been introduced to the dashboards. Old issues and limitations are still there. The dashboards gain new features while the number of bugs and regressions also increases. The custom resources for custom cards don't always load in the mobile app. The UI still loads all the icons from the Nabu Casa icons site [1]. Home Assistant frequently stops updating my location (home vs away) and requires deletion of the device from HA to get it to work again. Entities don't update in the dashboard sometimes.
Home Assistant is described as being an open source project which has been donated or moved to the Open Home Foundation. Why does it still require a CLA to be signed, just like corporate open source projects?
Setting up Home Assistant for someone who's non-technical is a terrible idea. This is an even bigger issue if they want it set up and left alone without updates/maintenance. The mobile app would probably stop working properly with this installation or they'd break it at some point by installing updates.
I'll wait for a bit longer while I prepare to migrate away from Home Assistant and Home Assistant OS. I'm considering a setup which uses Home Assistant core to trigger automations and to display a dashboard. All the automations and device integrations would be done with other tools. This would reduce exposure to Home Assistant's regressions and avoid Home Assistant OS's limitations.
[1] the Nabu Casa run icons site - https://brands.home-assistant.io
[2] https://github.com/home-assistant/frontend/issues/18549
[3] Home Assistant Python requirements https://github.com/home-assistant/core/blob/dev/requirements...
I’ve been using HA for 10 years and I share almost all of your concerns.
Particularly annoying is automated issue closure on GitHub. Imagine spending your free time debugging an issue and describing it meticulously only to see it ignored and closed a few months down the line. I can’t but think about all the burned users who’d inevitably stop reporting anything at all. How does that affect project’s quality?
How do you like the Discord based forums? Having knowledge buried in a proprietary closed source platform hosted by a third party is another problem. They can wipe out countless posts and exchanges through a simple terms of service update to delete older data.
The automated issue closure and ignored issues are pretty much the last straw for me. I appreciate the work done. I can't help but see that this how things are going to be forever without any significant change. The only option is to migrate away from Home Assistant.
> What's done to assess the security of these numerous packages?
Nada.
Putting things under the Open Home Foundation seems like interesting choice. Can you speak more on that and about the foundation generally?
Our launch post covers a lot of the original intentions and a good starting point: https://www.openhomefoundation.org/blog/announcing-the-open-...
The way the world works, you need to be either a company or a non-profit to be able to partner with the industry. Just being an open source project is not enough.
Since the launch of the foundation, we see a large uptick in companies and universities reaching out to partner with Home Assistant. A lot of manufacturers are very happy to see that an independent platform is being established as alternative to the big tech platforms. Universities want to collaborate on energy and privacy research for the smart home. We've also seen some industry donations (ie DuckDuckGo) to support our work.
What's the HA community's attitude towards FOSS nowadays? Comparing to 3.5 years ago?[1]
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27505277
FWIW frenk clarified that their issues was not licensing, but support.
> For me, this was not about licensing specifically. However, that point unfortunately is missed and got lost. Which is unfortunate. A lot blew up on the route, which just sucks for both parties.
> In the end, I think the way this project distributes Home Assistant (and its integrations, including Ambee) is not providing the intended working and thus may surprise the end user. In the end, those users are likely to knock on the doors of the Home Assistant project and their integration maintainers, not this project. As a matter of fact, most of my packages in this project are outdated and don't match the distributed version of Home Assistant.
That's why I asked about attitude, not anything else. It's perfectly fine to decide to not to support someone, but...
"I release my code under FOSS license, but if anyone distribute it in a way I consider not nice, I will re-license it just to screw them over." [1]
When I was considering using HA and was casually browsing community discussions, there were many posts gave me similar feeling like above case. There were other technical reasons that I decided to not to use HA, but this certainly left a really bad taste in my mouth.
1. https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/126326#issuecomment-86...
Wow, one active contributor is now "the community"?
This isn't some regular contributor. They appear to be one of the most important Home Assistant maintainers and a Nabu casa employee. This contributor is also the author of many release note blog posts such as this one https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2025/01/03/release-20251/
Home Assistant may be developed with financing from Nabu Casa. Nabu Casa receives money from partners, from people who buy their products and from those who pay for their cloud subscription. They also rely heavily on countless other Python packages developed and maintained by people they don't pay. Other people make significant contributions to Home Assistant and to its web UI.
I'd expect them to run this project as an open source project and handle such situations with a bit more grace, even more so for someone with such a high profile such as frenck.
They'd have the right to get angry if someone distributed a paid product which didn't include FOSS code from third party contributors or FOSS dependencies. This isn't the case. They use a lot of FOSS code from countless people already for the Home Assistant core, for the frontend and for the Home Assistant OS.
All of the time spent dealing with such needless drama could be better spent living one's life and doing something more meaningful for everyone.
I only linked to the HN thread, but there you can find links to discussions in HA community, for example: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/consider-to-avoid-addi... , which includes responses from forum admins and founders.
I’ve read that whole thing back when it happened.
much respect to you for driving this, but home assistant was unusable to me fyi https://github.com/swyxio/swyxdotio/issues/525
this is my friciton log. i am left with a $60 brick. hope your folks can use this to improve the experience.
Home Assistant and the Home Assistant Operating System have a log of bugs, regressions, shortcomings and usability problems. They have far too many problems for me to even track them or write all of them down. That's not related to your experience. There are other issues which stand out based on what you've written.
The so called issues you've encountered appear to be due to insufficient knowledge and experience. It might be a good idea to learn more to better understand what's going on. What you've done is similar to complaining about being last in a swimming competition without learning how to swim properly first and without proper practice for several years.
im perfectly fine with that, and am not asking for a refund or anything. i am merely pointing out that as a fellow startup person in tech this kind of friction log is typically what you want to improve the experience, so that in 3-5 years you are not blaming your user for their skill issue when really its always possible to improve the experience. this is what i did for a living. this comes from empathy.
seems your issues started from the beginning. you bought a HA voice believing it was a home assistant server.
it says right on their sales page it is a "voice assistant" and that it is "built for home assistant". [1]
then you didnt want to buy the HA green that is a home assistant appliance with HAOS already setup for people who don't want to diy it (like you didnt).
next you downloaded a .vdi and didnt research what it is or how to install it.
then you complain about docker images, although it is absolutely possible to run in docker as long as you understand the limitations [2]. did you even read this?
> hmm. new macs dont have apt-get anymore.
they never did. why dont you read whats in all of your screenshots? it says right above "if your OS don't have that, look for alternatives".
> Installing Virtualbox and double clicking the .vdi file i downloaded from earlier gives.... nothing
well, what do you expect? it's a disk image, not a executable. again, the installation instructions for macOS can help you here, you should read it [3]
> anyway, it looks like the default vdi ships with some well known bugs but ALSO its now just straight up missing the \EFI\BOOT\BOOTx64.efi file it expects to load. I found one you can download here and learned that you can import them into the vm via shared folders.
you found a post from 2021, it is not relevant today. then you started replacing files... oh man!
your actual issue is that you didn't configure the vm like the installation guide showed you.
next you got it running in docker. advice to you: don't. you will not be able to use addons and thus no hacs.
> of course it just expects the networking to work when of course it wont fucking work
> i tried ngrok to setup a tunnel but it just resulted in a bunch of bad 400 bad request errors
you must learn how docker networks work to progress here. docker only listen locally by default and you need to instruct it otherwise if that's what you want.
TLDR: you should have just started by reading the installation instructions, it explains to you:
> Home Assistant offers four different installation methods. We recommend using Home Assistant Operating System.
then you should follow the recommendation and be done long ago.
you seem frustrated and not keen on reading or learning.
not sure who you expect to take action based on that rant.
1: https://www.home-assistant.io/voice-pe/
2: https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/#advanced-install...
3: https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/macos
yeah, for someone who wrote a book called "The Coding Career Handbook"[0], not being able to actually read the instructions, getting mad about it, and then posting a rant called "Home Assistant Voice Preview is an unusable mess"[1] is not a good look.
[0]: https://learninpublic.org/
[1]: https://github.com/swyxio/swyxdotio/issues/525
I've built a KNX house about 10 years ago and I'm still quite happy. Let me share some experience:
Having the light switch on the smartphone does not make it any smarter, just more complex.
The following automations are the most valuable for me:
- automatic blinds. Go down when too much sun hits the facade, go down when dark outside, go up with too much wind. No concern leaving for work, and coming back to an overheated living room (no AC needed). But still automatically collect the direct sun in winter/spring.
- motion sensors, turn on lights when dark and motion in the room, every room
- night mode - low level motion-activated light in all bedrooms, corridor and bathroom. No automatic lights in bedroom, orientation lights on, night light sockets on, blinds down
This brought me to rarely touching a button/switch, twice a day, maybe?
And then there is toys
- blinds can fully close when room is empty, but go to half tilted with presence, angles following the sun, for maximum natural light without direct sun
- TV lowers the blinds behind that would give a reflection
- opening the terrace door opens the blinds and turns off indoor lights, to not attract mosquitos (idk if that even helps)
- shower motion sensor turns ventilation on high
- some sockets go on/off for Christmas lights
- logging of appliances, water, ventilation, heating.
I like that the low level stuff in KNX does not need/have a central hub. But the higher level requires extra smarts. I plan to migrate those to Home Assistant this year.
Do the motion sensors add value when compared to independent motion sensors or humidity sensors?
My sense is that with independent dumb motion sensors you achieve much of a smart house with less cost, wifi dependency.
mosquitos are indeed not attracted by light (other insects are). I believe they are attracted by CO2 (breath) blood and sweat.
Oh man. I love Home Assistant. But I think of it as a really fun hobby. Maintaining, getting dashboards working, integrating with wireless local network standards… It ends up very technical, very quickly, as Mr. Petersson so ably demonstrates. That said, using it has put me hard on the side of preferring home devices with open management platforms. I keep feeling there’s a chance my smart home could stay off the cloud and have good automation if only I buy the right nerd tech..
I have been using Home Assistant since before "Lovelace" UI was available. It has come a long way but there's still an ongoing maintenance demand. It's less than it used to be... but it's still not zero.
> That said, using it has put me hard on the side of preferring home devices with open management platforms.
I feel like this is the true purpose of HA and the ecosystem around it. Similar to how matter is forcing IPv6 adoption on micro-controllers, really.
Every holiday season, I go looking for a bunch of cheap stuff on Ali express to tear down. Every year there's new LED light controllers and 2024 was the first year where the manufacturers were almost _bragging_ about how they label the GPIO pins and expose the programming interface so you can throw your own firmware on there if you want. Seriously, never before have I seen these controllers BRAG about how they support WLED natively. The FOSS / DIY / I'm not using _your_ cloud, I have one at home, already movement is ... actually being catered to!? That's _new_.
"Offline" has been my number one rule for home automation since I started using HA about a decade ago.
I have a couple of hundred devices connected to it now, and the _only_ cloud integration I use is Spotify, for obvious reasons; I have been careful when buying smart things that they're completely offline, and anything I buy that _is_ smart but isn't offline-only gets hobbled into a "dumb" appliance; e.g. my new dishwasher has "smart" stuff, if I connect it to Wi-Fi, I found the maintenance menu and disabled the network interface entirely and it's just a regular dishwasher now, which is how I like it.
I try to avoid all smart devices, but I moved into a house that already had "smart" garage door openers installed, so I thought I'd try the smartness. It is indeed ridiculous in that it requires an Internet connection to work. Here I am, with a remote control device (my phone) that is on my LAN and a garage door opener that is on my LAN, but I need to do a round trip to the Internet to communicate with it? What idiot designs these things?
There has been some uproar lately about a particular manufacturer shutting down access to the API used for their garage door openers to HA, I forget the name but there was a Q in it I believe.
The solution, as I understand it, is a little device which talks the protocol of the door opener that gives you fully local access the way it should be.
I'll try and dig out the link now in case it's of use to you.
EDIT: Here you go https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2023/11/06/removal-of-myq... Hopefully that can point you towards a solution for your opener (and the state of affairs).
And the fix for this is ratgdo[1].
I got one for my decade-old not-smart opener around the time the manufacturer was shutting down API access for their fancy new smart models. Works like a dream. Why would anyone want to spend $$$ buying a fancy new cloud-smart appliance when a simple little chip can make the old one local-smart?
[1] https://ratcloud.llc/
Thanks for providing the name/link for everyone, I remembered it had "rat" in it, but couldn't quite recall what it was.
Yea, that's the kind I've got. I solved the problem by simply not using or caring about the "smart" feature, since it's pretty pointless. Why would I even need to open or close my garage with an "app" when the button is right there by the door?
I don't have a garage door opener myself, but from what I've gleaned from US YouTubers is that they like to know the _state_ of the door, open/closed which is handy if you use home automation.
I imagine if you're driving into the garage from outside you have a physical button in the car with you to open it, and if you don't run home automation, the "automation" part is likely not very useful.
I like knowing if the door is opened or closed from remote. Kids sometimes forget to close the door, and it's reversed direction before because the tracks needed lubricated and it raised the door again after I had pressed the button.
You could open your garage when coming home by pressing a button on your phone.
Mine shows up on car play on my dashboard when I get near home.
Look at it from the vendor’s perspective. Most people still want to be able to access and control their home from outside their home network, which generally means going through a hosted server, so why go to the extra trouble of implementing a separate method for local LAN only when you could just use the same central server? It’s almost always the case that the local LAN can access the internet, so there’s not much incentive to make it more efficient.
Yes, ideally the local user should just hit the local hub directly, but it’s double the development effort for negligible benefit.
> It’s almost always the case that the local LAN can access the internet
Said vendors and I have a disagreement about what constitutes acceptable failure modes...
I agree there isn't much incentive, and this is where standardised local protocols like ZigBee, Z-Wave etc come in; I can buy the hardware I want and run it how I want and those who want simplicity can buy a local hub, which can cover the cost of the hosted servers I have no interest in.
Failing that, I'd settle for manufacturers adding an option in their app of wherever suitable, that will let me change the server URL and leave me to it, I'll reverse engineer then protocol, or if they're feeling generous they can open source or provide an API doc.
Unfortunately, my experience reverse engineering lots of devices over the years is that they're often sharing more than they should, and subsidising the devices they sell you with your data.
There is also an overwhelming number of hardware manufacturers who just have piss poor software with atrocious security who should probably be embarrassed to release their code.
We already know what it's like in home WiFi router world.
> What idiot designs these things?
This is carefully planned.
I worked around this by exposing most HA entities to HomeKit using the built-in HomeKit bridge.
That way you get all the "this is just integrated with Siri and it's easy for non technical people to control" as well as much more powerful automations.
For example, my home presence detection is actually powered by HomeKit automations which flip binary sensors I've exposed from HA.
For me the number one priority is to make the "smartness" additional, and not change how I interact with my home in general. This is mostly to satisfy the SO-acceptance factor and also not to confuse visitors, especially elderly like my parents.
In particular:
1) there are light switches that work as expected
2) you can adjust the temp on the TRVs
3) if the HA instance blows up, shit should still work
What this means in practice:
1) I have motion sensors in some rooms that might turn on the main lights or some smaller lamp in a corner if it's past midnight (eg in kitchen), but the light switch will always turn on/off the main lights. If no motion is detected for X minutes all lights turn off.
2) if my mom comes to visit and feels cold in the evening, she can just turn a dial like she did her entire life. No app, no touch buttons on the TRV, no "hey Google... Or was it sori? Siri? Son, help me out!" The smartness lies in having a general schedule, and then again motion detectors that reset the TRVs back to that schedule if they were adjusted manually and no motion was detected for 15 minutes.
3) This means I don't have smart bulbs, but relays in the light switches that do not run in detached mode. For TRVs this obviously works since they have dials.
Personally I consider the fact that my DIY thermostat has no buttons to change the temperature a feature, but lots of people have varying feelings on who's allowed to be adjusting the thermostat and it's good to have options :)
It doesn't help that half of the population seemingly doesn't understand how to use a thermostat. More than one person in my family treats it like an on-off switch. When they feel hot, they turn it down to the lowest temperature, and when they feel cold, they turn it up to the hottest temperature, and basically repeat this all day. No amount of explanation helps, about how you're just supposed to pick a comfortable temperature and it will maintain it.
One of the nice things you can actually solve with a thermostat on your LAN! I have a button for "Just run the heat/ac for 30 minutes because I'm hot/cold in the moment", without changing the actual set point.
Isn't the problem that "comfortable temperature" is personal and circumstantial?
Set it few degrees lower than average preference. Put on socks or hoodie when cold, take them off when hot. Instant regulation, efficient energy usage.
Generally the problem in this situation is that the person wants a different temperature now, and they think that setting a higher number will make it get there faster.
It can make it get there faster depending on how many stages of heating/cooling you have.
Problem we have at work is people that are cold temporarily adjusting the heating setpoint too high (above the cooling setpoint), now when it goes back to normal operation after the override expires, the temp of the space is above the cooling setpoint, so the cooling turns on. And now people are wondering why it's in cooling in the winter.
But I agree that's not the desired operation.
Perhaps we humans are not seeking corporeal warmth but spiritual warmth through a dialogue with the machine.
Sure, but then you should still try to set you current (estimated) comfortable temperature as the target. If it's 23°C and you feel warm, you should set it to 20°C for example and not do 0°C just to get the heating to turn off.
You're assuming that they all work the same. I've been living in an apartment for the last 15 years where it is indeed mostly on/off. 0-2 = nothing, 3 = in some rooms the radiator will be warm to the touch but not radiate, 4-5 = warm.
It's not the end of the world, we generally have them off until we need to turn them on, and then it's not too warm, and after the winter they're off again for 9 months.
Un-wire it and hide a second actual thermostat, then they can change it all they like since they'll never be content anyway
At least in the guest room I think you might want that, people have widely varying preferences for sleep temp, but I feel similar about the other rooms. This is why the "reset on no motion" was important to me, so my mom won't turn up the heat in the living room at 10pm and then the next morning I discover my living room has turned into a sauna. ;)
I might have to add that our house is really old and has shitty insulation, so having a schedule that lowers the temp at night or when at work is also important. Keeping the temp up at acceptable levels 24/7 would be rather expensive. So when you unexpectedly are at home during those down times it's nice to be able to adjust directly at the TRV. I'm still thinking about whether I want to automate this more via motion, but since heating is not instant like turning on or off lights, you don't want to toggle the trv all the time as you enter or leave rooms...
An ultra-smart thermostat could have buttons and temperature display but have a setting so it doesn't actually do anything. So people can feel like they are doing something and feel good, while still not messing up anything.
Haha, good idea for my next revision
> This means I don't have smart bulbs, but relays in the light switches
In my experience, many good smart bulbs have the option to act like dumb bulbs on regular light switches. Some just return to the state they were last in when power returns, others to a "default boring light". It's one of the things that keeps me buying the more expensive smart bulbs because they are easier to configure between such options (and the third option: stay off when power returns; avoid the "bright flash wakeup" in overnight power outages in bedroom lights, for instance).
You can also emulate that somewhat easily enough in software, even if the bulb doesn't support it right, if your hub notices a light disappeared from the network and then came back, it can default the light to some useful state.
The trouble with the bulbs is that if you turn off the switch, now your automations can't control the bulb.
I've got one bulb that occasionally loses connection. Then I have to turn it off on the switch, and the next time I go to turn it on with the automation I've got to turn the switch on again and let it connect first. This is not a seamless system.
I got around this by replacing my light switches with a mixture of toggle switches (ones that spring back when pressed) combined with Zigbee relays that support them, and smart switches that can be set to coupled or uncoupled.
My home office for example I set the Aqara switch to uncoupled and toggling it switches on/off the desk lamp, ceiling, bookshelf LEDs, Uplight and wall-strips behind my SKADIS, all of which are smart lights. Since it's _my_ home office, if HA is down and I can't toggle any of them using that switch, I'm probably not worried.
Areas of the house which are used by the rest of the family, have the spring-toggle switches and operate non-smart bulbs so they will function just like a normal switch/light if HA happened to be down and I'm not home to fix it.
Definitely an experience that varies with model of bulb and type of network/hub. As I mentioned, I know I bought into one of the more expensive sorts for reasons like knowing that automation starts working again just about as soon as the dumb switch is flipped back on, between a tiny bit of "memory" in the bulb firmware and a reasonably reliable/quick reconnection.
It's not always a seamless system, and it varies so much in actual practice on hardware. I definitely understand why so many prefer smart switches over smart bulbs.
I also know that the silly things I want to do with colors across a day/week push me to wanting fun smart bulbs more than smart switches.
The one thing I really want is covers for some of my dumb switches, and I've seen them for cheap on places like Amazon, but haven't actually bought any or installed them, because I'm also in a situation where I don't really need SO/friend/guest buy-in/confusion-saving having people over so rarely in the last few years.
I have Inovelli switches that have a "smart bulb" mode that lets them send commands instead of physically switching the build. I use that to make my smart bulbs respond like dumb ones to a switch, but means I also make them do smart things based on holding the switch down, double tapping, etc.
TRV = Thermostatic Radiator Valve
(I had to look that up)
I’m moving away from this level of automation in my home. At the most, I’m thinking of a smart panel that can turn on/off/dim simple, non-smart LED bulbs throughout the main living area, and that’s it.
Right now I have expensive (at the time) GU10 LIFX bulbs you can no longer get. They’re not operating on and off at the wall, because my wifi settings changed and I couldn’t be arsed having to reconfigure 14 bulbs by manually resetting them, unscrewing them, and then slowly and painfully register g them on the wifi. I’ve probably created a lot of my own pain here because I could have used a dedicated SSID for that infra that never changes… oh well.
Also, in the time the smart bulbs have become idiot bulbs, I’ve never needed to really dim them, change their colour, or do anything smart.
I sort of feel like the idea is a good one but really it’s overthinking a really simple idea: turning a light on.
I don’t know. Maybe I’m under thinking this? Would love some thoughts.
Most smart home tech is sold because it sounds or looks cool, not because it is actually helpful. For instance, smart bulbs are dumb because they break the most obvious correct control in your house: The light switch. Smart switches are a lot better of an idea, and they recognize the reality that most of the time the best time to turn on the light is by touching the switch when entering a room.
Monitoring can be really useful and some subtle scheduled controls can be a nice touch, but people go very dumb and very overboard.
> Smart switches are a lot better of an idea, and they recognize the reality that most of the time the best time to turn on the light is by touching the switch when entering a room.
i went with precense sensors instead, stuff light up as i move across the house, and will be removing the switches.
You know what I really hate when I am up at 3 AM trying to move about the house without being blinded? Probably your lights.
That’s why the lights go on at the dimmest setting at night. Or not at all.
It’s literally one extra if clause in the logic
And then when I need it brighter? Or if I don't want the lights on at all?
Sure, you can manage an increasingly programmed logic path for every conceivable option, but it's way easier to just hit the light switch.
There’s a point where you're spending a multiple of the cost on equipment and a huge amount of time, to save you a net amount of... zero effort. It becomes a waste.
> but it's way easier to just hit the light switch
> to save you a net amount of... zero effort
This is just not true. I have 7 lights in the room I'm in right now, and I want them to all turn on and off together. This was a huge pain before I had smart lights.
then you change brightness or on/off using the homekit integration. its literally on my lockscreen
use adaptive lightning
why not leave the switches for emergencies?
Smart switches (at least for lights) seem to me like a solution in search of a problem. Why would I ever need to turn on lights when I'm not there? If I am there, what's wrong with just using the switch?
I am using HA for something else. I'm building some ESP32 based "smart" thermostats to collect temperature and humidity data as well as exert some control over my minisplits. The only viable interface is IR so that's taking a little work to place a transmitter and receiver appropriately s.t. my wall mounted device meshes well with the existing remote control. The end goal is to integrate with the hydronic backup to create a hybrid heat system.
It's frustrating I have to build all this myself. This shit should all just work that way out of the box, without the "GE Cloud" or whatever. But I'm glad it's made relatively easy by tools like HA and microcontroller dev boards.
> Why would I ever need to turn on lights when I'm not there?
The use case I have is to turn off lights when I'm not there. My wife frequently leaves lights on when exiting a room, so it is often useful to turn the lights off remotely. Voice control is nice too, for the situations when my hands are full and I can't hit a switch.
So smart switches are solving two problems instead of one problem: When you want to automate it, you can. When you just need it to work conventionally as a light switch without breaking your automation, it also does that. They are the no-compromise solution.
I guess that's the thing: I can't imagine wanting to automate a light switch. There are plenty of practical things to automate. For example, window shades for passive solar heating (or the prevention thereof), hvac, hell I think it would be awesome to have a temperature sensor in my utility room and machinery to "scram the reactor" (shut off the well pump and drain all the water pipes) if the temperature drops below 34°F. But light switches?
Sibling comments suggest automatically turning on/off lights if someone is expected to arrive or depart, but wouldn't that person just think "weird, they left the lights on"?
Actually, I’d have them come on to at the same time the cleaner is due. Or the dog walker. I DO intend on a smart lock for the front door.
I'm currently building a local LLM (multiple threads - one for each sensor suite) sensor array for more proactive needs. I don't want it else conditions, and I don't want to turn lights on when I do x or y. The sensors are cheap and plenty on AliExpress and all it takes is an esp32-s3 or similar.
A smart home should predict my needs dynamically rather than do stuff based on predefined conditions and is more than just "turn living room red."
> I could have used a dedicated SSID for that infra
Just move the phones and laptops onto a fresh 5ghz ssid
Then the old 2.4ghz becomes the iot one
The main use I see for smart bulbs is to put wall-switch lamps on timers. Then again, that could be done with a smart dimmer instead.
Too bad so many of these "smart" devices insist you talk with a server in China (or anywhere other than your own LAN!) to turn on the lights.
"This was before Home Assistant offered their own hardware... Home Assistant uses SQLite, and when you have a ton of sensor data flowing in, SQLite can start choking."
Their $99 hardware works great. Some devices are chatty but it's two lines in the startup config to filter the bulk of it, with no useful functionality lost.
If the data being generated by your living room is overwhelming SQLite on an eMMC, wow.
Home Assistant is one of the few recent products to delight me during setup. The sheer number of weird things it found on my network was impressive. The number of them that are dropping off as various cloud vendors try to lock things down, even more so. It has definitely motivated my future purchase choices and pushed me to simplify.
I had problems in the past with the sqlite database getting corrupted on shutdown. I moved it to a postgresql database on the same VM and it's been fine since.
Yeah, past experience with RPi/SD cards certainly gave me pause. No problems yet, knock wood. $99 well spent. Didn't see anything widespread in the forums and they made online backup a priority in the latest version. I like these folks, their priorities, and the community they built.
Interesting that Google Nest and Tesla are pissing everyone off at the moment. The forum is a leading indicator of brands to avoid.
Pi SD cards seem to be extremely reliable, I have not had issues with Amazon SanDisks. Especially not if you get a bigger one than you need to spread wear more.
I've probably spammed this comment an obnoxious number of times already, but I think a lot of the problem is that IIRC HA still writes logs as they happen. Filesystems don't like small frequent writes, it makes write amplification happen.
I handle logging by buffering everything in RAM, and optionally only saving min/max/avg data, on top of only logging points that are specifically configured.
I have a script to set up /var/log as a ramdisk, along with a few other things things I've found can occasionally go wrong and write a bunch of stuff.
But I don't use HA, or have any idea how hard it would be to do this kind of thing in HA.
Yet every single time I see HA in relation to a raspberry pi, the number one complaint is it destroying SD cards.
Yes, that has been my experience with RPi in general. But there's a lotta Pis and lotta Linux versions and a lotta SD cards and a lotta hobbyists out there. Using the $99 Home Assistant Green with eMMC soldered to the board was a leap. So far no problems, nor much griping in the forums.
Does SQLite really start choking? I feel like the issue is on configuration/ code side rather than on the database itself. It should handle thousands of writes per second, even on older Raspberry.
For this use-case, you can even likely implement own writer queue for every sensor type, and then batch insert them.
I would like further detail about this also. I suspect that SQLite wasn't choking and it was something else. I cannot imagine a single home being able to overwhelm SQLite [0]. Unless the OP has a couple thousand devices all looking to write to it at the same time and they cannot queue and take turns.
[0] https://sqlite.org/whentouse.html
Author here. The problem with SQLite is when you start having a lot of sensors. That's when SQLite failed to keep up on a Pi. Mind you, this was back on Pi 3s. It might be better today, and I know there has been performance improvements to SQLite, but for me moving to Influx for time series and MySQL for the database solved things.
Also, even on the best SD cards, you will eventually break them if you write this much.
Came here to question this too. I have trouble with this claim because I do not see how a bunch of sensors could produce so much data as to overwhelm a Raspberry Pi...
Maybe the problem was having the database on a super-slow micro-SD card?
Low power sensors are only being polled every few minutes anyway. I have a dozen temp/humidity sensors and several dozen lights etc and my HA on a Pi 4 has no lag issues from it.
Yeah the microSD will die eventually even if it’s a high endurance one - but it’s fine for a small installation, I’ve been running a quality one until I really started building out the sensor network. With just switches it was fine. Now running on a mid tier usb3 ssd.
Like many other commenters here say, however nice and increasingly better Home Assistant is, in effect you will manage 10, 20, 50+ devices that may receive updates, live in your network - whether wifi or zigbee, all have their issues - interfere with each other or just plain break.
I love the possibilities, it's often calming and nice to show off, but like with all things personal infrastructure, I have an increasing nausea and regret, along with the sunken cost fallacy.
Been running HA for a year or so and been rock solid. If anything, it's a buggy device that adds extra effort.
I suspect that what's actually needed is containerized integrations, if we can't get a real standard protocol that everyone uses(Is Matter going to take over?).
WebAssembly seems like it could be a reasonable possibility for making plugins that don't need constant maintenance.
Eeek, is this a representative experience, HA users?
I'm HA-curious, but I use HomeKit (with Homebridge) and rarely touch it between device additions/reconfigurations.
HA isn't (usually) the problem, the smart devices are. Our LIFX bulbs work almost flawlessly, and the Ikea bulbs using zigbee (not the ikea hub) are yet to fail, but the small number of Tapo bulbs require an API authentication that expires eventually or whenever there is a blackout so they require me to re-enter the password.
So the tapo bulbs are getting replaced with more Ikea bulbs and I won't be buying Tapo again.
I update my "smart home" stuff when I have the time to spare. Otherwise, things live their lives isolated form internet, with auto-updates disabled.
Yes, there are exceptions, like non-local-control devices. But fingers crossed, those have not given me much grief yet.
Nice write-up OP.
I've been using HA a little longer than yourself and took the exact same steps a few years ago. It's good to see we ended up at the same "conclusion".
I decided to buy dedicated hardware for HA as opposed to the VM approach as I wanted it to be completely independent from my home servers running non-critical tasks. I bought a Minisforum mini-PC with far-far overkill performance, RAM and storage for HA, but that's just how I roll.
With well over 100 devices, I switched to MariaDB and Influx too, I also solved the heating a couple of years ago, here's a quick summary:
I have a BLE temperature sensor in every room of the house (Switchbot Meter Plus), and I have a Z-Wave TRV on each radiator, I grouped the values into upstairs and downstairs for day/night with some exceptions for home offices, and calculate a sort of "average" temperature.
With some scripts to create a hysteresis, I turn the overall heating on/off when the "average" temperature is below set temperature - 0.2C or above set temperature + 0.3C, each room has an individual set temperature and I turn off the TRV if that room goes above the set temperature and back on if it drops below, again with some light hysteresis.
I then have some automations to switch to day/night/away modes with different set temperatures and rooms on/off depending on the situation.
As for lighting, I use "Circadian Lighting" which _does_ allow light groups, so I just specify the groups in yaml and it takes care of the group as a whole. I think it's probably lacking some functionality of the Adaptive Lighting plugin, but I haven't had to worry about differences in bulb types, I have a mix of Hue (80% of my bulbs) and IKEA (white only and colour).
> As for lighting, I use "Circadian Lighting" which _does_ allow light groups, so I just specify the groups in yaml and it takes care of the group as a whole. I think it's probably lacking some functionality of the Adaptive Lighting plugin, but I haven't had to worry about differences in bulb types, I have a mix of Hue (80% of my bulbs) and IKEA (white only and colour).
Author here. Interesting. I wasn't able to make the groups work either with Flux or with Adaptive Lighting. Not sure why, but I didn't spend too many cycles on it tbh.
Also, good ideas on the heating. Will look at that.
> on/off when the "average" temperature is below set temperature - 0.2C or above set temperature + 0.3C, each room has an individual set temperature and I turn off the TRV if that room goes above the set temperature and back on if it drops below, again with some light hysteresis.
Until you discover the generic thermostat helper :)
I am using that already, I may have missed some features but it didn't seem to support the more complex requirements I had for my heating.
I use the helper to manage the overall heating, by giving it my calculated "average" as the target sensor, and I use the home/away/sleep values.
The complexity in my setup is managing individual rooms which I control independently of the overall heating state; it's a fairly large home for the UK and an old one, some rooms come up to temperature much quicker than others and I want them at different temperatures too, so each room is switched as a separate zone using its TRV and sensor.
Indeed! I started with rules to turn on or off my individual heaters based on the temperature of the room but that's too many rules to setup and update. Then I found the generic thermostat helper and my appreciation for HA immediately went one lever higher!
I would use HA only to get off limited/bad "smart home" apps, but we've been using it in my home for ~6mos for a handful of things and we love it. Probably gonna go ham this year: switches, sensors, the whole thing. I think my most in-depth project is wiring up some temperature-sensitive PWM fans inside an IKEA cabinet that houses a bunch of tech stuff (gaming consoles, voltage converter, modem, router, HA machine, laser printer, etc) to keep it from overheating, which I'm very excited to get going on. Other pie in the sky plans/ideas:
- Wireless plant water sensors
- Blind/curtain management
- Ventilation management based on PM/VOC/CO2
I'm not that into smart locks or doorbell cams... or cameras in general? Feels a little creepy, but I can see the appeal I suppose.
We use Frigate with our cameras and doorbell cam, it can detect people, animals etc depending on how you configure it; We've got our doorbell cam set up to announce via TTS how many people are approaching the door before they even get close enough to press the doorbell; great for delivery people who leave parcels on the door step and don't ring, as well as general security.
Frigate rocks, I love all the zany things it can detect. Want to know if there's a zebra, snowboard or teddy bear at your door? You got it!
You can announce if someone is wearing glasses or has a handbag.
Wow that's wild, hmm OK might reconsider.
I'm not a huge smart home guy. I just have a doorbell camera, a camera, a smart plug, a smart switch, and a light bulb - all running through an Apple TV.
When I originally bought my home I was thinking of making everything smart, but I realized all of this was enough for me.
That being said - I'm absolutely STOKED that there are smart thermostatic radiator valves.
I will say for OP though - it may be worth having an expert come in and check on your radiators to help balance your system (or you could do this yourself).
Checking to see if radiators have the correct pitch, if you have the right sized radiator for your home, if you have the right pipes insulated, etc.
My impression was that if you get all the balancing right - you won't really need to fiddle with the valves again (unless of course you want to change the temperature in a room versus keeping it consistent).
I've also heard people say that it's generally a good idea to not have an adjustable radiator valve with the radiators by your thermostat - I think because when set wrong your thermostat will trigger and turn off the boiler.
I've been meaning to rebalance my home, with my first goal being to adjust the valves closest to the radiator so that they fill up the slowest.
We're in different countries so obviously you won't be able to use the contractors I used - but mine were wonderful. Their specialty is steam heat - nothing else. To get a new boiler they had me measure all of my radiators and say what type each one was. This helps figure out the correct boiler size, since most houses don't have the correct ones.
Wait until you discover https://github.com/Alexwijn/SAT your smart autotune thermostat!
I love Home Assistant and run it in Proxmox. The USB zigbee and z-wave dongles work without any problems.
Author here. Yeah that's what I'm doing too. Except i use the IKEA hub rather than USB Zigbee.
I've never got the reason for home automation over setting the heating to come on half hour before I get out of bed in the winter. I'm quite happy manually turning on lights, etc; and keeping things simple and off line. I also turn most stuff off, fridge/heating system excluded, before leaving the house or going to bed. I definitely don't see the point in smart lights and things like that.
If you’re curious I have all my automations on GitHub: https://github.com/shepherdjerred/homelab/tree/main/cdk8s/co...
Nothing on there is really crazy or complex. Just things like running the Roomba when I leave, or turning on lights at sunset.
I’ve found it to be very nice because I can automate common things around temperature, motion, waking up/falling asleep, and leaving/coming home. It also all integrates with HomeKit so I can control everything with Siri.
It’s definitely more in the hobby territory than something truly essential, but I would say that it is definitely useful and better than managing a bunch of random apps to automate lights or whatever.
I definitely like the idea, and I do think it's cool. But I just can bothered with the complexity and the fact it needs to be maintained and networked, etc. Also yaml...
That's fair! For me it has been a really fun way to learn Docker, Kubernetes, etc.
For those who want something similar with way less work I'd use https://www.home-assistant.io/green
On the side of writing YAML, this was actually all generated by the UI and then exported to YAML when I decided I wanted to version control it. It's really nice because Copilot works pretty well for creating/editing automations.
setting the heating to come on a half hour before you get out of bed is literally home automation
your thermostat just happens to support that internally. not everyone's thermostats are 'smart' like that.
I can assure you there's nothing smart about my 15 year old boiler and it's thermostat supports that functionality externally, though the name escapes me it looks like this [0]. No need for any fancy nonsense, networking, "smart" anything. Simple and easy to use.
[0] https://www.ncelectrical.co.uk/product_images/FT24H-HiRes.jp...
it's literally smart home automation, just analog. you like the functionality of automation, you just have a fashionable allergy to it in its digital form
Timers are "smart" now? I just though they were timers. Does the timer on my cooker, so I don't need to set an external timer, make my cooker smart too? Is my outside light over my bins "smart" because it's connected to a light and motion sensor and come on automatically at night?
I've definitely no "fashionable allergy" to digital forms of automation. I simply don't want the massive complexity that comes with it.
I'm also not advocating against it, I just don't see the point it in.
Setting schedules and automatically doing things in reaction to events is home automation. You've set it up to do something automatically when needed so you don't have to interact with it. I wouldn't include a timer you have to set manually every time though.
Your thermostat? Yes, based on the image above. The cooker? I'd say not. The lights? Definite yes.
I agree it's an automation, I don't agree with it being "smart".
What I like about my thermostat timer is that it's simple, local, and requires nothing else. No networking, no app, no maintenance over changing the timer for if I'm away, etc.
I think(?) you're thinking of "Adaptive Recovery" which has a few manufacturer-specific aliases.
The behavior is broadly as follows: Consider a thermostat heating schedule that is programmed for 64F overnight, increasing to 70F at 7:00am. A regular thermostat would begin heating at 7am, and take e.g. 40 minutes before reaching 70F. So between 7:00 and 7:40 the temperature is "less than 70F."
With adaptive recovery, the thermostat figures out (or is hand-tuned to know) that it will take 40 minutes to raise eight degrees, so begins the schedule at 6:20 so that it hits 70F right at 7am.
If that's not what you were saying then, uh, ignore me.
The overhead and maintenance involved in setting up these home automations have always seemed to spend more time than it saves. I'm not convinced that automatic lighting is better than just flipping a light switch.
Beyond the "cool" factor I'm with you. I don't know what the benefits would be but I can definitely see it being a pain to maintain and the extra cost in both time and money for running these automation do not seem worth it. I would definitely like to be proven wrong, but I have not seen anything to date.
Do you live with other people? Kids? I love being able to quickly turn off all the lights in the house as we leave.
I remember automating the lights in my house decades ago (the X10 era!).
The first time I had someone over, I got into bed and hit all-lights-off, only to hear "Hey! I'm in the bathroom and all the lights just went out!"
I just either do that manually or, better yet, make them do it.
That's basically a hobby for nerd. At least it's the way I see it.
Not once I found anything it allow actually useful. Cool? Yeah maybe the first time, bulb that can switch color is cool.
Beside that, utterly and completely useless.
Well. I'm not living in a big house, but believe me the simplest and less fancy automations make life way better. My favourites :
- Lights on when the first person living here arrive after sunset
- Shutdown every lights when the last person living here leave
- Main switch to shut every lights at night
- 30min light sequence from red to white every morning, everywhere, before playing the "birds" playlist on sonos : waking up like this and not having to deal with switches and darkness while my head is up my ass changed my life.
- Ungrouping every sonos devices each night a 5am and setting volume to each so I don't wake up to full volume and I can have birds in the bedroom, music everywhere else. Screw you Sonos for not making it in your app.
- Gently tone down lights when something is played after 8pm on Apple TV
- Gently lights up when something is paused or stopped on Apple TV
- Setting "night mode" on automatically on sound bar every night at 11pm
- Setting it off automatically every morning at 7am
- Using dirt cheap Ikea remotes for eveything connected, without limitation or Ikea Bridge.
Everything is possible thanks to Home Assistant and some efforts. Because manufacturers either don't care, don't want to be compatible with other brands, or want to keep new exciting features for the future.
Motion activated lights switch is also very useful for corridors and definitely not for lazy people as I often read.
For all of that, thank you HA and its beloved and passionate community !
Every time I dip my toes into "smart" devices, the required operational maintenance of fiddling with them to keep them working always pushes me back to the tried and true workflow of just flipping a light switch.
FWIW, I’m at ~50 devices (in a two bedroom apartment, so quite dense), and I spend maybe 5 minutes a month on average maintaining my HA instance and automations. It takes some fiddling to make the automations bulletproof, but once you’re there, it’s entirely hands off.
Fellow HA enthusiast here high fives
I’ve been upgrading my adaptive lighting over the past few days so this is neat timing. I’m taking quite a different approach though. While I do have a script that can be called to set a light to the “right” value (based on a global ideal brightness and kelvin values calculated elsewhere plus params for multiplier and offset) I call that for each light or group from individual room handler automations.
The reason is that every room is different. Besides the obvious off or presence states, what is the brightness of the room? Are the curtains open? Is the TV playing? Is it late at night? Is the vacuum in this room? Do we have guests? The answers are all unique to the room.
So each room handler can figure those things out and call the light set script with parameters that offset the brightness, and in some cases like an interval, nudge the current brightness towards the ideal without fully overriding what someone might have set manually.
Fun stuff :)
One issue I have with Home Assistant is the dashboard set up. I recently picked up a used crestron power over ethernet touch panel that I have mounted in my wall and I’m thinking I might have to write my own dashboard for my house because the Home Assistant default is not great. The system works best when it’s mostly automated.
I recently noticed that entities can be tagged/labeled in Home Assistant, and then selected on those (I use auto-entities).
Instead of relying on a brittle naming convention, I can tag devices as 'rgb_led' or 'humidity' and then target all of those. Entities' naming can now be more natural and intuitive.
Pro-tip: use zigbee2mqtt's groups for targeting multiple lights (but I'm guessing OP is using ZHA).
I've also used HA for quite a few years, and I have several hundreds of devices. I just (this week) decided to move Mosquitto and z2m out of HA to LXC containers in Proxmox (where HA is already running) and it was very easy. Now I don't have to restart the entire world whenever I have to restart HA (usually updates).
Next is to move Node-Red out to its own container. I already do not use HA's automations because they are very poor compared to Node-Red, and I'm starting to change all flows to use MQTT directly instead of passing through HA.
So in the end HA will be relegated to run non-MQTT integrations and dashboarding and not be a single point of failure.
I went this route, but eventually went back. HA automations became more powerful/flexible, and node-red became hard to manage, not easily updatable on mobile, and a bigger point of failure than HA.
Home Assistant has been rock solid with zero downtime for over a year now, and that last downtime was due to a hardware failure.
For automating TRV’s, I use Better Thermostat. It allows one to use external temperature sensors to offset the TRV temperature. https://better-thermostat.org/
Thanks for the link, I might need to look into this, it may be able to help me simplify my rather complex setup (I described in another comment) with a BLE temperature sensor in every room that I use to control the Z-Wave TRVs since the temperatures sensed _at_ the TRVs is way off reality due to proximity to the radiator.
I control my downstairs - 4 TRVs and 3 window sensors in one open area. Zero problems, can recommend.
https://github.com/Alexwijn/SAT for your boiler (and thermostats)
I only use smart devices for lights and thermostat. Things like oven, washer/dryer, coffee machine require some physical interaction so I feel like it's mostly pointless to have them be smart.
On the subject of under-powered hardware, this will be a minority opinion, but I don't even bother self-hosting on Pis anymore. I started using more powerful systems like NUCs and that was good, but I still kept running into hardware limits with things like Jellyfin. What I do now, and IMHO what the holy grail is (for some with a finite budget) is to build a great desktop PC and do all the self hosting on that. I built a beastly "gaming" rig that ran me about $3800 (though $2k of that was the damn GPU because it was early 2021 at the time). With a Ryzen 9 5950X 16-Core Processor and 128 GB of RAM, and a RX 6900 XT, it easily handles everything I throw at it, and occasionally when there's an intensive job like a long re-encode, it blazes through it in record time. Currently I could rebuild a similar system for about <$2k. I put Fedora on there, and I then use this rig for:
1. A normal desktop experience with multi-monitor for work during the day.
2. A remote dev workstation. I use neovim & tmux so can do development completely headless, so I SSH into this rig for doing dev work. It compiles and runs tests blazingly fast and with up to 32 threads so I rarely have to wait for compilations. It's also great to have something that's "always on" so I can SSH in from anywhere and instantly be dropped right into the last state.
3. Running all my self-hosted stuff like HA, Jellyfin, Audiobookshelf, ArchiveBox, and many more. Some run in containers on the host while others run in VMs. Even the heaviest of stuff runs very well and I never have to worry about OOM or max CPU.
4. A VM server that I can use to quickly spin up any sort of VM I want, permanent or transitive. I have a handful of different distros set up in a "freshly installed" VM snapshot and can near instantly clone and have a full install of that distro.
5. A gaming rig for the occasions I want to play a game. It works great physically (i.e. at-the-desk) and also remotely using Steam Link. I can use the Steam Link app on my Chromecast w/ Google TV to remote in and get high-res/high-fps rendering with practically no latency. My biggest complaint with that is the controllers don't often work great with the Chromecast, but I recently bought a USB-to-ethernet converter so I can plug the 8bitDo dongle in near me and have it get reliable long-range all the way back to the desktop. I've been quite happy with it!
I also routinely find other ways to get utility out of this rig. I like to say that the best ideas are ones that seem obvious in hindsight, and that is definitely how I feel about this setup.
Doesn't this idle at about 100 watts though? Which would be about £25/month for me. I found a lower spec Ryzen 5700 system which idles at about 20 watts is more than enough for Jellyfin etc.
Yes great point, if power is expensive then this can be a big downside. Depending on what it's running it idles between 50 and 100 watts. I leave it on all the time so the constant draw does start to add up. My kids and extended family to some extent use it too so it is engaged in delivering content most of the time even when I'm not using it, so I think it's worth it, but the power use is definitely a consideration.
It makes sense if it never crashes and you also need a small space heater. It gets rather expensive otherwise.
I have to reboot desktop PCs, especially those used for games, far more often than I do small dedicated ones. My NUC idles at around 5W, which is definitely waaaay less than a desktop PC.
I've had some luck by misusing older hardware designed for network appliances. I picked up an older Protectli Vault used on eBay for something like $65 and it's more capable in practice than I would've thought. (Makes sense I guess, considering it was built to do packet filtering and VPN termination all day.)
How many watts does it pull at idle?
Between 50 to 100 watts when idle. It's rarely truly idle because I use it throughout the day and my family also uses it (via Jellyfin et al) but that could be a big downside depending on power cost and utilization.
Completely unrelated to the article but at least related to home automation: is there something that can be used to detect if a door is locked or not? I am sure there is something that replaces the entire lock to allow automation, but I am thinking of some kind of sensor to attach close to an existing lock. But it seems like a complicated problem to solve easily. There are many kinds of locks and so on...
You could probably glue a flat magnet to the end of deadbolt and place a reed switch inside the box. Though you'd have to be careful to never apply force to the door as you're unlatching the deadbolt to avoid detaching the magnet. And you'd need to run wires to the reed switch, which means drilling holes in the door frame.
This is a "problem" that's on my list of things to solve;
The solution I've come up with but haven't yet put into action is to use an ESP device, with some sort of contact switch which sits _in_ the hole where the lock goes and detects whether the lock (bolt?) is physically present.
This solution isn't likely to be pretty, unless it could be shrunk down to fit within the "hole", but I imagine some sort of ribbon coming from the "device" which should ideally look/be sized similar to a door/window sensor, and goes into the opening in the frame; Main concerns for a DIY solution are battery life and longevity of the switch/contact being smashed into by the lock/bolt each time.
EDIT: A sibling comment mentioned reed switches and magnets, which I had considered, but felt would be either too bulky (reed switch plus magnet) or too fragile (do reed switches come in non-glass form?).
> The solution I've come up with but haven't yet put into action is to use an ESP device, with some sort of contact switch which sits _in_ the hole where the lock goes and detects whether the lock (bolt?) is physically present.
Another option is to disassemble a door/window sensor and replace its reed switch with a contact switch, much like you want to do with the ESP.
Heh, I don't know how that didn't occur to me. I guess I'm susceptible to overcomplicating things by trying to build it rather than just use something that's already 90% there.
I'll have to give this a try now you've suggested it, I've got a few spare Zigbee doors sensors, Ring and IKEA so will be interesting to see which is better suited.
Thanks for the suggestion!
There are key turners, such as Nuki, that piggyback on the actual lock/key and sense the lock’s state.
Things that control the lock or replace it are easier to buy. But you could DIY
@ingve I'm interested in your plan for your new TRVs. Why would you check the temperature of the nest hub if the TRV is in a different room? Or do you also have "nest sensors" and those report to the nest hub?
Would love to see a blog post about HA and TRVs
Smart temperature control with rads sounds unfeasible because rads are slow. Maintain a certain level of heat with rads, and then perhaps add some smart controlled infrared radiant heating panels for fast responding cozy comfort.
Interesting, especially the IKEA stuff. Are there any high-CRI IKEA bulbs?
The TRÅDFRI has a CRI above 90
https://youtu.be/1Xk7sTe29hs?t=3m21s
I recently discovered the ikea smart stuff range and highly recommend it. The Ikea stuff uses zigbee and its trivial to connect it to a third party zigbee dongle plugged into your Pi HA setup. The lights work flawlessly and I've been reinventing light switches with the smart remotes ikea sells.
I still don't understand what's the use case for home automation. Turning lights on? Dimming lights?
Maybe I'm missing the "killer app" so to speak.
I have some smart plugs which I can use to turn things on/off from Home Assistant, but more usefully, they report current power draw. I use this with Home Assistant to:
- Turn on my electric blanket from my watch 10 minutes before I go to bed
- Make my echo dot announce when one of the following finishes:
Some other things I use Home Assistant for:- Force charge my home battery during cheap electric periods
- Turn off the heat pump if the grid goes down, so I can decide myself if I want to use my remaining battery power on heating
- Announce if my printer is low on toner via a message to my watch
- Program a more efficient routine for my water heating than the native solution that came with my heat pump allows.
[edit] I just added another automation I've been meaning to: If the time is after 22:00 and I am home, and the outdoor temp is < 6C and I switch the TV from on to off, then turn on the electric blanket and send a notification to my watch to inform me it has been done. Done this because I sometimes forget to do it manually and turning off the TV at that time is a good indicator that I'm heading to bed shortly.
I really don't care for controlling lights or whatever, but I find it very nice as a common place to monitor all the different things we have in the home: heat pump, evse, humidity in rooms, power consumption, state of lawn mower bot, etc.
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I use Home Assistant for home automation - motion sensors, Z-wave light switches,iPhone notifications,remote access, Bluetooth connectivity, etc.
Anyone know what TRV they have purchased? I Can't follow that link as it has some kind of tracking built into it.
https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256807332587013.htm
$13.75 - GIRIER Tuya Smart Thermostatic Radiator Valve ZigBee Thermostat Radiator TRV Programmable Temperature Controller Work with Alexa
That's why home automation is such a waste of time. All this work for that? And the cost too.
For what it’s worth I’ve been using HA for 5 years and don’t deal with any of that and it generally just works. I was dealing with worse with overlapping hubs and ecosystems.
All my switches are unicellular and ceiling fans and lights are their fan hubs as well. Over a hundred devices and it generally just works.
Oooh the Adaptive Lighting Integration looks very cool, just installed it. That was my next step on my lights but I was going to do it myself via automations. So glad I found this instead.
My most recent HA journey has been replacing all bulbs in my house with smart bulbs so that I can dim them all to 1-5% by default and then use motion to bring up the lights. It feels magical walking into a room and being able to see but a little dim then the lights fading up. I have it set to use a different brightness at night so it's not blinding. The lights all stay on for ~5min then fade back down.
I've had motion lights for a few years but it's rather "harsh" to have the lights snap on from 0->100% and the "click" from my smart switches was a little annoying. This smart switch+bulb setup is the best of both worlds for me. I do not pair my switches with the lights, I never touch the switches in my house, they are there for other people and as a final fallback if HA stops working (all bulbs will go white/100% when turned on).
Home Assistant is really awesome and I encourage more people to try it out but for the love of god, do not use a Raspberry Pi. It can sort of handle small workloads but HA is going to stress it too far and you will have a bad experience.
That moment when you order several hardware devices, search and flash random firmware from the internet, search countless forums for instructions, spend hours looking at logs in the dumbest html logviewer, just to get a single bit from a switch (this is homeassistant).
I can’t imagine living in a house that isn’t fully automated with HA.
> I’ve already purchased these TRVs but haven’t had time to configure them yet.
lol. Story of many (most?) of my projects :)
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It really doesn't have to be. Your standard zigbee smart lightbulb, for example, behaves exactly the same as non-smart lightbulb - you flip a switch to turn it on and off. You have the option of integrating it with automations and services fully under your control and even disconnected from the broader internet, if you like.
Building up a "smart" home where you have control of everything is radically different from off-the-shelf IOT crapware that turns into a paperweight when some company decides to pull the plug.
It's really not. I have well over 100 "smart" devices, but a large portion of those will be light bulbs and door/window and motion sensors. I haven't looked, but I'd say they account for 80%+ of the "smart" device count.
Almost every bulb in the house is a smart bulb, every external door (and some internal doors) has a sensor, some windows, and some rooms have motion sensors, in some cases more than one. Every room with at least one smart bulb has a smart switch, whether a wireless dimmer or the actual light switch on the wall.
The bulbs, you group together; I use the "Circadian Lighting" integration rather than "Adaptive Lighting" and it _does_ support light groups, so all of the bulbs in my hall can be managed by a single group entity, the 5 spots in the main bathroom, same thing, 4 in the en suite, same, etc etc.
How long have you been maintaining this?
Everyone starts out thinking it’s wonderful. It’s when it comes to maintenance or troubleshooting that things become tedious. Spending 60 dollars on a bulb that may or may not last 2 years.
After 10+ or so years of messing with these stupid bulbs no one in my family besides me even uses I’ve basically switched back to all “dumb” stuff now. This isn’t even taking in to account the amount of “smart” devices that start with even basic interoperability but then end up locked in a walled garden when money got expensive. Sure you can fashion up an esp garage door opener but do I really need another 20 cobbled together devices to maintain?
As I mentioned in another comment, I've been running this system for around 10 years now, across 3 homes, growing in size each time.
I use a mix of Z-Wave and Zigbee devices (as well as lots of WiFi such as ESPHome and other devices), I started initially with Hue bulbs, moved to HA, ditched the Hue hub, increased to near 100 bulbs a mix of Hue and IKEA, door/window sensors and motion sensors, water leak sensors, wireless dimmers, and plenty more.
My kids don't know any different, the oldest now 5 has grown up with automatic lights, and has a smart switch I built for her to change the colour of the lights in her room as she wishes; we occasionally sit together and she choses a new set of colours for each button, my son (3) likes to pick a colour for his bedroom lights before bed using the colour picker on mine or my wife's phone.
The kids are aware that if they don't come to dinner when we ask I can just shout "Ok Nabu, turn off the TV" from another room and just the suggestion will convince them to do it themselves.
There's some maintenance for replacing batteries, but I really like that IKEAs stuff uses mostly AAA and I have automations to notify where the low batteries are, and as a household with young children, we've always got batteries charged and ready to go.
We use Frigate to notify us with a voice prompt across the house when people walk through the gate before they even reach our front door, we have audible alerts if the garage door was opened, and plenty more.
My wife will occasionally have griped with how something works, so I ask her to tell me how she _wants_ it to work, and I fix it.
Overall, other than adding new features, it's very hands-off.
> There's some maintenance for replacing batteries, but I really like that IKEAs stuff uses mostly AAA and I have automations to notify where the low batteries are, and as a household with young children, we've always got batteries charged and ready to go.
If you have HACS, you can add this: https://andrew-codechimp.github.io/HA-Battery-Notes/
And this is why I love this community.
Someone's always got a way to improve things.
Thank you, I do have HACS and I'll be getting this installed ASAP!
With 100 ikea lights you have to be replacing them monthly or weekly.
Not GP, but I've been at this for over a decade now and here's the maintenance that I've had to do:
That's it.I've made a point of trying to avoid anything which requires the internet/cloud to function.
The hue bulbs that I added in 2015 are still going strong. I see so many people complaining about the short lifespan of bulbs and all I can figure is that their power dirty or they are buying very cheap equipment.
> Spending 60 dollars on a bulb that may or may not last 2 years.
The only way I have ever lost bulbs is when I forget to remove them when changing apartments.
Modern bulbs from reputable manufacturers easily last a decade of normal usage at this point
To play devil's advocate (because I'm very much in agreement with you), I've found that Hue bulbs I've bought in the latter half-decade have lasted less time than the ones I bought a decade ago.
The original metal and glass ones are still going strong at nearing 10 years old, but some of my newer ones made from plastic and plastic since Siginify started cheaping out the build quality have been failing.
Out of somewhere in the region of 60-70 Hue bulbs, mostly Colour + White Ambience, a mix of Edison, Screw and GU10, I've now had 3 of the new cheap/light/plastic ones fail, and zero of the older metal/glass ones, though I've shattered the glass on 3 of the glass ones being careless when moving.
How do they fail? Is the physical case breaking or do they just not turn on anymore due to electronics failures?
Two failed the same way, one E27 and one GU10; they light the wrong colour and have lost most of their brightness, now about 20% or less of their original brightness, really noticeable when they're grouped with another bulb which should be the same colour and brightness, the third just stopped lighting up entirely, even though it does still register on the Zigbee network.
> It’s when it comes to maintenance or troubleshooting that things become tedious.
I'd rather have troubleshooting be tedious than have troubleshooting be impossible because I don't have direct control of the device.
I share the sentiment, and I also get downvoted every time I post something on those lines here. Only thing that can make you even less popular is saying that using cloud services can make sense depending on your priorities. =D
I wouldn't downvote anyone who says it hasn't worked out for them, but I run what I imagine is a fairly large scale "smart home", ("device" counts in the hundreds), perhaps not compared to the popular YouTubers you see, but still fairly large.
It's worth noting that I _enjoy_ finding ways to automate my home, or create solutions to problems that didn't exist, and using Home Assistant, but my experience has been anything but troublesome.
Granted HA started off pretty rough, and there are ways it does things I still don't think are as good as they could be, but it has come along an incredible amount and they're doing great things at HA/Nabu/Open Home Foundation.
EDIT: typo
It's surprisingly easy and flexible. One can just buy a Zigbee dongle for 20$, connect it to the machine running Home Assistant, and have sensors, light bulbs and such from many manufacturers working together via HA in no time. No need for smartphone apps, wifi or proprietary protocols that may stop working eventually.
Even 5$ sensors and bulbs from Aliexpress were pretty much plug and play experience.
I have nowhere near that many devices, but I have been adding them over the last decade. Everything in my house works as a dumb device as well -- push the switch, light turns on or turns off.
To me, though, the value is that I can turn those devices on / off from whatever logic I desire. On a lot of them I can gather power consumption which helps me to understand how much energy I use and where it goes.
Interesting - I suppose it depends on how you count things. I have more than 100 smart light switches in my house, so if you add in smart plugs, sensors, cameras, etc I certainly have more than 300 'smart devices'. That has no effect on if the house is somehow less or more horrid, at least from my, my wife, and my daughters point of view ( I asked them ). Perhaps all three of us are weird however. ;)
I'm the same, I want no smart devices in my house. Getting harder with most TVs and many appliances having "smart" features even on the base models, but I never set them up, never install their apps.
It partially comes down to what you buy. I've found that pre-flashed tasmota smartplugs are pretty bullet proof. They talk normal MQTT and wifi 2.4ghz.
If you're buying some random smart crap with integration on some sketchy app then yeah you'll have a bad time
That said, haven't scaled anywhere close to 100 devices
Yeah they’re fun tech demos, for the first couple of days. After that it gets really tiring, fast. Especially when connection “breaks” or an update comes along, you rip the “smart” part out and put that dumb switch back in.
I am surprised this is not the consensus. The hidden costs of maintenance of home automation often removes its practicality. My Roomba and home camera system can barely go a few months before causing me grief. User error sure, but it's not like I'm some fool who can't grasp basic setup instructions.
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