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There is almost no way you can handover any HomeAssistant installation during a home sale, not unless you want the buyer to be calling you for help with technic

by giobox 5y ago

There is almost no way you can handover any HomeAssistant installation during a home sale, not unless you want the buyer to be calling you for help with technical issues/gremlins months after the sale closes. Every single Home Assistant installation is effectively a custom install - there can be almost zero commonality between two different setups really. Things break because you don't update them; they break because you do update them. It's a small but constant stream of maintenance tasks once your HA installation reaches a certain degree of complexity and new owner is likely not going to be interested in that at all? For me and my own HA install, I accept I will have to revert everything to how it was when I bought the home, which is itself a really tragic statement on the state of home automation in 2022. I get satisfaction from running it, but it does require running. It is not an "appliance", and there are still no real building codes/standards for ensuring these things stay compatible for years to come. Similarly, if the seller tried to convince me to take a house with their own home made HomeAssistant setup, I would likely request it be removed completely before I closed the sale, regardless of any perceived quality of the work. If nothing else, I couldn't trust they hadn't left their own remote access ability somewhere in the stack and I don't have time to audit what might be years of quite hacky integration work. There is an old saying, "Never sell a car to a friend". Home assistant is like that, but you should never sell it to anyone, regardless of how good you think you've got it running today.

j45 5y ago
So far I’ve been able to avoid some of this by registering my home with its own email account and then all home automation items to that account. I am close to adding an iot wifi access point that can remain with the home. All gear connects to it and then up to whatever internet is present. My HA currently runs in a vm but seeing the fanless devices (or laptops) is encouraging. Chrome books with 8 gb of ram seem like a good candidate to become a server appliance. Add to it a few tablets and it’s not so bad. Documentation can go a long way as well even if it is for tenants. The home assistant blue or yellow device is also intriguing for that reason. If it had a touchscreen built onto it it would be one step closer to being self sustained.
- giobox 5y ago
  > If it had a touchscreen built onto it it would be one step closer to being self sustained. Until there are proper standards that we can rely on to last for decades plus for automatable home devices in general, Home Assistant will never be truly self-sustaining. Almost all of its integrations rely on unofficial API access, those APIs change often enough to requiring patching etc. Finding a cheap reliable machine to just run Home Assistant has never been the problem either. Home Assistant doesn't try to solve the elephant in the room: the complete lack of any standards in the industry, instead it tries to patch over it through regular software updates to keep everything working together. No matter how good you have Home Assistant today, you are just one bad release or API change from any of the hundreds of smarthome product vendors breaking it - it is completely outwith your control. It doesn't happen super often, but it's often enough that I'd think someone a little silly to include it as part of a home sale process. Almost zero of HomeAssistants integrations are supported by the vendor, some vendors are even actively hostile towards efforts to use their APIs in HomeAssistant. I'm secretly hopeful that the new standard, Matter, finally solves some of this for the long term, especially with Google/Apple buy in, but will probably be years before we see Matter devices hit mass market: > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter_(standard) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter_(standard) > https://csa-iot.org/all-solutions/matter/ https://csa-iot.org/all-solutions/matter/
  - bmicraft 5y ago
    That's way less of a problem than you make it out to be. As long as you don't use some kind of bridge but just a local zigbee or wifi network not connected to the internet everything will stay as is until a device physically breaks. Few devices actually need a cloud connection and and there are always alternatives that don't.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - j45 5y ago
      This has been my experience as well. Still, some manufacturers like Lutron makes some nice switches however their cloud connectivity is not something I wish to keep a dependency on for the initial setup. There's simply no reason to make it mandatory. Another piece of useful gear that is being discontinued is the Logitech Harmony Hubs... no replacement really, and the existing gear will be supported for an unknown period of time. Would be a great candidate to open source.

by giobox 5y ago

j45 5y ago

So far I’ve been able to avoid some of this by registering my home with its own email account and then all home automation items to that account. I am close to adding an iot wifi access point that can remain with the home. All gear connects to it and then up to whatever internet is present. My HA currently runs in a vm but seeing the fanless devices (or laptops) is encouraging. Chrome books with 8 gb of ram seem like a good candidate to become a server appliance. Add to it a few tablets and it’s not so bad. Documentation can go a long way as well even if it is for tenants. The home assistant blue or yellow device is also intriguing for that reason. If it had a touchscreen built onto it it would be one step closer to being self sustained.

giobox 5y ago
> If it had a touchscreen built onto it it would be one step closer to being self sustained. Until there are proper standards that we can rely on to last for decades plus for automatable home devices in general, Home Assistant will never be truly self-sustaining. Almost all of its integrations rely on unofficial API access, those APIs change often enough to requiring patching etc. Finding a cheap reliable machine to just run Home Assistant has never been the problem either. Home Assistant doesn't try to solve the elephant in the room: the complete lack of any standards in the industry, instead it tries to patch over it through regular software updates to keep everything working together. No matter how good you have Home Assistant today, you are just one bad release or API change from any of the hundreds of smarthome product vendors breaking it - it is completely outwith your control. It doesn't happen super often, but it's often enough that I'd think someone a little silly to include it as part of a home sale process. Almost zero of HomeAssistants integrations are supported by the vendor, some vendors are even actively hostile towards efforts to use their APIs in HomeAssistant. I'm secretly hopeful that the new standard, Matter, finally solves some of this for the long term, especially with Google/Apple buy in, but will probably be years before we see Matter devices hit mass market: > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter_(standard) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter_(standard) > https://csa-iot.org/all-solutions/matter/ https://csa-iot.org/all-solutions/matter/
- bmicraft 5y ago
  That's way less of a problem than you make it out to be. As long as you don't use some kind of bridge but just a local zigbee or wifi network not connected to the internet everything will stay as is until a device physically breaks. Few devices actually need a cloud connection and and there are always alternatives that don't.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - j45 5y ago
    This has been my experience as well. Still, some manufacturers like Lutron makes some nice switches however their cloud connectivity is not something I wish to keep a dependency on for the initial setup. There's simply no reason to make it mandatory. Another piece of useful gear that is being discontinued is the Logitech Harmony Hubs... no replacement really, and the existing gear will be supported for an unknown period of time. Would be a great candidate to open source.