I've done something very similar, NOT with ZigBee or any other wireless devices, but with wired ShellyPro, a Victron p.v. inverter, some WaveShare ModBUS RS485/

I've done something very similar, NOT with ZigBee or any other wireless devices, but with wired ShellyPro, a Victron p.v. inverter, some WaveShare ModBUS RS485/tcp etc, and my few notes are: - HA have a slick UI, but it's a MONSTER, less monstrous maybe then OpenHAB but still a monster, I HATE it's YAML config, it's use of SQLite is well... And it's less horrific way to deploy, by pip in a virtual environment is meh, at best; - wires are needed for reliability, but while ShellyPro and WaveShare seems to be reliable (in few years almost no issues) they are still limited, damn expensive and not much comfy to keep them up to date automatically and centrally. In general most IoT products are crap at best, badly documented, buggy, dysfunctional and damn expensive; - most sound reasons for home automation lay in energy saving/automation, I normally see no sound reason to switch on the lights from a mobile phone instead of a physical switch for instance, but most appliances seems to be designed without any clue on how they can be used and integrated. A small example, I have a Daikin/Rotex heat pump for domestic hot-water, it's not really a small economic device, well: just to read water temp to makes decision I need a 300+€ extra card, my take was a far cheaper pt100 inserted via the hot-water return intake I do not use. Remote piloting can choose "do not heat", "heat full power, heat-pump if possible + classic resistive heater", "try heating with the heat pump for 15' than goes full power", "choose automatically what to do". WHY THE HELL not offering a simple: - try heating with ONLY the heat pump - try heating with ONLY the resistence - do not heat - heat full power leaving the extra bit for "choose internally what to do"? I still have not answer, and to heat only with the heat pump, for instance because I have just 600-800W spare from my p.v. I have to switch any 10' "do not run" for a minute, than "start with the heat pump" in a loop. My VMC is even worse: it's only ModBUS, native, but various registers store/read different values than those documented, a small set of them are totally undocumented, some fails to read or write randomly so I need a bit of extra logic to try again few times. IoT can be a nice addition, but so far there is simply too much crap both on electronic side and on the digital side.