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How I Use Home Assistant in 2025

268 points by ingve 2y ago

imp0cat 2y ago
Interesting, especially the IKEA stuff. Are there any high-CRI IKEA bulbs?
- derektank 2y ago
  The TRÅDFRI has a CRI above 90 https://youtu.be/1Xk7sTe29hs?t=3m21s https://youtu.be/1Xk7sTe29hs?t=3m21s
- ImaCake 2y ago
  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.
vessenes 2y ago
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..
- baby_souffle 2y ago
  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_.
- alias_neo 2y ago
  "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.
  - ryandrake 2y ago
    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?
    - alias_neo 2y ago
      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-integration/ 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).
      - ryandrake 2y ago
        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?
- philjohn 2y ago
  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.
yapyap 2y ago
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- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- antonyt 2y ago
  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.
- alias_neo 2y ago
  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.
  - whatwhaaaaat 2y ago
    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?
wildekek 2y ago
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/ https://better-thermostat.org/
- alias_neo 2y ago
  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.
  - baq 2y ago
    I control my downstairs - 4 TRVs and 3 window sensors in one open area. Zero problems, can recommend.
- pandora-health 2y ago
  https://github.com/Alexwijn/SAT https://github.com/Alexwijn/SAT for your boiler (and thermostats)
goodlinks 2y ago
Anyone know what TRV they have purchased? I Can't follow that link as it has some kind of tracking built into it.
- nickthegreek 2y ago
  https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256807332587013.htm 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
badlibrarian 2y ago
"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.
- fullstop 2y ago
  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.
  - badlibrarian 2y ago
    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.
    - eternityforest 2y ago
      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.
hokumguru 2y ago
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.
alias_neo 2y ago
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).
- moepstar 2y ago
  > 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 :)
  - alias_neo 2y ago
    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.
balloob 2y ago
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)
- poutine 2y ago
  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.
  - Yossarrian22 2y ago
    Have you tried using the NodeRed plugin? That’s worked really well for me
    - ziml77 2y ago
      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.
  - balloob 2y ago
    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/ https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2024/11/15/roadmap-2024h2... )
    - poutine 2y ago
      Cool, thanks! Great work!
    - oynqr 2y ago
      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.
mongol 2y ago
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...
- tgamma 2y ago
  There are key turners, such as Nuki, that piggyback on the actual lock/key and sense the lock’s state.
- TheBicPen 2y ago
  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.
- alias_neo 2y ago
  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?).
  - Mister_Snuggles 2y ago
    > 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.
tibbon 2y ago
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.
nicce 2y ago
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.
- CT4u8798 2y ago
  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 https://sqlite.org/whentouse.html
- jmmv 2y ago
  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?
  - baq 2y ago
    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.
  - ImaCake 2y ago
    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.
- mvip 2y ago
  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.
iforgotpassword 2y ago
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.
- connicpu 2y ago
  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 :)
  - iforgotpassword 2y ago
    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...
_spduchamp 2y ago
I love Home Assistant and run it in Proxmox. The USB zigbee and z-wave dongles work without any problems.
- mvip 2y ago
  Author here. Yeah that's what I'm doing too. Except i use the IKEA hub rather than USB Zigbee.
freedomben 2y ago
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.
- bityard 2y ago
  How many watts does it pull at idle?
cyrialize 2y ago
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.
- pandora-health 2y ago
  Wait until you discover https://github.com/Alexwijn/SAT https://github.com/Alexwijn/SAT your smart autotune thermostat!
_spduchamp 2y ago
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.
camgunz 2y ago
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.
- alias_neo 2y ago
  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.
  - camgunz 2y ago
    Wow that's wild, hmm OK might reconsider.
  - grahamj 2y ago
    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.
poisonborz 2y ago
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.
- CharlesW 2y ago
  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.
  - ImaCake 2y ago
    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.
  - silversmith 2y ago
    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.
- turtlebits 2y ago
  Been running HA for a year or so and been rock solid. If anything, it's a buggy device that adds extra effort.
- eternityforest 2y ago
  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.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
CT4u8798 2y ago
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.
- robby_w_g 2y ago
  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.
  - CT4u8798 2y ago
    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.
- jjeaff 2y ago
  Do you live with other people? Kids? I love being able to quickly turn off all the lights in the house as we leave.
  - m463 2y ago
    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!"
  - CT4u8798 2y ago
    I just either do that manually or, better yet, make them do it.
- deleted 2y ago
empiricus 2y ago
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).
m463 2y ago
> I’ve already purchased these TRVs but haven’t had time to configure them yet. lol. Story of many (most?) of my projects :)
grahamj 2y ago
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 :)
moogly 2y ago
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.
- SparkyMcUnicorn 2y ago
  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.
joshstrange 2y ago
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.
psyclobe 2y ago
I can’t imagine living in a house that isn’t fully automated with HA.
aucisson_masque 2y ago
That's why home automation is such a waste of time. All this work for that? And the cost too.
- richman777 2y ago
  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.
andrepd 2y ago
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.
- mike-cardwell 2y ago
  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.
- lutorm 2y ago
  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.
- Jx9Detroit 2y ago
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movedx 2y ago
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.
- flyinghamster 2y ago
  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.
- ocdtrekkie 2y ago
  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.
  - jcgrillo 2y ago
    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.
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BocaDano 2y ago
I use Home Assistant for home automation - motion sensors, Z-wave light switches,iPhone notifications,remote access, Bluetooth connectivity, etc.
BocaDano9 2y ago
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schobi 2y ago
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.
- forty 2y ago
  mosquitos are indeed not attracted by light (other insects are). I believe they are attracted by CO2 (breath) blood and sweat.
- smileysteve 2y ago
  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.
spicyusername 2y ago
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.
- Toutouxc 2y ago
  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.
zikohh 2y ago
@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
DonCalloway 2y ago
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scaredhana 2y ago
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268 points by ingve 2y ago

imp0cat 2y ago

Interesting, especially the IKEA stuff. Are there any high-CRI IKEA bulbs?

derektank 2y ago
The TRÅDFRI has a CRI above 90 https://youtu.be/1Xk7sTe29hs?t=3m21s https://youtu.be/1Xk7sTe29hs?t=3m21s
ImaCake 2y ago
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.

vessenes 2y ago

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..

baby_souffle 2y ago
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_.
alias_neo 2y ago
"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.
- ryandrake 2y ago
  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?
  - alias_neo 2y ago
    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-integration/ 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).
    - ryandrake 2y ago
      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?
philjohn 2y ago
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.

yapyap 2y ago

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antonyt 2y ago
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.
alias_neo 2y ago
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.
- whatwhaaaaat 2y ago
  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?

wildekek 2y ago

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/ https://better-thermostat.org/

alias_neo 2y ago
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.
- baq 2y ago
  I control my downstairs - 4 TRVs and 3 window sensors in one open area. Zero problems, can recommend.
pandora-health 2y ago
https://github.com/Alexwijn/SAT https://github.com/Alexwijn/SAT for your boiler (and thermostats)

goodlinks 2y ago

Anyone know what TRV they have purchased? I Can't follow that link as it has some kind of tracking built into it.

nickthegreek 2y ago
https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256807332587013.htm 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

badlibrarian 2y ago

"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.

fullstop 2y ago
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.
- badlibrarian 2y ago
  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.
  - eternityforest 2y ago
    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.

hokumguru 2y ago

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.

alias_neo 2y ago

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).

moepstar 2y ago
> 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 :)
- alias_neo 2y ago
  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.

balloob 2y ago

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)

poutine 2y ago
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.
- Yossarrian22 2y ago
  Have you tried using the NodeRed plugin? That’s worked really well for me
  - ziml77 2y ago
    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.
- balloob 2y ago
  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/ https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2024/11/15/roadmap-2024h2... )
  - poutine 2y ago
    Cool, thanks! Great work!
  - oynqr 2y ago
    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.

mongol 2y ago

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...

tgamma 2y ago
There are key turners, such as Nuki, that piggyback on the actual lock/key and sense the lock’s state.
TheBicPen 2y ago
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.
alias_neo 2y ago
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?).
- Mister_Snuggles 2y ago
  > 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.

tibbon 2y ago

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.

nicce 2y ago

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.

CT4u8798 2y ago
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 https://sqlite.org/whentouse.html
jmmv 2y ago
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?
- baq 2y ago
  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.
- ImaCake 2y ago
  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.
mvip 2y ago
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.

iforgotpassword 2y ago

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.

connicpu 2y ago
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 :)
- iforgotpassword 2y ago
  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...

_spduchamp 2y ago

I love Home Assistant and run it in Proxmox. The USB zigbee and z-wave dongles work without any problems.

mvip 2y ago
Author here. Yeah that's what I'm doing too. Except i use the IKEA hub rather than USB Zigbee.

freedomben 2y ago

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.

bityard 2y ago
How many watts does it pull at idle?

cyrialize 2y ago

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.

pandora-health 2y ago
Wait until you discover https://github.com/Alexwijn/SAT https://github.com/Alexwijn/SAT your smart autotune thermostat!

_spduchamp 2y ago

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.

camgunz 2y ago

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.

alias_neo 2y ago
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.
- camgunz 2y ago
  Wow that's wild, hmm OK might reconsider.
- grahamj 2y ago
  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.

poisonborz 2y ago

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.

CharlesW 2y ago
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.
- ImaCake 2y ago
  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.
- silversmith 2y ago
  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.
turtlebits 2y ago
Been running HA for a year or so and been rock solid. If anything, it's a buggy device that adds extra effort.
eternityforest 2y ago
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.

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CT4u8798 2y ago

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.

robby_w_g 2y ago
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.
- CT4u8798 2y ago
  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.
jjeaff 2y ago
Do you live with other people? Kids? I love being able to quickly turn off all the lights in the house as we leave.
- m463 2y ago
  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!"
- CT4u8798 2y ago
  I just either do that manually or, better yet, make them do it.
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empiricus 2y ago

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).

m463 2y ago

> I’ve already purchased these TRVs but haven’t had time to configure them yet. lol. Story of many (most?) of my projects :)

grahamj 2y ago

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 :)

moogly 2y ago

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.

SparkyMcUnicorn 2y ago
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.

joshstrange 2y ago

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.

psyclobe 2y ago

I can’t imagine living in a house that isn’t fully automated with HA.

aucisson_masque 2y ago

That's why home automation is such a waste of time. All this work for that? And the cost too.

richman777 2y ago
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.

andrepd 2y ago

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.

mike-cardwell 2y ago
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.
lutorm 2y ago
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.
Jx9Detroit 2y ago
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movedx 2y ago

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.

flyinghamster 2y ago
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.
ocdtrekkie 2y ago
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.
- jcgrillo 2y ago
  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.

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sneedle 2y ago

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BocaDano 2y ago

I use Home Assistant for home automation - motion sensors, Z-wave light switches,iPhone notifications,remote access, Bluetooth connectivity, etc.

BocaDano9 2y ago

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schobi 2y ago

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.

forty 2y ago
mosquitos are indeed not attracted by light (other insects are). I believe they are attracted by CO2 (breath) blood and sweat.
smileysteve 2y ago
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.

spicyusername 2y ago

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.

Toutouxc 2y ago
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.

zikohh 2y ago

@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

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