Home Assistant advice

[The Cosmic Avenger]

After reading about Home Assistant in the How "Smart" is your home? thread, I was hoping some of you who are using it can give advice to those of us who might be interested. (Like, say, me! )

I looked at the Home Assistant Getting Started page, and I'm having trouble deciding which to try. I can usually fumble my way through most repairs/upgrades that don't require soldering, and I have SSHed into my NAS and entered a few Linux commands, but those are really the very limits of my comfort level. I could handle those kinds of things during setup if that's the only time they were required.

So, any thoughts on where to start? Cost isn't a big factor, especially if it means a more robust, flexible solution.

 

[5Miler]

I have been playing around with it a bit over the past year or so. I bought a Wyse 5060 Thin Client on Ebay and after adding a second memory stick and upgrading the storage to a small leftover SSD I had, I set up Home Assistant. It is not for the faint of heart as it takes a good amount of manual configuration but it has been getting more GUI friendly with each monthly upgrade.

Right now I use it mostly to access my EZVIZ doorbell camera via Blue Iris so I can view my cameras anywhere in the world. I set up a DuckDNS address for this all of which is configurable in Home Assistant (HA). My primary smart home is still via Amazon Alexa as I use a lot of voice control which still needs work in HA. I can access most of my home automation via HA in parallel with Alexa but it is so much easier to use voice control. The last time I tried to setup voice control in HA it required a monthly subscription fee to an Amazon service or else a laborious installation routine to circumvent the Amazon paid service. I wasn't up for either one so I remain firmly entrenched between the two worlds.

Here's an example of the Wyse 5060 I purchased to run HA.

Wyse 5060

 

[AZ2020]

I have a Home Assistant setup with over 400 Devices exposing over 5000 Entities and 150 Automations, so I guess it is pretty good sized.

I started running Home Assistant on a virtual server running under Windows 10 because it was free to setup. The virtual server was a bit flaky, and when Windows upgraded it caused problems. I've since moved Home Assistant over to an old laptop were it runs the native Home Assistant OS. It has been rock solid ever since.

If I was starting out again I would probably get a Home Assistant Green box. It's smaller and probably draws less power than my old laptop. I've read that the Green box is simple to setup as it is built specifically for Home Assistant. I don't know if the Green box can handle a lot of devices or not. Fortunately it is pretty inexpensive so It looks like a good place to start.

As for what smart devices to get, there are so many to choose from. Home assistant works with so many devices, so you do not need to stick with a specific brand. A general recommendation is to try to get devices that are NOT cloud based. Local control is the way to go.

The big advantage with Home Assistant is that you are in complete control, and you can do whatever you want.

The big disadvantage with Home Assistant is that you are responsible for everything. It is trivial to make it do trivial things, but the learning curve is very steep once you want to do more.

 

[CaptTom]

Long-time HA user here.

If I were starting today, I'd seriously consider a small x86 computer, or HA's own "Green" product. I started with a Raspberry Pi 3B+, and I might also consider a more modern RPi, although the price point isn't nearly as good as it used to be. The Green, x86 or RPi routes allows you to just download and install a dedicated operating system, which means one less thing you need to set up.

Probably the biggest thing I'd recommend is to limit yourself to a minimum of different device types and protocols to support. The real benefit of HA is local control. Most WiFi devices require you to use the vendor's "cloud" servers. Avoid those where possible. There are HA "integrations" which let you connect to some vendor's cloud solutions, but no guarantees how long or how well they'll continue to work. Vendors can and do go out of business, change their terms, or switch to a subscription model.

Zigbee and Z-Wave devices create their own local wireless mesh network, and most of them are fairly plug-and-play. Choose one or both of those protocols any time you have the opportunity.

There are so many "fun" things you can do with HA that it's hard to limit yourself to just those things you really need. Still, it's worth considering that every new feature, every new integration, every new device you add is going to demand more of your time doing maintenance and administration.

This is a very dynamic environment. HA major version updates come out once a month, and several point updates in between. Vendors change their back end APIs and update device firmware. The fewer things you have to research each month to see what will break your system, the better.

 

[5Miler]

Just ran into an issue with Home Assistant (HA) this afternoon. With this online discussion, I was reminded to go and accomplish the monthly updates to my HA system. After the update I discovered that my video feed from Blue Iris for all of my home cameras was no longer working. I tried restarting Blue Iris and reconfiguring the Integrations in HA but to no avail. I always complete a backup before upgrading so I just rolled back to the previous version and all is well with my camera feeds. Guess I'll sit out this month's update and try again in Feb.

 

[CaptTom]

The above story is a good example of what I mean about keeping your HA environment simple.

The updates drop on the first Wednesday of the every month. You need to read the blog and forum posts to figure out how they're going to impact your environment. Something is always broken by the update. The more "somethings" you have, the more likely you're affected.

This month was worse than usual. Lots of problems and poorly-implemented changes. But it does seem like they are being addressed. I've learned to wait until about the third week of the month before updating. By then most of the kinks have been worked out, or at least, identified. While I'm waiting, I make notes about what I need to change to avoid problems, and what I need to test after updating.

Oh, and I don't use HA for things like security cameras. To me, HA is not the best solution for that. There are off-the-shelf systems, and DIY open-source systems, dedicated for that purpose. I use HA for home monitoring and automation. That's what it does best.

 

[jollystomper]

Good thread for me to follow. I had set up a Home Assistant virtual machine under ProxMox a while back just to get it up and running and play around with its navigation. I need to get back to making it one of my active projects .

 

[DayDreaming]

...There are so many "fun" things you can do with HA that it's hard to limit yourself to just those things you really need...

I never heard of Home Assistant until I saw this thread. I looked at the website but am not really sure what one would use it for. Can you comment briefly on this, without derailing the thread too much?

 

[CaptTom]

Not derailing at all. It's a good question.

Personally, I started out wanting to monitor my sump pumps. I have a fieldstone foundation dug into clay. Any water which falls anywhere near or uphill from me ends up in my basement. I need to know those pumps are doing their job. Then I found that HA had an integration to let me monitor and control my smart thermostats. Adding a few temperature sensors in the coldest corners of the house gave me even more detail. Next I put a bunch of sensors on my heating and domestic hot water system. And of course I threw in some smart plugs to allow me to control lights. Another good use for those is to allow me to remotely power off/on things which need to be rebooted, like my security cameras. And speaking of security, I can set up automations to turn lights on and off when I'm not home to give the place a more lived-in look. Some of those I leave running even when we're home, because those are lights we're likely to want on anyway.

That's just me. Some folks like to fully automate things so they never have to touch a switch. Lights come on, colors are adjusted or whatever just from walking into a room. Others control their sound or even video systems. Lots of people integrate to a voice assistant so they can use spoken commands rather than a web page or app on their phone. Then there are those who go way overboard with this stuff. I've seen discussions about bed occupancy sensors and toothbrush monitoring sensors. The only limit really is your imagination.

 

[AZ2020]

Some broad categories of things I use Home Assistant for:

Making a smart switch control something, like a switch that is not directly wired to the living room lamps turning all the lamps in the living room on or off together.

Automatically turning on lights at night, and off in the morning.

Notifying me of some situation. Water leaks, someone at the front door at night, garage door left open, batteries running low, stuff like that.

Using my phone as a remote for the home theater.

Playing music across my smart displays.

Controlling my sprinkler system to make sure the bushes are getting enough water.

Turning off everything when we leave home (when we set the alarm system to away mode).


In general, you can do many of these same things with other platforms, but they are often limited to working with a limited set of devices or technology like Homekit devices or SmartThings, etc. Home assistant can work integrate with all of them.

If all someone wants to do is control their lights with voice commands, using something like Google Home is probably enough. We don't use voice commands at all, at least not yet. If we did, Home Assistant can both listen and speak.

There are so many more things that can be done, and so many different ways to do them. That is the fun side of home automation.

 

[triangle]

Have any of you done a containerized install? Perhaps using Docker as described on the Home Assistant (HA) website? But going beyond that specific question, my main question is around how to best maintain HA going forward, such as going through major software upgrades and saving data related to device configurations, automatons, integrations, and local data collected. By local data, I am referring to information like temperature and humidity readings that get pushed to HA and could be used in the years ahead to generate long term graphs.

My HA is currently running on an old PC, but I was thinking about getting something like a lower spec'd N100 tiny PC to save space and power. I have not done very much with my setup but was considering adding some indoor air quality monitoring, maybe some weather monitoring and a few automations. I need to do more research around how to manage HA over the longer term and don't expect anyone to provide details here. But I just curious if anyone has kept a complicated setup running for a long time and what might be the biggest thing to consider.

 

[CaptTom]

Have any of you done a containerized install? Perhaps using Docker as described on the Home Assistant (HA) website? But going beyond that specific question, my main question is around how to best maintain HA going forward,

My HA install has been running for over 5 years. I don't use Docker, just a native HA install. You can do this on a NUC, or an RPi, or just about any x86-based laptop or desktop.

My advice? Keep it as simple as possible! Use the supported HAOS image. Standardize on the minimum number of protocols, integrations and add-ons you need. Don't install things just because they seem "cool."

Look for local-only solutions. Avoid off-the-shelf WiFi devices, which almost always require an account on, and a connection to, the vendor's "cloud" servers. Vendors go out of business, change their firmware, or start charging subscription fees all the time.

Why all these recommendations? Maintenance overhead. HA, and in fact this whole field, is very dynamic. There are monthly version updates of HA which can break things or force you to make configuration changes. Sometimes these are driven by new or changed third-party devices, but just as often they're some developer's idea of the way things "should" work. Regardless, they can require effort on your part. And if you don't keep up with the monthly changes, you're making even more work for yourself when something stops working and you're forced to jump a number of releases, and deal with all the changes introduced in each one.

 

[AZ2020]

Maintenance...

Today's example. The integration for my Rheem water heater decided to change the name of the water heater entity. It used to be "Electric Water Heater" and is now "Gladiator Water Heater". This makes my water heater entity "Unavailable".

This wouldn't be an issue, except that Home Assistant didn't remove the old entity, so my automations are still trying (and failing) to talk to the Electric Water heater. And Home Assistant doesn't make it obvious that the automation is failing.

I've had issues with the water heater before because it is Cloud based and it just goes down occasionally. So I have an automation that notifies me if the water heater changes from Electric to Unavailable. Except in this case, it did not change from Electric to Unavailable, it is just Unavailable, so the notification did not happen.

So now I will manually delete the old entities, and then manually fix the automations and dashboards where the old entities are used. Not hard to do, but it was not something I expected to be doing today.

I do review the change note for each release and I must have missed this one. A lot of stuff changes so it's easy to miss something.

I actually like the new name better, so I'm not complaining about the name, just about how things change unexpectedly.

 

[triangle]

...
My advice? Keep it as simple as possible! Use the supported HAOS image. Standardize on the minimum number of protocols, integrations and add-ons you need.
....
Why all these recommendations? Maintenance overhead. HA, and in fact this whole field, is very dynamic. ....

I plan to stick with mostly Zigbee devices as that protocol is widely used and has low power requirements when compared to wifi. Zwave has its advantages but I have not needed to use it. I also think that Zigbee devices will work alongside a future Matter/Thread environment is that ever became king of the hill. As you know there various "platforms" to chose from such as Home Assistant, Hubitat, OpenHAB, google Home, apple home, alexa, ... almost too much information and too many choices for the average consumer to sort through unless they are getting some trusted guidance. And as we are discussing here, even managing a deploment after the fact is nontrival.

I plan to add more smart switches and outlets, and maybe a few powered blinds/shades, an outdoor weather monitor, and electric power usage monitoring. I think upgrading the hardware/software is something that should be planned for to the extent possible, as imagine a HA server failure or unable to fix it in a timely manner and there are a 30+ devices that need to be manually repaired to a new server and automations recreated. I would think that it should be possible to restore that from some backup and if not changing software platforms.

 

[marko]

Not derailing at all. It's a good question.

Personally, I started out wanting to monitor my sump pumps. I have a fieldstone foundation dug into clay. Any water which falls anywhere near or uphill from me ends up in my basement. I need to know those pumps are doing their job. Then I found that HA had an integration to let me monitor and control my smart thermostats. Adding a few temperature sensors in the coldest corners of the house gave me even more detail. Next I put a bunch of sensors on my heating and domestic hot water system. And of course I threw in some smart plugs to allow me to control lights. Another good use for those is to allow me to remotely power off/on things which need to be rebooted, like my security cameras. And speaking of security, I can set up automations to turn lights on and off when I'm not home to give the place a more lived-in look. Some of those I leave running even when we're home, because those are lights we're likely to want on anyway.

I have all these things going on including a temp monitor for my brother's furnace, cameras to monitor him and a plug to remotely reboot his cable box when he screws it up.

But, these are all controlled by separate, individual apps from my phone. What folks here seem to be talking about is a dedicated and integrated computer (?). If so, I'm not sure why I'd need that (?)

 

[triangle]

I have all these things going on including a temp monitor for my brother's furnace, cameras to monitor him and a plug to remotely reboot his cable box when he screws it up.

But, these are all controlled by separate, individual apps from my phone. What folks here seem to be talking about is a dedicated and integrated computer (?). If so, I'm not sure why I'd need that (?)

I think your approach is fine and adequate for most people in most situations. However the appeal of a dedicated home server like (HA) is to have a focal point to monitor and control regardless of vendor. No vendor (Amazon, Apple, Google, Samsung, Philips, ...) provides a complete set of devices or the most flexible/customizable software to control them. And it becomes nearly impossible to have devices in these different ecosystems trigger any complex actions as they are siloed away from each other. For example having a presence sensor or door (contact) sensor from one vendor trigger a (smart) light from a second vendor to turn on.

When speaking about HA one of its main appeals is that supports very customizable dashboards. For instance the home automation geek who is setting everything up can create an uber dashboard that is more complex, while their spouse has a much simpler dashboard that only exposes widgets to turn on/off lights and control the thermostat.
There are better examples, but to get a feel for the different dashboards people have created:

https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/1db2u9j/show_off_your_dashboards

 

[AZ2020]

My wife also likes having all the things she cares about in one app. I made a dashboard just the way she likes it and it comes up by default on her phone.

I have several dashboards that show me a variety of things, and all the apps on my phone for when I really need to look directly at something.