I know i have seen a number of peeps in here saying “home assistant”. I am i.t. and never really wanted or thought I needed home assistant, but there are alot of youtubes etc about it, it seems I may be the only nerd not using it. What does home assistant do for you that you could not live without. Or more fairly, miss if it broke tomorrow?
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Motion activated lights. And the ability to hit one light switch and it activate others. In my garage the lights are all broken up between 3 different light switches. During the day, well from 5am to 9pm as soon as you walk into the garage from any of the 3 doors the lights come on automatically. After 9 all I have to do is hit the switch by the door from the kitchen and all 3 light switches turn on/off. That is probably the biggest plus for me and how my house is set up.
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Also I am not stuck to one brand of switch/sensor and their ecosystem. That is the main beauty of Home Assistant. I have some stuff that’s wifi, some Zigbee and some Zwave. And it all works together very well thanks to home assistant.
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Here’s one Home Assistant application that could be useful with a CNC router.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPoIxaH8A7w
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I have a friend that is off-grid and he uses HA to manage his power. He redid the light in a stained glass chicken lamp his wife has to give a visual of the power, green good, red bad etc, etc. It monitors the the batteries as well and if they fall beneath a set threshold that the solar isn’t keeping up with it turns on a generator to bump the batteries back up, then kills the gen once it is no longer needed. He also has the usually light switches for lights and stuff talked about above. Pretty sure he turns on heaters in the chicken coop if temp goes to low as well, but not sure if that is still setup.
Philip
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Literally plugged in HA yesterday. Halloween/Christmas lighting with WLED doesn’t need an external timer, can just use HA. Smart plugs could do the same thing. I’m also a late nighter but sadly work doesn’t start late. Having HA dim all the lights in the house at a reasonable time might get me in bed at more reasonable times; its setup, we’ll see if it helps.
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Is that done through plugs?
Mostly smart light switches. I do have a few lamps and such that work on smart plugs.
Something I forgot to mention that I really like is the ability to time lights coming on with day/night. like 30 min before nightfall our bedroom lamp comes on. And it auto adjust as that time changes throughout the year.
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Ok how much amperage can those plugs handle? I would never have tried a dust collector on one!
Wow! that is sweet! ok i may have to try home assistant! I will look for a forum, or discord for home assistant!
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Those wifi plugs handle more than i thought!! https://www.cnet.com/home/smart-home/smart-plug-safety-for-the-spring-season/
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I’ve been using Home Assistant for ~4 years now and it has been great. In the early days it was a bit more finnicky to get running/keep running but it has been rock solid for me for the past 2.
I’ve been running it on a Home Assistant Yellow for the past couple of years which has been completely stable. Before that I had it on a Pi 3 and Pi 4 which both ate SD cards left and right, then eventually an SSD in a USB caddy that was fine but the Pi developed stability issues.
Things I use it for:
- Appliance control. We had a bunch of things on timers that are now all handled via HA and smart plugs. In the simplest sense this gives us the functionality of a 7-day timer that’s much easier to set up. In a more complex sense we use it to do things like turn on the coffee machine while we’re on the way home, have the timers not turn on the coffee machine automatically if our phones aren’t in the ‘home’ zone. I use it to turn the 3D printer off remotely once it’s done printing, or turn it on remotely so I can send a job to it without going downstairs.
- Lighting. We have Shelly units behind the switches for a bunch of our lights and a couple of appliances. That allows remote control of them so we can have them on timers while we’re not home, turn them off if we’re upstairs, have an ‘all lights off’ shortcut for going to bed, etc.
- Heat pump control. We use a Tasmota based IR sender that lets us control the 2 heat pumps in the house remotely. That has been a huge quality of life upgrade because we’re not in line-of-sight of either of them. We can pre-heat or pre-cool the bedroom, have the main heat pump turn on before we get up, etc.
- Cheap BLE temperature/humidity sensors running the pvvx firmware. I have them in every bedroom, the garage, entryway, office, lounge, pantry and a couple of other places. The coin cells last ~18-24 months and so I have logging of temps and humidity throughout the seasons.
- Power monitoring. I have a whole-house energy monitor that provides the power draw on each circuit into HA for display/logging. I have some smart plugs with power monitoring that I use for specific things that I’m interested in, too, like the dehumidifiers, coffee machine, grow lights, etc.
- Weather monitoring. I have a cheap EcoWitt weather station setup that I use to track rainfall, average/peak windspeed, temperature, humidity, UV index etc. The main important usage there is rainfall so we know how much we need to water the garden or plants on the deck.
- Notifications: I use a service called Pushover to push notifications direct to my phone when certain things happen or haven’t happened. Things like the garage door being open for more than 5 minutes, the water pump running for more than 10 minutes at a time, the water pump not having an ‘off’ period of at least 8 hours in the past week, that kinda thing.
I also have quite a few custom things I’ve designed using ESPHome that perform some slightly more esoteric functions:
- Water tank level sensor: We’re on tank water so I have an I2C pressure sensor hooked up to an ESP32 and reporting back the level in the tank. There are a bunch of other ways to do this but they all suck. The ultrasonic options I’ve tried are finnicky and seem to have a short lifespan. The float types aren’t easily automated, I’d rather not have something unknown soaking in my tank long term, etc.
- Water pressure sensors: I have a pump and stack of filters (100u pleated, 20u polyspun, carbon block filter) with pressure sensors between each connected to an ESP32. This is a bit of a work in progress and is currently broken, but it worked enough to prove the concept. I can see the pressure drop across each element with respect to flow rate which lets me monitor filter lifespan etc.
- Water flow meter: I have a water meter with a 1 pulse per litre reed switch on it that HA uses to monitor water quantity/flow rate.
- Garage door opener interface: I have my garage door remotely controlled and monitored using an ESP32.
- Hot water cylinder solar diverter: I made a custom board that uses an ESP32 and an SSR to control the hot water cylinder power in 10% increments between 0% and 100%. This lets me do timer based control (heat on off-peak pricing) as well as adjusting the load to match the export power reported to HA from the whole house energy monitor.
- Irrigation system: A bank of 6 solenoids running off an off-the-shelf Athom relay board and some custom electronics to control driplines in the garden, retaining walls, deck, planters etc.
Things to add eventually: Electronic door lock control, monitoring of the motion sensor lights in front of the house, monitoring of the hot water cylinder temperature and flow rates (which can then also be integrated into the energy monitoring and solar diversion for the hot water cylinder), etc.
So yeah, I’ve used it pretty extensively. There’s a lot of things that we did just to see and wouldn’t necessarily do again. There are a few things which we can’t live without now.
My fiance loves the remote control of the heaters and coffee machine. She also loves the water tank level monitoring and irrigation control. She watches the temperatures in various rooms more than I expected. She makes quite a lot of use of the remote garage door opener but really that has just saved us buying expensive batteries for the fobs. She also enjoys watching the solar and some of the weather stuff like rainfall for predicting when we need to water stuff.
For me, I really like some of the warnings I have built in, such as the immediate warning for a burst pipe or whatever, the longer term warning of a slow leak and the ability to shut off the water pump remotely to combat that. The garage door warning has also been useful in a bunch of ways. Beyond that, it’s the long term logging and energy monitoring that I really appreciate because it lets me get answers to things I’m curious about, like how much do we spend running the dehumidifiers, how much of our water heating cost is standby vs active use, etc.
The other thing is that you can make it as big or as small as you like. I think the usefulness compounds as you add more things to it. Being able to control the coffee machine on a timer is great. Adding a VPN to my home network and controlling it remotely is better. Adding monitoring of when the phones are in range and having it not turn the coffee machine on when we’re away is even better. Being able to turn the heat pump on downstairs when the temperature in the lounge at 6am is too low is great. A lot of those things are combinations of multiple smaller things that seem inconsequential by themselves.
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Wow! Thank you Jono! I really appreciate it! That was excellent!
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Go for it! It does have some of the typical open source bullshittery when it comes to finding assistance, but overall it’s pretty good.
I would STRONGLY recommend the Home Assistant Yellow hardware if you want it to be reliable. If you’re just starting out, a spare Pi or a docker container on a NAS works great, but both of my colleagues and I have run into issues with all of those things.
My ‘recipe’ for success:
The ESPHome addon allows you to do all sorts of stuff with ESP32s as an extension of HA. I use it as a WiFi to BLE relay.
Xiaomi BLE Temp/Humidity sensors like these: These are great. I reflash them with the pvvx firmware which makes them easier to use and lets you tweak them to last longer on the battery. I use ESPHome on a couple of ESP32s stashed around in 3D printed cases to get these into HA.
Tasmota smart plugs: Specifically I use a lot of the Athom ones, but anything running Tasmota is great. I’m a big picky about what I use here if it’ll be switching mains, so I’ve gutted a couple of them and I’m comfortable they’re designed well enough to use. I use the slightly older and NZ/Aus version of these: https://www.athom.tech/blank-1/tasmota-esp32-c3-us-plug-v3
Shelly lighting controls: I like the Shelly 1PM gen4 minis for going behind switches, but any of the Shelly stuff seems good. Those units are small enough to tuck away and they can take the existing switch as an input as well as control the output, so worst case there’s no difference in functionality. You can configure them to treat the switch a few different ways so it suits what you need.
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Ok, so let me share why I am really asking. I am thinking of getting a home lab running. I am trying to determine Proxmox or Xcp right now. (as of this I think proxmox is winning as Truenas goes in well inside of it for ONE server).
Well ALMOST every youtube i have seen they have installed prox, truenas and utltimately Home Assistant! So i knew that Jeff has posted a few times about it, and others, but I really could not remember everyone, so in True Carmen fashion, I decided to Ask!. So I guess I will have a home assistant soon 
One more question, so do the plugs communicate direct to the home assistant, or do you need plugins to communicate with the plug internet host? It would be a bonus to NOT use the backend of the plug developer.
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Oh, I should have clarified, EVERYTHING on my setup is entirely local. That’s a hard requirement. Actually, I think it pulls weather forecasts from somewhere else, but that’s it.
I haven’t gotten there yet, but ultimately everything IoT will be on its own VLAN/SSID and quarantined.
It sounds like you might be heading down the containerized approach. That can work pretty well but the issues my colleague ran into were around things like USB Zigbee/bluetooth dongles and I think also a couple of the add-ons never worked properly. That was a couple of years ago now and we’re all on HA Yellows which have been flawless. I suspect it may have improved.
You can mix and match how things communicate but I like to try have a primary preferred method. The options are WiFi, Bluetooth, Zigbee and more and more stuff is supporting Matter.
I try to have as much stuff on WiFi as possible. I have a really nice Ubiquiti Unifi setup so it’s easy to manage and I’m in a quiet area for radio noise so that works for me. Other people in crowded areas or apartments seem to gravitate more towards Zigbee for robustness. I have a couple of Zigbee things (an electric roller blind controller I forgot to mention, that thing rocks because it’s somewhere damn near impossible to access) but almost everything that hits HA is WiFi.
I also try to keep the brands or at least the firmwares I’m working with consistent. That saves on troubleshooting. If Shelly does it, I’ll use that primarily because the integration is great. If not, I’ll look for something running Tasmota (typically smart switches, lighting, smart plugs etc.). If not, I’ll check the other integrations to see how well supported it is. If it’s custom or weird, I go straight to ESPHome.
I’m so pleased that I am rubbing off! lol
I love many aspects of home assistant. I love it telling me when the dishwasher, washing machine and dryer have completed their duties. I love being able to walk into a room and not have to worry about flipping the switch because I have already been detected in the room and lights automatically turn on. On the opposite of that, they turn off when nothing is detected, ending unneeded lights being on. I love it reminding me to feed the dogs; I sometimes get busy and lose track of time, not feeding them at a regular time- that problem is solved with the reminder from Home Assistant.
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i am a network engineer mine will not be containers but true vm’s.
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