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Comment by sen | Hacker News Reader

Very handy considering myself (and most people I know) have their HA+devices setup with as local-only.

I don’t want my home automation connected to the internet at all, but I still want notifications if my kids room temps dropped too low or my garage door opens in the middle of the night.

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I've been using the signal-cli add-on for this with a lot of success. I can add attachments, have the notifications show up on all my devices, and share a group with my partner so we both get the same notifications. All end-to-end encrypted.

I also use signal-cli for notifications including my own custom integrations using MQTT. And to connect remotely to the Home Assistant (HA) UI I use an SSH tunnel. But this is how I enjoy using HA, integrating with my own projects.

What I also learned to enjoy about HA is the diversity of the community of users that found success in home automation without completely relying on "cloud" solutions. I think this is the ethos of this project: local control comes first.

You can add some protection by putting it behind a reverse proxy like HAProxy or nginx. It's mostly security through obscurity, but in this case it helps a lot unless you're being specifically targeted by someone.

Basically pick a subdomain on a domain you own and have that and only that forward to HA. So the only way to connect to the HA instance from the internet is to know the exact subdomain you've picked for it. Set the proxy to not pass any port 443 traffic unless the subdomain matches one that you've set.

What type of smart theromstat allow local only operation? The popular ones I've looked at (nest, ecobee, honeywell) all look like they require internet connection to work.

I have an ecobee and I actually wonder whether it needs an internet connection. For setup, certainly. But I have it connected to Apple HomeKit, which all runs on internal networking. My Apple TV then exposes HomeKit for use outside the house.

Either way, HA lets you use a whole load of random ZWave/ZigBee/whatever thermostats:

https://community.home-assistant.io/t/latest-and-greatest-th...

Any Z-Wave one will operate locally. I just set one up the other day in Home Assistant.

Ecobee works with HomeKit, which works without an internet connection. You don’t need an Apple device either, as HA has a HomeKit bridge.

https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/#climate

Look at this list and go into each page to see the “IoT class”.

“Local push” is the best but “Local polling” would satisfy your requirements as well.

The Venstars have been good to me and have a local api that integrates with HA. They are more basic in appearance, but that’s never bothered me.

I have the Honeywell T6 Pro Z-wave. Works great but any Z-wave will be fine.

I would not recommend ecobee, it does not allow you to apply simple actions you may want to do. For example, using HA I am monitoring co2 in the bedroom, if the level rises above 1000ppm I wanted to turn on house fan until level reaches a value. You cannot simply turn central house fan on/off at will, you can only apply a hourly duty cycle controlled by ecobee. I wish I would have purchased a thermostat with basic api controls.

Do you have a one hour hold duration configured within your ecobee? I have a Home Assistant switch entity that turns the ecobee furnace fan “on”. Turning the switch off returns the ecobee to “auto”, or it will do so on its own after the two hour hold duration I have set in my ecobee. I believe you could accomplish what you want by setting your hold duration to “until I change it”.

Thanks for the info, I will give that a shot.

Local only as in you can only use it and get notified when connected to your LAN?

Yes. Local push would mean you’d only get notified when at home.

Home Assistant has had non-local push for a while now. I use that for door unlock and alarm notifications because I want them when I’m away. It’ll be handy to move less urgent ones to local only though.

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