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Comment by Nextgrid | Hacker News Reader

> Each time something is updated/bricked the entire system must be revisited.

The advantage of a fully local, self-contained system is that you can treat it as an appliance - you don't have to update or tinker with it continuously. There's no reason for it to update or brick itself.

A friend of mine still has a Home Assistant set up from now almost 3 years ago running with no updates or anything - it just acts like a PLC to manage some lights, switches and toggles heating on/off based on window sensors. Nobody has to mess with it and it just works in the background.

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>> toggles heating on/off based on window sensors.

Do people want this? Maybe I want both warmth and fresh air in the room? And I foresee the day where the window sensor is faulty. I'm shivering in bed as I have an argument with my furnace about which one of us should be in charge of setting the temperature in my bedroom.

It's a fail-safe against leaving in the morning for work, opening the windows, and leaving the heating on full-blast all day long as it tries to heat the outside. It matters even more now given the energy prices in some countries.

Hass just sends on/off commands to a self-contained thermostat in response to window sensor state change events. If it fails, you can still manually go to the thermostat and set it to whatever you want.

Flip side - one sensor failure and your home is without heating, and if you so happen to be on winter vacation at the time it can possibly be catastrophical

Are there any thermostats at all that work completely locally, i.e. without any internet access and no cloud, but still can be controlled via HASS?

Yea, your best bet for non cloud/internet stuff is to stick with Zigbee or Zwave. I have a Trane Zwave thermostat https://www.zwaveproducts.com/collections/trane/products/xr5... that’s worked well for several years.

For a more advanced use case I’ve recently set it up so that the thermostat logic is within HASS. An automation driven by a binary switch helper then switches the thermostat to a fixed hot or cold value for heat and AC. Then I can feed the HASS thermostat with whatever temperature sensor data I want, like an average of multiple sensors around the house. All this is totally optional though if you just want to control the thermostat from within HASS.

Venstar wifi thermostats have a local API that can be switched on.

https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/venstar/

I've not used it (I installed one because I wanted scheduling and liked that it had further possibilities and wasn't overly expensive).

Especially in Europe, many people have radiators right under the windows. If the windows are open and the radiators aren't turned off, the cold air will come in, fall down and hit the thermostat, which will lead to the radiator running at full power because it stays cold.

He must not look at the UI, because the HomeAssistant interface begs you to update it _constantly,_ it's actually one of my biggest gripes with HA

Yes, in this case nobody looks at the UI - Hass acts as a glorified PLC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmable_logic_controller). I look at it every few months out of curiosity when I have the opportunity to visit but given that it works well and fits their needs I resist the urge of updating the system.

If there was a need for a UI I'd probably enable the HomeKit Bridge extension and let them control it via HomeKit (with only specific entities whitelisted) so that 1) they don't have to suffer through the eyesore that is Material Design and 2) don't get confused by a lot of the internal, read-only entities.

If you're looking at the Home Assistant admin interface all the time, you're doing it wrong IMHO. The key reason to do home automation is if it's actually automated and not just replacing a bunch of physical switches with web page switches. For the things which cannot be automated, bridge them over to HomeKit (or Google's thing) so they can be natively controlled by your phone and/or voice assistant.

A lot of things could be automated in my home if HASS knew that I'm not working tomorrow, that one of us or both of us are in bed, etc., but no idea how to best tell HASS about these things and how to model all the different cases without going crazy.

You can integrate it with a calendar and have automations based on the events. So you can have a work calendar that it checks before doing specific automations.

People have also built a variety of presence sensors for beds. With pressure sensors and such. Or if you have a Sleep Number bed, it also has presence detection. You could also do things like detecting phone is in the room and plugged in as a rough equivalent for presence of the person.

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