Confessions about my smart home
frenck.dev
frenck.dev
I’m on my fourth iteration of a smart home setup with HA. Depression, neglect, a feeling that I need to burn it all down and restart, and depression again were all extinction level events for my setup. At one point I had meticulous Grafana dashboards worthy of a Golden Grot that could tell you the concentration of CO2, the pressure waves from the Tonga eruption, a map of Puget Sound gas prices, and other bits and bobs. I had dozens of Airthings sensors, plant sensors, ZWave temp sensors, three weather stations, countless LIFX bulbs, all working in unison to give me a pulse on my house.
Then I had a bout of the existential sads and just stopped looking at the slack notifications when HA connected the dots between a spike in radon and a nearby earthquake. I stopped caring that the CO2 concentration in my office was over 750ppm, or that watering my plants in my office in the winter was contributing to increased particulate in the air. Because I wasn’t listening to the interesting stuff, I stopped listening to the important stuff- alerts about failed drives, dying batteries, and broken updates.
Not caring felt so freeing. I didn’t start things up again until a few months later when I realized I wanted something cool to show in an interview. The cycle started anew.
The existential depression cycles that make me wonder why I’m even bothering to do the things that used to bring me joy, or at least keep me occupied, are exhausting.
That means it does things like switching off the lights when nobody is home, measuring temperature that informs heating, switching on certain things based on time etc.
But what it isn't meant to be is a dashboard that I have to look at constantly. All functions I need shall be accessinle with physical buttons, dials or switches.
Turning lights off, closing shutters when it goes dark, handling temperature and CO2 concentrations, etc.
I feel people have a need to look at dashboards, have screens, etc (maybe it's some sort of sympathetic reaction about looking at dashboards all day at work?) instead of letting go. Dashboards should be looked at if something is wrong and automation is failing.
I want a system so reliable that I can completely forget it exists. I have been leaning towards setting up a few basic automations with Apple Home and calling it good, since it seems like the Apple version can handle simple things like “turn on the lights at 8pm for 3 hours when I’m out of town” or “open the blinds when my morning alarm rings”. Other than that, probably don’t need a ton of smartness besides grouping things into zones that can be turned on/off together
Whatever you do, don't skimp on the lighting smart devices. It usually ends in tears.
You can still use Apple’s automations to do stuff in HomeKit. I mean all the rooms & devices “just show up” in Apple HomeKit seamlessly. “Siri, bedroom off” works perfectly with no setup, for example.
Apple home is ok, but automations / iOS shortcuts are unfortunately extremely difficult to write unless they’re very simple. As a technical user, it’s nice to have the option to do something deeper if I want. But the biggest problem for me was the reliability, even for bulbs allegedly fully supported by HomeKit.
I originally only set HA up to bridge in non-homekit devices (like my Govee LEDs), which is also a good use case for HA.
I’ve been fiddling with my smart home less than ever now that HA is set up.
Unless I start tinkering with it :)
They have an entirely different mentality on longevity, on where and how it can run, plus it supports scripting instead of the utterly disgusting YAML thing in HA.
For most people that I know that use HA, it's more of an hobby than a thing you set up once and then blends away in the background.
I tried HA a few times and it was way too much effort for something that I do not want to spend a lot of time on.
It's building automation. When it's over a decade, then it's starting to be OK.
The most useful automations are very simple: turn on some lights around sunset, turn off radiators when windows are open, etc.
I haven't (had) to touch my HA assistant since I set it up which is now roughly a year ago and it is running fine. If you feel the constant need to optimize stuff that is a bit on you..
I gave up trying to do much with it. It still runs my MQTT broker and basic automations, but for anything tricky I no longer try.
It’s like GitHub actions - yaml shouldn’t be doing too much.
Heck, I even set up the HomeKit bridge so my wife can use Siri or the Home app to control everything, and she still prefers the dashboard I built on Home Assistant.
I only have two problems, which aren’t even Home Assistant problems:
1. Some door and window sensors I got from Sonoff become unavailable at times, which is a problem since I use them on the security system. Haven’t had the time or money to replace them yet, but I’ll probably go with Aqara next.
2. While my wife loves the dashboard, I like to thinker with it, and am never satisfied. I’m still looking for a way to expose all devices and controls in a visually pleasing way.
Actually, three. My only cloud integration, which controls my LG air conditioner, recently started to give me problems and I can’t turn the units off from Home Assistant anymore. But I’m sure this will be fixed soon, so, meh.
All in all, I’m very pleased with Home Assistant. Wish they had a better design, but themes fix that, so, overall, very pleased.
> If I had to count, I’d guess I have maybe 15 working automations across all my half-baked instances. That's it.
There is a big home automation channel in one of the Slacks I’m in.
It has been a running theme for years that people get Home Assistant, start trying to automate everything, frustrate their families, and then get forced to de-automate parts of the house because everyone around them is so fed up with it.
The endless debugging and tinkering is only fun for the person doing it, not the test subjects dealing with it. Even the tinkering gets old after a while and people end up with half-baked automations that they just live with, vowing to get back to it some day when the spark returns.
I did that too in the very beginning but soon realized that you need subtle, non-intrusive rules that make your day ever so slightly more comfortable but don't get in your way if you do something unexpected.
The problem is that HA gives you a million possibilities while Google and apple don't, and most techies just fall for it and start over engineering the shit out of it only to annoy the rest of their family to no end and then getting rid of everything again.
The poor, dumbed down writing notwithstanding, it also takes forever to get to the point.
I didn't enjoy opening this adcrap.
At least you have the capability of getting things into a working state without the original owner, which may be impossible otherwise.
Now of course the best case scenario is when the "smartness" is only additive to the home, and not required for it.
In my case, if Home Assistant isn't working, the house just works like a normal house with all the wall switches functining as you would expect.
If I ever sold the house, I would give the new owner the Home Assistant instance, disable all my automations, but also tell them that I'm not going to help them at all with supporting it. The most likely scenario is that they wouldn't want to use it or care about it, but at least the house works just fine without it.
Someday in the far future when someone buys my house, the small but noticeable differences in light switch behavior is going to drive them crazy. I did keep all the original switches for the next owner, if they are motivated to swap them back in.
Unlike some others in this thread, the 350 devices I have don’t require too much maintenance (have to replace the odd light bulb, and I do some upgrades once a week), and work flawlessly most of the time. I also designed it so that it works without home assistant or any controller.
But what I am going to do - some of the zigbee lights are permanently fixed, but are on manual switches so I guess thats ok. But the irrigation system, some of the lighting systems which are switched automatically, the built in speakers and even the networking might be beneficial to stay.
Would probably have to do an audit and take a couple of days.
I’d never buy a “smart house” though. I have to set up everything myself, that’s part of the fun.
At first, in the YAML era, because it was insanely hard to create heating automation (not HVAC, just heating).
Second when HA decided that their supported Python version was greater, than Debian Stable's and FreeBSD stable's Python version.
Third when it became near impossible to install manually, especially on something not linux, FreeBSD.
HA might be a great system when set up once and left alone, but nobody seems to be doing that.
This is a Python problem, inelegantly solved by docker. Nowadays you could probably use uv, but see below...
> HA might be a great system when set up once and left alone, but nobody seems to be doing that.
Everybody except tinkerers do exactly that, they just don't run Debian stable or FreeBSD and don't really comment about anything anywhere. They run HAOS or Ubuntu+Docker.
Yes, I have some 'home automation' around the farm, in my case based on OpenHAB. I use it for the aforementioned purpose as well as for making it possible to remote control electric fence chargers and lights. No silly sensors for air quality or CO2 because I don't see the use. It is a bit like the early Linux desktop installations with an overabundance of monitors for everything going on in and around the machine, maybe fun to configure and run for a week or so but after that you'd just get rid of 95% of the xperf, xosview, conky, gkrellm, ... guff and settle on a few simple and unobtrusive cpu/memory/storage/network monitors and be done with it. 10 years later you'll still be running the same configuration, now as natural as the dials on a dashboard.
A lot of the complexity seems to come from being clever around performance, so the thing only reacts to new events or commands and doesn't do more work than it has to. This just seems like a lot of over-engineering. If you don't have thousands of devices, or run your controller on battery, performance shouldn't be an issue.
I ended up using an existing home automation thing just as a bridge to smart devices, and wrote a service to control what should be happening when. Every incoming event or every 60s, I just rerun a my thing that determines the desired state, diff it against the known state and emit commands to make them match
So my home automation ended up being stuff like "if someoneIsAtHome() and time > XXX and time < XXX, these lights should be on: "
Add a frontend for overriding the default and I have a system where I can just change my code if I want the behaviour to change.
I ended up creating poor-man's controllers in automations where there's a timer, a switch to override the automation, triggers for many different events - like at first start, then when the timer runs out, others - just so it would ensure things wouldn't just get out of what because one event was lost, or an addon was down for a minute, or I had a networking glitch, you name it.
I am on my third iteration of HA, I regularly update it, so I also read the release notes that the author prepares/publishes.
HA feels like a broad church that caters to many users' integration needs. Lots of plugins that are supported as part of the core, fancy ways to create dashboards (admittedly I still struggle beyond the basics, and maybe I want automation and not dashboards).
It's one thing to write in the release notes about the fancy new features being added to dashboards, and another to actually use them as the lead developer. I personally wouldn't have posted that as my best/most used dashboard, because that signals that you don't really use your product.
There's a time when I led a team building a product, and my sermon to the team was that we should always be the superusers of our product because we'll be the first people to notice issues, our clients would look to us for support and we can't correctly build what we don't understand.
I don't get a sense of that from this post. It's not even about having a well oiled automation/assistant (as you're not the only one using devices in the house like you correctly point out), but find a subset of your devices in the instance you want to use, and produce something you want to regularly tell the world about.
Else we'll keep getting frustrated with HA until the big beans eventually catch up.
My 18 month toddler can do things with Google Home, she knows where to press to turn on the lights she can't reach. She fumbles her way around "he gugu". That's a good experience for someone who can't yet form sentences. Even with the best devices, I doubt I'd get her to that proficiency with HA.
Yeah, it's been the year of voice, but it feels complicated at a distance, I'm not even bothering with it.
Just as everyone I started out by automating lights and other stuff...
And just like (almost) everyone I quickly found out my life really isn't structured enough for automation at the level of detail like one light in one room.
While I love the "scenes" (turn off X, Y and Z with one press) and the observability (see state of lights on 2nd and 3rd floor at one flance) I pretty much stopped automating stuff.
First time lights turn off when Plex starts? Great, like in a cinema!
7th time? After discovering 500 edge cases. Not so much.
Now I'm in the process of creating mini-dashboard per room that I put on a NFC tag next to the door. A quick tap in every room to control everything in that room and nothing more.
It's so simple even my wife uses it, usually a good indicator you've actually added some value as opposed to just doing something 'smart' because you can.
I have HA, but I used it for a custom application that relies on some integrations with Home Automation stuff (Lights, Sensors)
As an accidental outgrowth of that I was also able to automate the lights to aid my child in keeping a good bedtime routine.
But its certainly not the reason I bought all the doohickeys.
Where I've had more issues is experimental stuff, integrating voice assistant & generative AI with HA. For example, I can use HA voice preview & whisper to verbally ask my HA instance to give me the lunch menus of my nearby restaurants. It then fetches the data from APIs, generates the response using template, and plays the response using text-to-speech. All this happens locally. Usually works, but sometimes it hangs for reasons I've yet to determine.
There are some automations I've setup that I never have issues with. Perhaps my most reliable being around lights. Not surprising the hue lights work the best. Also my hardwired locally controlled garage doors
There are some that if the power goes out I gotta log back in. Cloud is often a pain.
If it isn't on my dashboard I forget about it.
I've talked to professional installers or resellers and found similar issues with control 4 and other systems so it isn't a unique problem to Home Assistant.
This stuff gets ugly because of how complicated it is to setup, deal with multiple protocols,lack of standards or too many standards, unreliable devices, breaking changes with updates and more.
The result is pure freedom. Setup: plug in and connect to Wifi, done. Control: install app, join home network, control lamps anywhere in the house. Automation: A lightweight, customizable app handles everything.
The app polls locally for available lamps, which works flawlessly for 5-10 devices.
Security might be a problem, but since everything lives behind a firewall, I’m comfortable with the tradeoff.
Manual on/off is just a URL shortcut in my chrome bookmark bar.
Basic but does what I want, turns light on when it starts to get dark, and simple bookmark on my laptop and phone to toggle power on/off manually.
I suppose chefs don't eat most of what they make. Most wood workers don't have a house full of only furniture they've made. I know a lot of working musicians who have a lot of gear they never use because they just play bass in a band somewhere.
I have to disageee with you here. Chefs are definitely tasting their food throughout, even if not enjoying the final creation. And many many many woodworkers I know have the random hodgepodge of bespoke furniture spread throughout their property.
It seems like there's an endless amount of automations that can be done, but are there any simple ones that provide outsized returns?
* Controlling items I don't have easy access to:
* AC in baby's room (as well as checking on temperature) while baby is asleep
* Subfloor ventilation fans and set up clever timers for them (I'd have to crawl under the house)
Other than that, the rest is pretty much gimmick: Every blue moon I will change the light in the living room to bright purple for fun.
I even installed Node RED not to deal with YAML and multiple sheets of conditionals and dropdowns. Node RED is also a bit weird :)