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Comment by californical | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, as someone who will soon be starting some basic smart home configurations, this whole article reads like “why not to use HA”.

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

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This is exactly what HA has been for me. I had several smart bulbs on Apple HomeKit which were… unreliable to say the least. After switching everything to Home Assistant as the main brains, it’s been rock solid, and a LOT faster. I even have an Apple TV which should have helped HomeKit be better.

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.

If you want to enjoy the adventure I can't recommend Lutron Caseta switches enough. They are rock solid and work independently of any smart home setup (for when the smart home inevitably fails). I don't like smart bulbs but if you prefer them, Philips Hue is widely loved, as far as I can tell.

Whatever you do, don't skimp on the lighting smart devices. It usually ends in tears.

The fact that this guy is running four separate Home Assistant instances should make it pretty clear that this experience far from the normal use case. My automations for lighting and other "core" stuff is rock solid, the fun tinkering with ESP 32 stuff less so but that's because it's really an extension of my electronics hobby.

For basic automations like you're mentioning, Home Assistant is pretty much rock solid. Bad devices are far more likely to give you trouble than HA itself. Don't buy anything cloud-based if you can avoid it (though many of them do work well with HA). A zigbee dongle with HA and Zigbee2Mqtt integration should cover most of your use cases.

Agreed. We used to use Homekit, then we switched to SmartThings because it supports Z-Wave and Zigbee and that's about it. I rarely look at the app at all, but it does useful things like warning me when the humidity is too low (which is an issue in our apartment), automatically switches off the infrared heat panel when I leave home and I forgot to turn it off, and something SmartThings or Hue changes the light intensity/tint based on the time of the day. The robovac also works from SmartThings (which is nice, because I don't have to deal with another platform).

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.

HA has been "set and forget" for me for a few years.

Unless I start tinkering with it :)

Domoticz.

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.

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