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My smart home 2021: A Home Assistant love story

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Re: My smart home 2021: A Home Assistant love story

#181

Post by tlrobinson »

crooked-v wrote: post #115
reacharavindh wrote: post #51

May be my day job of handling servers and services at scale makes me say this… I’d like my home, appliances and equipment to be dumb and simple. A basic level of automation by making all power switches controllable from a central private endpoint would be nice, but hooking that up to a non self-hosted service is a big No for me. I’m about to buy a home. It will be fun to find that simplicity in automation for myself.

I'd personally recommend the Lutron Caseta line. They use a proprietary RF system so if you want full automation or phone-based control you need their hub, but even without one you can just use them as normal switches, pair switches and remotes, pair switches with motion sensors, etc just as built-in behavior. They've also covered basic usability issues that a lot of other smart switches overlook, like having a hard…

Caseta is also one of the few switches that doesn’t require neutral lines.

Re: My smart home 2021: A Home Assistant love story

#182

Post by twblalock »

buro9 wrote: post #23

When you sell a house like this... what do you leave behind and what do you take? This has increasingly been on my mind. I've no desire to sell soon, but there's a Nest doorbell that is wired in, so it stays. A Nest thermostat, which I could remove but when I got the boiler I chose to not have the control panel extra with timer as I knew I had Nest. Then the lighting, the motion sensors... should I take the few thous…

Replace everything with non-smart devices before listing the home and this will be a non-issue.

If I bought a home with smart doorbells and cameras and other stuff, I'd rip it out and replace it anyway. Who knows if the previous owner still has them on their account, or can access them in some way?

It has long been common wisdom that you should rekey or replace the locks when you buy a home. The same logic applies to smart devices.

Re: My smart home 2021: A Home Assistant love story

#183

Post by 01100011 »

jmathai wrote: post #177
01100011 wrote: post #67

As a SWE I was initially skeptical about using software to control more aspects of my environment but I finally gave in and gave HA a shot. It took some work but I managed to cobble together a system using a RPI and ZWave which seemed to work reliably. I slowly added more features like HVAC and controlling my aquarium top-off pump. Everything worked reliably until I went on vacation and the switch controlling the aqu…

I had HA set up for a number of things at my house but it took too much babysitting for me. I found it fun as a hobby project. But when we did a large remodel last year I intentionally decided not to have smart anythings. This includes Z-Wave, Zigbee, Alexa, Google Home, Sonos wireless speakers, etc. Instead, I went the opposite direction. Wired everything including speakers. It was much more enjoyable figuring out a…

Yeah, the whole reason I got into this was to monitor my garage door and now I'm considering just going back to a wire and an LED. I can just hook up a RPi or ESP32 to the wire if I want to send myself text messages.

Re: My smart home 2021: A Home Assistant love story

#184

Post by mrweasel »

merryMellody wrote: post #64
mrweasel wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe one of the hosts on the Coder Radio podcast moved into a home with some home automation stuff (light, heating and locks), but wasn't informed about the configuration or how to operate it. He described it as moving into a haunted house.

This sounds incredibly fascinating. Do you have a link to the specific episode or a title?

I looked, but it's a while back. It was just after the show returned from a break, and it was part of the opening chit chat between the hosts, so not topic of the show.

Re: My smart home 2021: A Home Assistant love story

#185

Post by randyrand »

nouveaux wrote: post #138
everyone wrote: post #103

All this smarthome stuff like an enormous amount of work. What are any actual concrete benefits over doing things the dumb way? I can't think of anything significant, certainly nothing to justify the cost (not just money, also time, embodied energy etc). Though I have 0 experience with this stuff, so I am asking a genuine question.

Without knowing your home, it's hard to say. I think the biggest benefit right now is sun rise alarm lights and circadian rhythm lights. This should have a noticeable benefit for everyone. The hardest part is figuring out what to do with your physical light switches. At the end of the day though, the ones that benefit the most from home automation are enthusiasts who enjoy tinkering. If that's not you, get some hue l…

> get some hue lights and light switches, and call it a day.

Or you know, physical light switches.

Re: My smart home 2021: A Home Assistant love story

#186

Post by randyrand »

nmcfarl wrote: post #32
pixelbreaker wrote: post #24

no thanks. I like switches and using my body. This kind of tech as progress is a fallacy.

I'm not sure. I love my house, but the lights are insane with a switch under every overhead light, and using smart switches to control them has been so very useful. Generally I control all the lights in a room with 1 smart switch so I don't have to walk across the room to turn on all the lights in the room My bedroom came with 3 switches in 2 panels across the room from each other, the kids room 2 in 2 locations, bat…

You can easily solve those problems with a call to any electrician. You don't even need wifi!

Re: My smart home 2021: A Home Assistant love story

#187

Post by Nextgrid »

mafro wrote: post #180
coreyp_1 wrote: post #86

I want SO BADLY to convert my switches to smart switches, but it feels impossible to find what i need. Good luck searching on Amazon, too. Search for Zigbee, and it will return page after page of zwave, proprietary, and other listings. It's impossible to wade through. I've tried and given up multiple times. This is what i need that is evidently so difficult to find: 1. Zigbee 2. 3-way 3. Dimmable 4. Beige (almond?) C…

Check out the Shelly products. You can wire them in behind a standard wall switch, and they can talk to a local MQTT server instead of the cloud. Replace your on/off flick switch with a push button.

Shelly products are also UL-certified. This may be an important factor when it comes to home insurance should something go wrong in a fiery way.

Re: My smart home 2021: A Home Assistant love story

#188

Post by koheripbal »

idatum wrote: post #18

Good article that gets into the details of leveraging Home Assistant (HA) to glue together various types of sensors and switches, etc. I think categorizing HA users into 2 groups of either technical or non-technical is too coarse. You have to add another dimension that captures how much a user is willing to automate their home (making it "smart"). I'm technical, but my goal is to make things as seamless as possible.…

What is still stopping me from jumping into this is the cost of each individual smart device.

They are just too expensive for what they are replacing.

Re: My smart home 2021: A Home Assistant love story

#189

Post by sanguy »

zsarnett wrote: post #107
sanguy wrote: post #33

Home Assistant is great, but it will face huge hurdles as the founder tries to cash in on the popularity. It's already underway. 1) Nabu Casa was founded with a claim that "it will all be transparent and reported" as to income, etc, etc. 2) Then the "private" components happened only for Nabu Casa - like the cloud connection stuff. 3) A few years later when pointed out nothing was transparent yet the response was "We…

Wow, that is a bunch of assumptions incorrectly presented as the truth! The Open Home conference in December is laying it out pretty good and shows why and how most of the above is actually miles off: https://www.home-assistant.io/state-of-the-open-home/

It's a yearly state of the union. You are informed of what they want to inform you about.

Nothing "open" about it.

Re: My smart home 2021: A Home Assistant love story

#190

Post by sanguy »

gedy wrote: post #134
sanguy wrote: post #33

Home Assistant is great, but it will face huge hurdles as the founder tries to cash in on the popularity. It's already underway. 1) Nabu Casa was founded with a claim that "it will all be transparent and reported" as to income, etc, etc. 2) Then the "private" components happened only for Nabu Casa - like the cloud connection stuff. 3) A few years later when pointed out nothing was transparent yet the response was "We…

I know the HA founder and think you're mischaracterizing him and his motivations. What you call "Cashing in" is attempting to focus full time on a really terrific project. He's certainly not rich off this and could have instead gone for a commercial/closed source vs the open project it is now.

He tried to sell it to Ubiquiti but they did not bite.

So he ramped up the Nabu Casa approach to "control" the top community developers to ensure he did not loose control of the project. It can only fork if momentum to fork; and if you hire all the contributors that momentum is curbed.

Many have also indicated he's also tried to sell it to Ikea as a center piece to their Smart Home line of products. This was quickly deleted and those in the know tossed off the forum.

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