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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

#41

Post by vetinari »

secabeen wrote: post #9
KennyBlanken wrote: post #7

> On caveat is that I have started running into some reliability issues (occasional device unavailability) once I exceeded 50 or so devices. This seems to be common for Zigbee networks, It's patently ridiculous that you could add a lightbulb to your network and be unable to get in your front door the next day because now you have too many devices. Even more so when you consider that the standard is twenty years old a…

> It's patently ridiculous that you could add a lightbulb to your network and be unable to get in your front door the next day because now you have too many devices. I am not aware of any keypad zigbee or z-wave door lock that depends on that network to unlock in standard config. Yes, you could set it up that way, to unlock based on presence detection, etc, but that's on you. The standard setup is a local code list o…

Similarly with radiator valves; they operate locally. You program them with a mode (normal/off/away) and schedule (given temp at given time) upfront, and then they maintain the required temperature.

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

#42

Post by ryanianian »

turtlebits wrote: post #14

Not sure if I'm just getting older, but the less things/complications in my home, the more peace of mind I have. Been watching the youtube LTT channel on his smart home and I feel all the things going on would drive me crazy. This doesn't apply only to tech, but even for my next house (Looking into passive homes, least possible HVAC footprint, floorplan for minimal plumbing/electrical).

Sufficiently advanced home automation is indistinguishable from a haunting.

Lighting controlled by home-assistant is endlessly frustrating. Especially if zwave. The networks are slow, the devices are awkward to configure, and when things go wrong debugging is difficult. Sometimes it takes my lights a good 60 seconds to respond during which time I'll try a few different button dances which all then get lifo queued... End result is light automation that works 95% of the time with the 5% remainder being enough to sour the whole experience.

This isn't home-assistant's "fault," it's the zwave product space being a convoluted mess that HA tries to paper over. Other integrations are better but each integration is a separate plugin thing so quality depends on who wrote the plugin.

My house got a 10% premium due to the home-assistant setup according to the realtor. Lights and music and blinds all easily controlled from an iPad mounted to a thing in the hall. I left all the equipment including the raspberry pi that ran HA, but I took the SD card for privacy reasons. 99% certainty that they don't even know what Z-wave is let alone how to rebuild the network... I'm sure that if I buy a "smart house" in the future it will be beyond my abilities.

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

#43

Post by vetinari »

mrweasel wrote: post #28
thebean11 wrote: post #3

Whoa, I didn't realize automatic radiator valves existed. Always feel guilty about using a space heater because the radiator gets way to hot.

The valves/thermostats in the article is actually kinda big. More modern ones are not much larger than the regular thermostats. It might be a question about which models can be integrated into Home Assistant.

> It might be a question about which models can be integrated into Home Assistant.

There are also multiple ways (zha vs zigbee2mqtt); and the given valve may support one, but not the other.

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

#44

Post by buro9 »

tlsalmin wrote: post #39
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…

This is why I opted for Shelly on my house build. The dimmers keep dimming and everything works regularly without a hub/HA/Wifi. Leaving the modules inside the light switches. No need for special bulbs and having switches with springs allows any light to be dimmed as long as the fixture/bulb supports it.

There's room for a future product to discover everything within a house. Find all the Shelly devices, figure out which bulbs are Hue, discover any small sensors left behind, etc.

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

#45

Post by detaro »

huhtenberg wrote: post #34
turtlebits wrote: post #14

Not sure if I'm just getting older, but the less things/complications in my home, the more peace of mind I have. Been watching the youtube LTT channel on his smart home and I feel all the things going on would drive me crazy. This doesn't apply only to tech, but even for my next house (Looking into passive homes, least possible HVAC footprint, floorplan for minimal plumbing/electrical).

I feel that the vast majority home automation tech got the whole thing backwards. They start with "we can do this" and then "let's see what we can bolt it on". Instead, they should've started with small things like being able to toggle every existing switch from your phone. Let lazy people be lazy efficiently. Now that has a mass appeal and would've led to a better adoption. Once this is in place, then you can build…

"Traditional" home automation tech does exactly that angle. Turns out "upgrade every existing switch" does not have the mass-appeal over a lot cheaper "replace one thing, do a bunch of things with thing" offerings. Most people need to have the latter before they get the appetite to invest in the former. As annoying as they are, "smart" plugs/bulbs are a lot easier and cheaper to deploy in many cases.

It's an interesting balance IMHO. If you can control everything you can build a lot on top, but even just being able to control a few things might already provide you a lot of benefit.

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

#46

Post by llamataboot »

I have slowly gone all in on Home Assistant over the past 5 years and I think it is an amazing community, and amazing open-source success story, and fantastic software.

I will say that programming your house yourself can be fun (you can literally do anything) but you also have to then keep up with all the technical debt and changes over time. I still don't think it's a great choice for non technically minded folks that would find that level of tinkering and fixing overwhelming - but I must say that Home Assistant is moving positively in that direction by really focusing on UX - and having a giant community keeping integrations updated, even unofficial reverse-engineered ones, is great.

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

#47

Post by stavros »

buro9 wrote: post #44
tlsalmin wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I opted for Shelly on my house build. The dimmers keep dimming and everything works regularly without a hub/HA/Wifi. Leaving the modules inside the light switches. No need for special bulbs and having switches with springs allows any light to be dimmed as long as the fixture/bulb supports it.

There's room for a future product to discover everything within a house. Find all the Shelly devices, figure out which bulbs are Hue, discover any small sensors left behind, etc.

Personally I'd prefer if Zigbee just took over everything, then everything would be interoperable and we would avoid being in yet another dystopian hellscape.

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

#48

Post by dr_orpheus »

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…

I feel like the declarations for what comes with the home are going to start to get longer. The big ticket items used to just be fridge/stove/etc. but I wonder if people will start making sure they declare (or explicitly exclude) other things when selling a house.

I moved in to a house with a Nest and it wasn't too difficult to set up again after doing the hard reset. Would've been much more awkward if I moved and there was just no thermostat...

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

#49

Post by OJFord »

mrweasel wrote: post #28
thebean11 wrote: post #3

Whoa, I didn't realize automatic radiator valves existed. Always feel guilty about using a space heater because the radiator gets way to hot.

The valves/thermostats in the article is actually kinda big. More modern ones are not much larger than the regular thermostats. It might be a question about which models can be integrated into Home Assistant.

You can also get them that look exactly like a regular one, just with a mains cable coming out too - add any HA-supported relay (or interface to a relay). I've been meaning to do that for some time; I'd prefer that to integrated temperature sensing & controls on every radiator personally.

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

#50

Post by lkramer »

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…

It also seems like it would severely lower the value for any buyer who is not interested in all that stuff?
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