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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

#71

Post by gregmac »

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…

10 years ago I sold a house that had only a couple smart switches, and I took them out before we listed and replaced them with regular switches.

A few months ago I sold a house a house with lots of Insteon stuff, and I left almost all of it in place. Partly it was because we sold quickly and I didn't have time, and partly because it was 9+ year old gear anyway. Insteon has the benefit that the keypad scenes and switch-to-switch links work without a hub. I took my hubs (ISY99 and HomeAssistant) which means no automations or timers.

I would have left the ISY99 if the new buyers had asked, but I didn't want to provide tech support of any sort for it. The downside of this type of gear compared to (the orders-of-magnitude more expensive) commercial stuff is you really have to know quite a bit about it to manage it. For the most part there's really not any local trades people you can call for service, and frankly, it's not worth the headache as a seller to even try to explain any of this.

In my new (current) house I'm in the process of installing Zwave switches. I think they're pretty hub-dependent, which is definitely a downside compared to Insteon for resale. I am really not sure what I'll do when I move, but hopefully it will be several years before that's an issue. I am fairly certain though that HomeAssistant (both software and ecosystem) won't be at the point where I could just leave it for the new owners and not cause more trouble for myself than it's worth.

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

#72

Post by alex3305 »

empiricus wrote: post #66

I use Home Assistant in my new house, and it kind of works. But the amount of effort needed to control a cheap wifi on/off plug did not impress me positively. It is basically one bit of information, but it goes through who knows how many layers of software and configurations. Took me a couple of hours to make it work.. I also use the standard thermostat component, which is basic beyond belief. The kind of control tha…

I am using Home Assistant for my home automation for about 4 years now, before just lurking. For me Home Assistant is about quantity, not quality. Look at the massive amount of Integrations, currently sitting at almost 2000 [1]. Which is really impressive, but not even half of them are apparently used [2]?

Another example of this was when Blueprints were introduced [3]. I really, really love the idea of having templated automations, and I even introduced them into my setup. But sharing Blueprints is clunky, not mentioning updating Blueprints, which is borderline impossible from UI. Or at least, I haven't figured it out yet.

I still wouldn't recommend Home Assistant to a non-technical person, as some aspects are really hard to work out. Even if you're *Ops person.

1. https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/ 2. https://analytics.home-assistant.io/#integrations 3. https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2020/12/13/release-202012...

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

#73

Post by constGard »

stevenpetryk wrote: post #59
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…

Kinda related but I've always imagined selling a house and leaving behind a "readme" with the latest state of things. I know inspections cover many things, but it'd be nice to have something from the previous owner talking about how specific things work.

One of the most frustrating aspects of this is all the stuff that's buried in the backyard. I've had to painstakingly survey the property to find all of buried electrical and water pipes and I fully intend to pass the map on to the next owner.

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

#74

Post by lm28469 »

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 can't imagine the state of these houses one or two generations down the line.

I witnessed "smart" houses when my parents' blinders died in "down" position and had no manual override... or when the electricity was down and they couldn't start their wood stove because it needs electricity to work...

I think some people are just so drawn to tech that they end up in these kind of rabbit holes. It reminds me of my nerd friends in uni who spent weeks configuring their linux distro from scratch just to start over a few months later, they were showing me their new shiny shells, how the trackpad finally worked with X and Y drivers, how their tiling window manager was better than macos'.

I don't think the end goal for them is to have a useable thing, it's more about tinkering and probably some form of attention seeking.

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

#75

Post by nouveaux »

empiricus wrote: post #66

I use Home Assistant in my new house, and it kind of works. But the amount of effort needed to control a cheap wifi on/off plug did not impress me positively. It is basically one bit of information, but it goes through who knows how many layers of software and configurations. Took me a couple of hours to make it work.. I also use the standard thermostat component, which is basic beyond belief. The kind of control tha…

Home Assistant is the Linux Desktop of consumer applications. Tons of power under the hood and it is not designed with the end user in mind. Home Assistant has accomplished something literally no one else has, including Google, Amazon and Apple. Home Assistant has the best integration across the most number of devices. It is also extremely reliable and you can run it without the cloud.

If you want easy to install, I would suggest using Alexa with Alexa compatible devices. Amazon has really made Home Automation easy.

I agree that Home Assistant documentation is really bad. If you are technical and want to stick it out with Home Assistant, there are Python bridges you can use to write your own custom code.

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

#77

Post by colordrops »

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…

> you'd need to transfer the knowledge around it too.

My experience with house shopping in LA is that you've got no leverage to question why some panel is missing or some disconnected wires are sticking out of the wall.

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

#78

Post by nouveaux »

lm28469 wrote: post #74
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 can't imagine the state of these houses one or two generations down the line. I witnessed "smart" houses when my parents' blinders died in "down" position and had no manual override... or when the electricity was down and they couldn't start their wood stove because it needs electricity to work... I think some people are just so drawn to tech that they end up in these kind of rabbit holes. It reminds me of my nerd…

>I witnessed "smart" houses when my parents' blinders died in "down" position and had no manual override... or when the electricity was down and they couldn't start their wood stove because it needs electricity to work...

Are you saying you have a stove that doesn't have an electronic starter? Are you on a digital or analog thermostat? Does your home heater work without electricity?

New technology will always have an early adoption phase. Smart blinds suck now but there is no reason why they cant be as reliable as an automatic garage door. It's a motor with RF control. It's not a complex thing.

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

#79

Post by alistairSH »

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…

Things like light switches (zwave, wifi) could probably remain. New owner would just pair them to their own hub/controller.

Hubs probably go with previous owner. Turn-over too complicated - just unplug it and take it.

Something like a Nest (or anything else with direct cloud integration) is a bit more complicated. You'd either have to unpair it from your account or replace it with a dumb thermostat.

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

#80

Post by grvdrm »

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…

I'm right there with you. I own a relatively new house (8 years old) and it has SO many switches associated with various lights. Easy to use the switches as they exist, sure. But some simple automations make it easy to flip things on/off without walking all over the house to find the right switch.

Also, some of us have roommates that don't obey the rules. My 3-year old DOES NOT turn on the lights when she walks downstairs on her own in the morning. Perfect opportunity for a simple Z-Wave motion senor + switch automation,.

Otherwise, I agree with the general sentiment to keep it simple. I use Z-Wave switches for lights, a Z-Wave lock for one of my doors, and run HA on a RPi4. Haven't spent an insane amount of time building custom scripts because I want to do other things. And those switches still work without HA too.

(totally see the benefits of Shelly, but hard to stuff in some electrical boxes like those in my house)

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