Confessions about my smart home

I feel like a kindred soul of sorts with this author.

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.

That the lead engineer of Home Assistant (HA) doesn't have an actual functioning HA setup, because he likes tinkering apparently, explains a lot about why HA is so awful to use for anyone who doesn't want to pick it up as a constant tinkering hobby.

> At one point, that kitchen light automation reached over 700 lines of YAML Now you know why it's broken

> 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.

The article has a lot of ChatGPT style and bloat, and seems like mostly an ad for the author's company, complete with some referral links in it to external merchants like Amazon.

I had to do home automation for FIR panels as the official solution had problems - writeup at https://petermolnar.net/article/herschel-fir-heating/index.h... - and used Domoticz. Never regretted it. I gave HA 3 runs, backed off each time.

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.

I've tried a few different home automation things including Home Assistant and OpenHab. I feel all of them are overly complicated and you're pretty much trying to code using configuration, which worst case is YAML

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.

This is not a great advertisement for Home Assistant. The writing is also not good like some point.

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.

Goodness I hope to never buy house someone used to hack into a smart home. I don't want to inherit anyones bugs or try to understand their mental framework for setting things up.

I have been playing with HA for years.

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 (the OS version) running as VM on Proxmox, and it's been rock solid for more than a year. Pretty much no issues using dozens of Zigbee devices from various manufacturers. Basic automations just work, I would never recommend any commercial / big tech alternative over it.

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.

Does anyone have a view of the 80/20-type automations I can make?

It seems like there's an endless amount of automations that can be done, but are there any simple ones that provide outsized returns?

  * 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)

I can attest to getting overwhelmed with it.

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.

I can 100% empathise with this.

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.

I have also tried to upgrade home lamps. But instead of "smart", I choose simplicity. Using MDNS (local network discovery protocol) and a minimal HTTP interface, I made lamps discoverable and controllable offline via a basic Android App. No central servers, subscriptions, or cloud dependencies.

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.

Our house is completely dumb. I don‘t see a reason to automate what little can be done manually.

Hm, odd, maybe turning something practical - a tool, a utensil, a beverage - into an obsession bordering on religiosity does not a happy camper make? A saw is meant for sawing, not meant to be idolised or localised or deified. Coffee is meant for drinking, not meant as an alternative for the Japanese tea ceremony. The thing you use to make it is just that, a thing used to make coffee, not some shrine to the gods of Java. In the same vein that program you use to switch on and off the boiler depending on the price of electricity and the output of your solar panels is just that, a thing meant to save money and make life easier.

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.

It's funny, this is actually very similar to my experience when I was working on VR software. I used to tell people, "I have at least a dozen headsets but only one head." But I bet rarely ever spent time on using VR. I'd pop on a headset to test the input systems, but most of the time I was working on application logic, which I didn't need to do in the headset.

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 wish Home Assistant had other ways of writing automations than YAML.

I even installed Node RED not to deal with YAML and multiple sheets of conditionals and dropdowns. Node RED is also a bit weird :)