I’ve been in the home automation world since the X-10 days and love what Home Assistant allows us to do. However, I’ve been thinking about what it would take to move from a collection of devices to a truly cohesive and reliable smart home platform that rivals commercial systems while keeping local control.
I’ve drafted a ‘blueprint’ for what I think an ideal, new-build HA-powered home would look like. I’m hoping to start a discussion around these ideas.
Core Principles
Single, Reliable Network: Use one primary protocol (e.g., Matter/Thread) to ensure seamless communication with no dead spots.
Local-First, Always: The system must be 100% locally controlled.
High Availability: A server crash should not disable basic functionality like light switches or fans. Critical systems must have redundancy.
Standardized Rooms: Devices and sensors should be planned by room type. For example, every bedroom would have a baseline of light, motion, temperature, and humidity sensors.
The Ideal Blueprint
Lighting & Power: All light switches, lights, fans, and outlets are under HA control.
Sensing: Every room equipped with a standard sensor suite (Presence/Motion, Temperature, Humidity, Light, Bluetooth).
HVAC: Full local control over the heating and cooling system.
Awareness: Whole-house energy and water monitoring.
Audio/Visual: Speakers and microphones in key rooms for whole-house audio and voice commands.
What I Want to Avoid
“Ghosts in the Machine”: Automations that trigger without clear cause.
Single Point of Failure: The entire home shouldn’t go down if one component fails.
My Questions for the Community
Does this vision for a standardized, resilient HA home resonate with you?
What are the biggest hardware or software hurdles to achieving this today?
Are there projects, hardware choices, or design patterns that are already getting us closer to this ideal?
Single point of failure. Yes do design to get critical mass in a protocol…no don’t limit yourself to one arbitrarily just because
Yes in addition design with no connectivity in mind. Physical buttons still works. As switch.
Nope. Too expensive. I prefer to keep parts available for fast restore. (I keep a spare SSD with HA on it) with automation designed to survive system failure - a failed system that I can have running in 30 minutes from full system failure is better a d WAY cheaper than a cold cluster. This is not 5-9s territory.
I abstract mine where if a room has something ot always shows up the same way… Using label targeting.
As far. As what you want in every room thats up to you but sensors are WAY more important than most consider…
Correct… everything should be designed to work as complete as possible without HA OR Internet. But plenty of people read High Availability and immediately think cluster or fail over imho not necessary if you built correctly.
If you do that, your requirements for High Availability almost evaporate. Then you make sure you have a good fast time to recovery.
I had the benefit of having to rewire & re plumb the house when I bought it.
Once you are hacking plaster off, you might as well install everything you can think of.
Fire sprinklers, 48 ports Cat 6 (for PoE cameras, Sonos Speakers & Ubiquity wireless access points etc). Wired programmable thermostats in every room - I used underfloor heating manifolds to control radiators.
Apollo XP95 smoke detectors in every room / cupboard. And extra cable back from each light switch to a central point. Hardwired motion sensors, for intrusion detection.
Two cheap Chinese Electric bolts & eKey finger print detection on the back door.
I’d installed a reasonably high end intruder alarm. I did not like it, spiders would set off false alarms, I had no way of knowing it was a false alarm. I’ve swapped the detectors for Bosch Tritech, they need detection from microwave & PIR to simultaneously detect to Alarm.
I replaced the Alarm Panel with Konnected & Home Assistant Alarmo.
I don’t use ZigBee for anything important just a few Hue lights for status indication. I use Shelly 4PMs to automatically control lights whilst I’m away. The Sonos automatically plays radio whilst I’m away. (Plus they tell me alarm status etc etc).
It’s all rock solid. A three times on Hass update I thought I broke it, but power cycle brought it all back ok.
As written before this looks like a single point of failure to take everything down. Also matter is somewhat problematic because it does not allow direct device communication beside other limitations like no local (on device) automation and very limited “ownership” (in fact the manufacture hold power over your device and cloud communication is mandatory for commissioning).
We took the way of using esphome based wifi devices which mitigates everything just written and also allows direct communication between devices ether via wifi or direct with esp-now in case HA is not available. This allows for maximum resilience possible.
I’m not aware of any other technology allowing such a level of autonomy or ownership.
I’m not aware that zigbee allows local automations at all and the bindings (direct device communication) can be quite limited as we found out. Not all zigbee devices support it and if, not all functions (thermostat?) may even be supported.
As an simple example: We have a smart plug/relay which toggles a water heater and a second device which features the temperature probe that is actually aware of the water temperature inside the tank which can be heated.
Now for an actually resilient setup you can use the bang bang controller component not in HA (because that can fail or not be available at times=updates/restarts/…) but directly on the esphome device (smart plug/relay) which allows to continue to work even if HA is down and receiving the actual temperature from the other esphome device featuring the temperature probe.
How would such a scenario look like with two zigbee devices (smart plug and temperature probe) and thermostat working resilient locally @fleskefjes? Without the single point of failure and with device to device communication in fallback while at the same time maintaining all comfort functions with HA?
controller component not in HA (because that can fail or not be available at times=updates/restarts/…) but directly on the esphome device (smart plug/relay) which allows to continue to work even if HA is down and receiving the actual temperature from the other esphome device featuring the temperature probe. 
