I just don’t believe how far Home Assistant has come and how far behind Homeseer now is.
I’ve used HS3 for about 3 years, done many of the things I wanted but found that often the simplest of things required hours of searching forums or the net to find the solutions. Often the solutions were half baked and not completely to my satisfaction.
General management was okay but having to write custom scripts to record energy usage and create 24 virtual devices to record this date (or in text files) and having found that most of the plugins I wanted cost yet more money, I quickly lost interest.
I started experimenting with Home Assistant after I found a simple method to hook into Hikvision motion alerts, which just required 4 lines of code in the config.yaml. After that the motion sensors were exposed in HA to use as I required. So simple I couldn’t believe it!
I decided to drag out my spare Aeotec Gen5 Zwave Stick and hook it up to Virtualbox HAOS. I’ve added a fibaro dimmer 2 and Aeotec Multisensor 6 which both worked perfectly after a few parameter changes.
Automations are simple.
I can finally use If, Else in my events.
A huge list of integrations that fill in all the bits I’ve not been able to do with Homeseer.
Even simple things like configuring zwave parameters which have all the parameter numbers laid out with descriptions and instant changes at a click of a button. I can’t tell you how much time it took in HS to do this. But the icing on the cake is a fast usable mobile app right out the box and usable web dashboards.
What pains me is the fact that I spent so much time and money on Homeseer. I purchased an upgrade for the latest HS4 software which was half-baked and fruitless, not to mention that it broke my installation severely and permanently. Luckily I had a backup. I spent a lot of money on the HS Touch designer to do dashboards and never used it… horrible. Moreover, I have a life and don’t want to spend 4 hours a day for 6 months designing pages.
Rant over.
Home Assistant, I love you.