Connecting remote instances of Home Assistant

[Peter_G]

I have two instances of Home Assistant. One where I live installed on a Pi and controlling lighting, heating etc. in my home. I have another instance of Home Assistant a few kilometers away using ESP Home to measure the water-level and water-flow in a water-well. There is no wired connection between the two sites but both have Internet access.
I would like to be able to include the information about water-level and flow in my home instance of Home Assistant and am looking for suggestions about the best way to achieve this goal.

[Tinkerer (aka DubhAd on GitHub)]

You’ll want two things.

1. A VPN between those two locations so the devices can reach each other (or at least your home instance can reach the remote one).
2. Home Assistant remote custom component

[Peter_G]

Thanks for this suggestion, I will get into it!

[Vahaldor]

Have you found an alternative to remote custom component? It is not maintained and each update of HA disconnects my remote sensors until I reconfigure the integration without changing anything in the configuration flow. Then, I currently found out that I cannot connect to another instance of HA using https over internet, it simply does not find the server. Even if I use IP instead of domain, simply does not work.

[chris.huitema]

Would ZeroTeir One work for you?

run zeroteirone on both instances and then bridge connections. this way the remote esphome devices are accessible to both.

ZeroTier One bridging

So trying to figure this out on my own now due to the lack of response, this was done through SSH/Web terminal addon. and assumes you have installed the Zeroteir addon and have authorized home assistant and setup your phone or another device too. first step of the guide is to Edit /etc/sysctl.conf to uncomment net.ipv4.ip_forward . This enables forwarding at boot. however when i open the file its pretty much empty and states this will override sysctl.d doing the following command i can see o…

not sure if you use the HA near the well for anything else, you could install zeroteir on the router, or a pi on the network

[odwide]

Also consider client-less VPN. That is a tunnel connection that links for sites seamlessly without having to install any software on each client. A common way to do it is through IPSec. What you’ll need is a single software instance (ie, pfsense) on each end to maintain the connection.