Connecting Two Homes to a Single HA Instance

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I have two homes with smart devices. The main home has been running Home Assistant succefsully for several years. The vacation home has been running SmartThings and is connected to HA at the main home. The two homes are connected over the public Internet with a point-to-point VPN with >99.8% uptime. Most automations at the vacation home are done from the main home HA instance.

I’m growing tired of the changes going on with SmartThings and I’d like to replace it for the Z-Wave and Zigbee devices at the vacation home. I have a thin client with the requisite radio dongles installed there. I’ve setup zwavejs2mqtt and zigbee2mqtt there and this is where my question comes in…

What would be the best way to configure integration of the zwave and zigbee devices at the vation home to HA at the main home?

  • Do I just use zwavejs2mqtt’s websocket server at the vaction home and point it at HA at the main home? And can I have 2 configured (I’m also using zwavejs2mqtt at the main home)?
  • For zigbee2mqtt, should I just point it at the MQTT service already running at the main home?
  • Or for either, do I point them to a local MQTT service at the vacation home and bridge it to the MQTT service at the main home?
  • Maybe just setup a local HA instance at the vacation home and connect it to the main home HA with Remote Home-Assistant?

I would like to keep things as simple and reslient as possible. I use a lot of automations for light switches and HVAC controls at the vacation home that aren’t super critical, but I’d expect them to work as long as the network is up. What do you think? Thank you

TL;DR - What’s the best way to connect Z-Wave and Zigbee devices in one home over the Internet to Home Assistant running in another home

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You didn’t say if you use Android, but if so, then this might be what you want to be looking at.

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Thank you. I’m using iOS, but it also supports multiple servers. That’s certainly an option if I want to maintain two totally separate HA instances. There are some benefits to doing that.

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I think your first question would be if you want to keep the 2 HA instances or not.
1 HA with a reliable VPN could do the job as well.

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Did you ever get this setup @ridiz ? Our situations are very similar. I had been planning on using the Remote Home-Assisant integration via HACS. Which route did you take?

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I went the VPN route. HA and MQTT run at the main house only. Zigbee2mqtt, zwavejs2mqtt, Frigate, etc all run on a thin client PC at the vacation home and connect over the internet via the site-to-site VPN. Over the past year, it has been very reliable and device response times are great.

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Thanks @ridiz - Networking is a bit of a knowledge gap for me. So those services are all running individually on a thin client without local orchestration from HA? and simply pointing to HA at home via VPN?

Do you notice latency at all at the vacation home? I use ZHA and ZwaveJS on my main HA instance. Assuming it’s still possible to achieve this though?

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fwiw, i have a 2 home setup and i converted from having 1 ha controlling both houses to having 2 separate systems, and having then connected via remote home assistant.

i think there are pro’s and con’s so it’s a personal preference, but i prefer this 2 system setup for our use case. it allows each home to run locally for almost everything, and run faster, and it also reduces the accidents where someone from the second house turns on/off the lights from the main house…

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I agree with armedad. There are pros and cons to each approach. If the link is down between homes, or HA is down at my main home - automations, alerts, etc. will not fire at the vacation home. There is also a slight performance tradeoff. This said, the VPN 30-day uptime has been 99.99% and RTT between hosts has averaged 74ms so it’s definitely within the acceptable range…for me.

There are additional tradeoffs with a single instance across a VPN (or any layer 3 network) for certain integrations, like Sonos. There are workarounds, but they are not as easy to set up or as flexible as they would be if they were all on the same local network.

But if you do decide to go the VPN route, yes, I have the same services running at both sites. Just note that you may need to change the MQTT client_id and/or topic_prefix for the secondary services so they don’t conflict with the primary ones. You don’t have to change anything for ZwaveJS if you’re using the HA websocket integration. Also, I don’t know that you’ll be able to run a second ZHA instance. You may have to Zigbee2mqtt at the vacation home (I run it at both locations).