Out of interest: what’s the longest anyone has been able to leave their smart home running without attention? Idle tinkering and checking logs counts as attention, as does checking performance graphs in dashboards. Using dashboards to turn things on and off is OK.
How long can you ignore it and get a life? 
Do you want something rounded to the nearest second 
Less then a month, because then it is time to install the beta again.
I normally install the betas, then the .0, and if no problems, do mostly nothing again. Quite happy how everything runs at the moment.
What Francis says.
The system needs maintenance, so a month tops.
probably two days tops.
I’m always thinking of new things to do or little tweaks that are needed.
unless reading the forums counts. Then it’s literally every day. Since 2017.
I think I have a problem… 
I’ve been away at sea for two whole weeks without internet access and the ability to tinker with mine.
It was hell.
I’m right there with you @finity I can’t stop tweaking, adding new things, figuring out complex automations and daily visits to the forums.
I think my longest time not touching something was about 8 days because I was on vacation. Typically, I use the dashboard daily though. My longest uptime was 3 weeks, but my uptimes are sometimes dependent on if I have an integration go to hell which requires restarting to recover it.
ooh, vacation. you’re right I forgot about vacations. So I guess it’s been 10 days not fiddling with HA directly.
But I still visit the forums almost every day even on vacation too. So there’s still that.
This is me too (circa 2019)…
I also have a bit of a roadmap for larger ideas, depending on how much time I have. When I don’t have that much time, I’ll spend it making tweaks. It’s a constant stream.
Existing things tend to (functionally) work just fine without me touching it, but every now and then a new edge case might pop up.
The longest I had, while being at home, was 10 weeks. Was an extreme situation with health issues and real life problems, where I didn’t touch it besides turning things on or off.
When life runs it’s normal course, I’d say 12 hours at most. Even on vacation I’m checking and doing things, that I found to have forgotten before I got on the road.
But, I have defined my end goal: my home should be so smart, that it can react on everything by itself, no matter I’m home or not. And I can say, I’m getting closer.
This year has brought some really cool things, that fit this goal perfectly. I can finally work with my tablets for voice in a usable way, I retired my Rhasspys (for now), Mushroom cards was a game changer for me in combination with the really cool themes from Madalena (= my dashboards finally look cool, imho) and all the other more “minor” changes.
If I had to pick a favorite, I’d say “Year of the voice”. I’m not used to talk to my home, so I find myself more often than I wanted doing things on a dashboard, but that will fade. And with a mic/speaker on nearly every corner of the house, it is more and more useful to just tell “Jarvis” what I want from him and what he should do. 
So yeah, 12 hours at most seems a reasonable answer to your question 
Five weeks now without touching my HA instance due to vacation only checking in from time to time to watch the status. I’m now two update cycles behind 
which I will not do when I’m not near the hardware. 
No risk, no fun 
I’ve read this week, that somebody called his neighbour to restart his HA instance. 
Could be me
I had an aneurysm burst in November, spent 3 months in hospital, been at home recovering since. I run docker and watchtower keeps me running on the latest version when it is released. My system was running continuously from when my priorities changed in November till I was home and cognitive enough to begin looking at it in April. It was still running, there were a couple small issues but nothing major and this included every update while I was in hospital.
Maybe I am unusual in this regard but everything continues to be manageable.
Warning sign checklist
If the answer to more than three of these questions is yes, you should seek help immediately. If the answer to the last question is yes, you should burn your Raspberry Pi and take up knitting.
check
nope
only if someone else comments on them. It’s not all my fault so I guess it’s a partial check
not quite as angry as that so sort of check
Hey, you’ve been reading my posts and picked that one out from those. That’s not fair!
Ok, check
well duh.
But the question is do they contradict me? I think I get some credit for this one. So it’s a wash.
So by my reading my score is 3 so I came in just under the wire.
Phew! That’s a relief! I definitely thought I was going to need to be checking myself in to HA Anonymous but after I read this post I’m feeling much better.
Hey!
We’re all humans that make mistakes and have our own personal opinions you can disagree with.
At least I am.
123 might be a robot. 
Me, nooooooooo
Nope
Funny enough, i stumbled across some solutions from myself while searching for an answer to an actual problem…
Nope, been there, done that, growing to old for… Over 40 you don’t need to get enraged, blood pressure is already way over the top
Never
Nah. He’d pass the Turing test, no trouble. 
Probably this group is somewhat self-selected. People active here are probably those most likely to be tweaking their systems all the time.
But there’s a larger issue here. Could you leave HA running for, say, a year without updates?
When the answer to that is an unqualified “yes, people do that all the time” then HA is ready for “production.” I don’t know if that will ever happen.
Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I guess it depends. I’ve been thinking about doing a long trip which would leave me away from home for several months, maybe up to a year. I could have someone watch the house. I could have someone mow the lawn. What I could not do is find someone to babysit HA. That sort of bothers me.
