Firstly, lets be clear this is not a negative post!
I am interested in who here uses HA for the most critical purpose? I find it impossible to keep my instance up and running reliably for very long, but then I am almost constantly poking around with it, making changes and improvements as well as often just satisfying some OCD requirement or other
I am running on a Pi and using a few Tasmotised Sonoffs and RF bridges, some very cheap no-name Chinese sensors and everything is compounded by not having a particularly robust WiFi network. All this means that I very much doubt all my hiccups are down to HA itself and I am about to upgrade my network and am considering a more powerful machine to run HA on which will hopefully help things.
I just wondered though, how far would you trust HA?
For me the most critical function is watering the garden when I am away. Not exactly life or death but more important than turning a few lights on and off
The most critical thing I have HA connected to is my alarm system. The only reliability problem I have with this is automatically arming and disarming with geofencing. Using iBeacons I have this about 99% reliable - just the very occasional failure to disarm, but I have other methods to do this (rfid reader at the door).
I do have a hard time trusting some other aspects of HA. At the moment my IR component sometimes does not initialise correctly after a restart. This isn’t really an issue as all it does is automate some nice to have features like switching the TV to the news at 7pm or brightening a clipsal IR light at sunset.
My aeotec zwave smart plugs are very unreliable (zwave bulbs on the other hand work perfectly) and I am replacing them with sonoff basics and pow 2s. I have found the sonoffs to be 100% reliable. Because of this reliability I have plans to automate my sprinkler system with the sonoff 4ch pro.
Fix this and you should find the sonoffs are 100% reliable.
Yes, I’ve been dithering on the network for too long. I keep flip-flopping between all-out-more-expensive-Ubiquiti with new router, PoE switch and AP and probably more features than I need, some kind of mesh or just a significant router upgrade. I’m currently favouring Ubiquiti so might push the button before I change my mind again!
And as for:
I also control mine using a Sonoff 4ch Pro and just in case you haven’t seen it there is a long but very good thread here Garden Irrigation with some excellent examples from various contributors (including mine )
If watering your plants is the most critical part I would not worry too much
how far would you trust HA?
It’s about the full system, hardware, communication, sensors, automations, scripts etc. not just HA. HA isn’t a solution for poor wifi or bad sensors.
Yeah, I was trying (but failed?) to make that point, I know any issues are not going to be simply down to HA, I was just interested in how far people trusted it. Just idle thinking, I wasn’t trying to make any point.
Well I think if I was in your shoes and was having those issues I wouldn’t, but I have to say my Home Assistant running on a raspberry pi 3 has been very stable. I have only had issues around upgrade time so I tend to wait a while after a big release for any bugs to be ironed out.
I would say one you sort out the stability issues then you are more likely to trust HA with more critical things.
I’m not too sure about critical but we have come to rely on HA in our home. I have mine running on a docker setup connected to a UPS. I run a dedicated pfsense pc as my router with 2 ubiquiti AP Pro and also a 28 port managed switch (all on UPS). We recently had an internet & Wink outage and had to remember how to use switches as we had gotten so use to using Alexa for all the lights.
I have since removed Wink from the equation but am struggling with pfsense as I think the recent update to 2.4.4 hosed my system. Now HA uses both a z-wave (long-time) and zigbee usb to control lights, sensors, door locks, and other switches.
All 14 cameras route to Zoneminder and then into HA as well which I use to monitor our home when away. A combination of camera-based, Bruh, and stand-alone motion sensors are used to monitor motion through every room.
This was not an overnight setup. I have been piecing it together for about 2 years now as time & money came available (and lots of help here) Again… not necessarily critical but we have come to rely heavily on our smart-home. I know that I was definitely irritated when the Wink outage occurred and my morning automations no longer worked (zigbee).
I can say I trust HA. I use it as security system and some automations. The rule is that everything must work as normal. Like light switches must function even if HA is down. Mostly to calm the boss down and make everything simple for guests
I migrated to a NUC about a year ago, to be able to run some more security related stuff on the same machine. And to avoid sd card corruption.
I run HA, mariadb, node red, mosquitto, appdaemon, nginx and the xeoma camera server on the nuc, all in docker.
I must say it is very stable, but as someone else said I am conservative with updates to be on the safe side
i am not sure what should be called critical, but i rely on HA heavyly
lights (on most places we dont even have switches anymore, only a remote lying around somewhere)
heating is completely regulated by HA. (if HA goes down i would need to switch the heating on and off manually)
plants watering in summer
movement detection with notifications (so actually HA is my alarmsystem)
5 cams
a shitload of sensors and automations.
if HA would go down it would be very hard to adjust.
i moved away from the RPI long ago and got everything on a beebox with ubuntu.
the longest run i got was this summer. 102 days without restarting the beebox, HA or appdaemon(automations and dashboard).
the only thing that makes it hard to keep HA running long is addition and development.
but i have a second HA running on the beebox now and i am splitting thigs up so i can add and develop in 1 HA while the main HA keeps running.
the main HA then should be reset with a max from twice a year.
I personally trust HA so much that I’ve connected all lights and the water in my entire house with some PCA9685 chips, which are connected to a RPi running HA.
What does that mean? Simple. Without HA I would have absolutely no lights, no water and no other random stuff that I’ve connected to it.
The setup is monstruous and I’m planning to move over to MQTT so that I don’t need wires going to every part of the house. The problem is that I didn’t find Wi-Fi reliable for critical things as light and water. Some of the MQTT devices I run with ESPEasy report Socket Errors and go down randomly. So I’m not yet convinced.
Like, it’s really a ridiculous setup, but it works just fine.
(In the photo one of the Arduinos isn’t yet connected, neither the RPi. It is quite a old photo, but the setup is the same today, just with a bit more wires on the RPi for some one-wire sensors and stuff) Left panel - Fuses Middle panel - Main RPi and Arduinos that receive switch presses and send them with JSON over to HA (over USB). Right panel - PCA9685 chips that drive all lights and relais’ for water and stuff.
HA once failed, because the SD card fried itself after some intense wear (HA loves to write to (huge) databases intensively).
(SanDisk 16GB - Lasted approx. 8 months. RIP.)
I once came back home at night and some lights had strange behaviours… Sometimes they didn’t turn on, sometimes I noticed a huge delay (3-4 seconds or so). I thought: “Well. Let’s replug the system. Maybe something got messed up”. And I was right. The RPi didn’t turn back on. I had no backup and my entire work of months was simply gone.
Needless to say that we were in darkness and without water for approx. 3 days.
I rely hardly on HA and I’m glad that it exists. I hope this awesome project never gets abandoned.
I live in Brazil and here we have water tanks in our houses to stock it in case the water supply cuts or something like that. While building the house, we opted to drill a font in our garden to pull water out of the underground with a pump. (The font and the pump is hidden.)
That means that we have two water sources and two 1750L water tanks.
With HA I mix both sources ± equally, so that we don’t pay a absurd amount of money in water and/or energy.
There are two “solenoid”/electric valves (at time of writing) controlling both sources. Both are 12V and driven by a relais, which is on wires which goes to the PCA chips in the “control room”.
Since the only HA component that supports PCA chips is a “light” domain, relais and stuff appear as lamps initially, but I’ve solved that by customizing the look and feel in the GUI with some yaml customization
Now the valves/pumps and stuff have appropriate icons and “supported_features” is set to disable dimming, since that’s not a nice idea when dealing with mechanical relais.
Another thing that involves water is our pool. We have solar panels, which are there to make the pool a bit warmer, but this only works with a active pump. Since it’s not always sunny or day, I’ve put a one-wire sensor in the pool and one on the solar panels.
If the difference is higher than a set threshold, the pump turns on and circulates the pool water through the solar panels.
It works great. I can view graphs and stuff all from my phone and I can set thresholds also (slider).
Currently if it goes down we can’t shut off some lights but overall it’s not a big issue. Starting soon though my entire HVAC is going to be controlled so I would say it has to be pretty critical for that especially in the winter.
@Valentino_Stillhardt This is amazing. I was impressed with some of the previous poster but I think you might trump them!
@sjee YesI think that was a fairly good answer to my quetsion
I’m glad I asked. It was meant to be an open question for discussion rather than taken as some kind of whinge that my system isn’t as robust as I’d like so I’m glad to have had some really good responses.
And in the interest of fairness to HA another reason I have remembered for some of my problems lies in using many free services which are neither guaranteed nor supported. I have no beef with HA whatsoever and now I have something to aspire to!!
)
