Hi, I am about to finish my house. And in connection with this I am thinking to add some automation to it create such a Smart system. I’m thinking about home assistant, however, here I have a question which devices, which better, how many, etc. is there any helper of the type want to do this and that how many and what devices I need. Is everything by trial and error ?
I searched the forum however I could not find a topic that would help me with my considerations.
There are many suggestions and answers on this forum, but there is no best or right way - it’s far too dependent on what you are looking to do.
Use Google and you’ll find plenty of opinions, Take some time to read them and then you’ll know which questions you really want answered 
[edited for clarity]
Hi,
In my opinion you should decide which protocol you are gonna use for your smart home. You can choose between wifi, zigbee, Bluetooth and rf.
Every has its ups and downs. By me basically you can choose between zigbee and wifi as others doesn’t have as many devices.
Home assistant is made for local control, meaning don’t use cloud for your devices.
That said you can easily count out tuya wifi devices as they work over cloud and, believe me, you don’t want that.
You have some wifi brand like athom or shelly that use wifi but has enabled local control. You don’t need cloud to operate device. You will probably need wifi mesh for a good coverage.
As for zigbee goes most of zigbee devices, tuya, bseed, mostly everything from ali express will work. To use zigbee devices you will need a coordinator. That’s basically usb stick with antena. Buy some that is 26* chip based. You can find list of them on net that works with ha. Don’t recommend sky connect.
Zigbee is mesh network by design so some of devices like plugs, outlets bulbs and light switches with neutral wire will work as routers. You will need some sensors like motion, temperature, presence and you can basically choose between wifi and zigbee.
And yeah there is something call thread but it will take some time for this to became mainstream.
I use mostly zigbee devices because it’s light weight compared to wifi and battery powered devices, like sensors, will work much longer.
There it is. It a long post but it is how it is.
I completely agree with @ddaniel and am a huge proponent of HA Supervised which is the most flexible version but will require more technical effort on your part. You also want good hardware running it. I have a RPI4 with 8Gig of Ram running on an SSD (the best way to install HA Supervised from scratch to get up and running is to use this method (following the instructions to the letter).
Do you want that to include an alarm system? I have not investigated alarm system vendors that interface natively with Home Assistant - and I have only found one hardware vendor with an integration to Home Assistant for their devices (leak sensors, door/window sensors, smoke sensors, automated valves to turn off your water and the like) which does allow you to implement a third party service they offer for calling you (and then the police/fire departments if you don’t answer), and that is Yolink. Because of that service however, the access is not local if your internet is cut off. Yolink however works with a hub (and they are working on a local version - yes I know the check is in the mail) connected to your local network (wifi or ethernet, ethernet is always better) - and they are cloud based because of the alarm service part to work. Their devices all connect to this hub using LoRa technology so that have extremely great range. I have a three bedroom house and my Yolink hub is in the basement and I have 65 devices connected to it - and it always just works. I can connect to every device from within Home Assistant for triggers for automations etc. All of the Yolink sensors are battery powered and the batteries last about 2 years (I even have a dashboard showing all the battery levels in the home including cell phones and ipads). My favorite device/vendor is Shelly and their relays - they are amazing, you put them behind wall switches and they work seamlessly with HA for remote/cell phone control as well as allowing you to use the same wall switches - and both work seamlessly together - and if set up properly the connection is rock solid.
Welcome, good luck and I strongly advise you to install Home Assistant Supervised for the best flexibility and total control in your setup, with the best integration with the most vendors (evidently 2,524 right now).
Sorry but that is a terrible suggestion.
Supervised is the worst possible installation method. It takes the most effort to keep up to date and is only begrudgingly allowed by the developers. It is no secret that they hate it and would prefer to drop it altogether.
There are far better alternatives if you want to run other software on the same system. Docker or some sort of virtualised install would be a much better recommendation. If you don’t want to run other software on the system then Home Assistant Operating System is the go.
Thank you for the correction @tom_l, I guess I still have alot to learn!
So @tom_l just wanted to ask, the below table is why I chose supervised (I disagree with the OS control, I can do whatever I want with the bare metal Debian runiing on it and have unrelated daemons running on it which is not allowed with the HAOS, right?). Is that incorrect or out of date? Thanks for your help -
I don’t want to turn this into a distro war, but I happen to love my supervised system, largely because I can still ssh into the underlying debian system when HA has completely shat itself.
However I am not sure I would advise a newbie to use supervised. I am also a fan of running proxmox with HAOS on top and would recommend that.
No that is incorrect. It has some very specific requirements, including that no other software may be installed. See: architecture/adr/0014-home-assistant-supervised.md at b85484512dd8f27338c6ae2ff28e9a7cf78abb2f · home-assistant/architecture · GitHub
Where as with a Docker install you can run up any other container you want. Likewise with a VM you can run other VMs to run whatever you want.
The HAOS install method is limited to only running additional software through add-ons, third party and official.
Do not forget z-wave.
I forgot it as I don’t use it.
As for instalation type goes I left supervised instalation because I couldn’t find out how to make permanent changes to docker containers. So I went to container based instalation.
The problem I was facing was high cpu and memory usage of some containers like frigate.
One more thing, you do not have to do this:
You can use any and all of these. There is no need to pick one. Home Assistant quite happily works with more than one.
Well in my experience bluetooth is colliding with zigbee. I don’t know why.
My brother has bluetooth speakers connected with s comp.
When this is on one smart light bulb disconnects from the network and have trouble to connect. Other zigbee switches in that room also have frequent network disconnection and reconnection.
Without this bluetooth speakers and comp everything is working fine.
Bluetooth is a pretty crappy networking physical layer. The low power / limited range really isn’t suitable for whole house applications. Personally I avoid it like the plague.
With careful channel selection I have no issues with zigbee and 2.4Ghz wifi coexisting,
I also didn’t noticed any problem with zigbee and wifi mesh system. But this comp in combination with a bluetooth speakers is just killing everything around.
Thank you @tom_l and @nickrout we are on the same page I believe… I do need to putty into the underlying OS from time to time and if things go south as well, and container doesn’t support add-ons either, right?
(Those are the only reasons why I went with Supervised as well… - it is the least restrictive flavor (unbless I am incorrect @tom_l - is the chart above correct ?)
Thanks for the clarification, all -
That is what is so great about all of this stuff! Choice, choice, choice! 
Not it doesn’t but add-ons are just Docker containers managed by the supervisor.
If you are running a Container install you should be able to find a Docker container of any application an addon uses. Search on Docker Hub.
If you really want add-ons instead of managing your own containerised applications you can install HAOS in a VM. You are then free to run up any number of other VMs to mess with how you wish.
Thank you for this information… Once I learn more I could enrich that table with additional columns showing a few more example ways of handling the environment.
Thank you all very much for your response.
I think I will go for zigbee and wifi devices.
Do you recommend to put HA on rasbery or a regular PC or for example Synology with virtual machines option. And how do motion/presence sensors relate to the dog (golden retriever) is there any point in going into them. Is it better sensors in windows o doors.
Again, it depends on what you want to do so think about that first.
I use HA container (in docker) on a Pi4 2GB with a Sonoff 3 USB dongle-P and Mosquitto/Z2M (a couple of devices over WIFI and LAN). Works very reliably and is responsive/quick for my 80ish devices. …but I don’t do video.
Edit: should add I use an SSD not an SD for reliability and longevity.