I’m trying to determine if buying Home Assistant Green can help me eventually replace my existing Insteon system.
I’ve read over the basic marketing materials for HA Green and it’s a bit hard to determine what features/capabilities HA Green specifically has and if it’s right for me (someone w/ no coding skills and don’t have a ton of time to tinker but am willing to learn new and better ways to operate my home automation system).
Specifically, I’m looking for an easy to use system for me to retain control of my home automation system/data and avoid the debacle of 2022 when Insteon shut down for several months.
I don’t want to get rid of any of my existing Insteon hardware (1 hub and 5 basic switches to control outdoor lights & water features).
The Insteon hardware I have now is pretty reliable albeit the occasional switch that goes offline & becomes difficult to turn off remotely.
I’m not looking for any super complicated features (just basically turn things on/off at certain times) with added control and notification features.
Given the above criteria, what benefits would I gain by purchasing a Home Assistant Green device? Would it be right for me?
Home Assistant Green is just the base hardware. It is what you can put on top of this base that makes it interesting, but also extremely hard to explain in marketing terms.
The base allows for a Huge number of integrations to be added based on pretty much all available communication technologies.
Home Assistant also have an integration for Insteon and it is local push.
Local push is considered the best connection type.
Local means the communication between the modem and Home Assistant is done pure on the local network.
Push means the modem will inform Home Assistant when an event occur, so Home Assistant do not have to ask the modem all the time to discover events.
The Insteon integration list the supported devices and you should check that yours are listed.
Some “coding” might be needed, but you have probably already handled the hardest part… asking on this forum for advice.
The forum here is the real power of Home Assistant. It’s for volunteers, but they are dedicated to help and there are lots of true geniuses among them, so if you have issues ask and help will be provided.
Home Assistant will give you the option to control your devices without the need for Insteon servers, but if you then want access from the internet to your Home Assistant, then you either have to tinker a bit with one of the free solutions or go for the paid and working out-of-box solution of NabuCasa.
Again, help will the free solution can be found in plenty on the forum, if you choose that way.
Home Assistant with just Insteon will be easy with a hardly any coding or maintenance, but Home Assistant open up for so many possibilities that the users often are consumed with projects for automations.
This is something you have to manage yourself.
