How many devices (smart swiches) can Home Assistant control?

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How many devices (smart swiches) can Home Assistant control? I am a newbie, looking to install HA in a retirement village to control several hundred accommodation units remotely.

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Depends…

On the hardware (Home Assistant platform & actual control devices), communication protocol to the devices, how far are these units, etc. Probably better to give more specific requirements, then you can build to those requirements.

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Agree, but perhaps not with :wink::

How many devices HA can handle can probably only devs answer, I have not seen anyone reach that limit (if it exists) and if you have the hardware. On the other hand, it is what Mark said, different communication protocols can handle different number of devices. One Z-wave network, for example can handle 232 devices. Zigbee can handle thousands per network (in principal) and if you have multiple network coordinators that can be linked together you can support extremely large networks. (goes for both z-wave and zigbee). For other protocols (Matter, Thread, LoRA, 433) :man_shrugging:
The limitation will probably be all the RF noise in the end …

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Then there’s the practical aspect of having all of those devices in one dashboard. AND securely allowing users to one set of devices or another.

There is an integration that can tie together multiple HA instances. This is probably one off those cases where it might make sense to have each tenant with thier own HA instance e and each of those tied to one that can manage them?

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Also, you could do 1 HA instance to control all the units or split it up across multiple HA instances (like 1 instance for every 10-50 units).

I have seen some impressive uses of HA in industrial environments that make me believe that it has some great capabilities: Home Assistant in a factory - Home Assistant Conference 2020 - YouTube But you need to design correctly before buying hardware.

There are a lot of ways to solve for this but remember: it’s called Home Assistant not Retirement Community Assistant :slightly_smiling_face:

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Thanks for the quick response. The project has a fairly simple goal - turn off power hungry appliances (water heaters, stoves, aircons) in around 450 accommodation units due to utility power supply constraints. That’s a TONTOFF of 450 devices simultanously or within a few minutes - no need for monitoring, feedback or any other service. So an OFF command followed an hour or so later by an ON command to all devices - that’s it. There wil only be one admin if HA can handle 450 devices, otherwise we can split this into 2 or even three controllers if needed.
I am based in South Africa and our utility (ESKOM) has major capacity problems and if we can reduce our demand at times of short supply this will help us.

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I forgot to mention that we will be using a priivate fibre network in our village so this is large LAN.

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Interesting! So, these not your average wall light switches - these are heavy load appliances. I was thinking something like Shelly for this but it looks like it handles only up to 16 to amps. Unless you go with the DIN rail mounted Pro stuff.

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If your question is it possible, the answer is yes but you need some serious considerations. I know that there are people that done this in this forum (not me). 450 accommodations :eyes: I try to handle two … Then it goes back to @MaxK question in the beginning, the distance. Do you need one unit per accommodation or are they close apart so you could steer them wirelessly? There are so many questions above my league. Hopeful that someone else can chime in.

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Just imagine: 450 retired furious people hanging on your phone, because you had an HA update and did not notice a breaking change… Some of us can barely handle one family member after that :smiley:

I think, I would choose for a more classical, less software method. Every house one dedicated switched circuit for those devices. But that is just my opinion…

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Thanks for all the responses so far, but my original question remains unanswered, which is <Will HA be able to manage 450 smart devices?>. Let me be a bit clearer about the topography;

  1. We have 440 dwellings (cottages and flats) and each has it’s own electric water heater (we call them geysers) and electric stove, plus several other appliances. Each dwelling has it’s own DB. (switchboard)
  2. When our utility shuts the power down (known as and usually lasting for 2 to 4 hours at a time) we switch over to internal diesel generators which feeds all dwellings. This is getting expensive so the idea is to install smartswitches in each dwelling and disable geysers and stoves while on generator, enabling them when we return to utility power.
  3. Each dwelling has a fibre connection from our internal fibre service provider, so we are effectively on a campus wide LAN - we can connect the smartswitches to the fibre, probably by wifi in each dwelling.
  4. So the idea is to have a central HA connected to the fibre so that we can issue an OFF command to all smartswitches when we switch over to generator, then issue an ON command when we return to utility power.
  5. My question is; How many HA controllers would we need to address 450 smartswitches? The only commands would be a broadcast OFF to all switches, followed a few hours later by another broadcast ON when the utility returns.
  6. We shouldn’t have problems with smartswitch rating - if required we will install DIN mounted contactors which can be driven by the smartswitches so rating will not then be a problem.
    My apologies for not being clearer in my initial question - I hope that this clarifies my concept.
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I don’t know what the upper limit is but you can see here that there are people who have systems with over 450 entities

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Ok, now this is a very large project, I’m not the person to answer your question about the amount of devices that HA can handle but I would like to point out a few things for you to consider.

You said that in each dwelling you need to control the power supply for the water heater, the stove and the other appliances. The first thing to do is to calculate the total load you want to control. From what you have said, the stove and the water heater need their own Smart Switch, so already we are not talking about 450 devices but for 900 devices in total, and for each smart switch you add to every dwelling you add 450 devices to the total number of devices. As you can see the number of devices can get out of hand pretty fast. My approach to such a project would be to break down the project into sections/Areas lets say 50 dwellings per area, I would go on and program the first area and then just “copy” that system to the next area.

If your can add some kind of sensor to your generators that can tell home assistant when they turn on you can make the whole process automated.

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just a note about a different approach, that is used widely in some countries. Example comes from Czechia. This approach can serve unending amount of households and is easy to add more later. It does not need to know the amount of address of end stations.
There the electric energy distributors can switch between night and day tariff on electricity, when the situation ask for it.

So, every house has a relay on their DIN switchboard, which cuts off the power of water boilers, when the tariff changes to day.

It is done with sending a high frequency signal over the main line. So normally, the line is 230V~ 50HZ. But when tariff changes, the distributor sends a short signal over the main line of 216,6 Hz. That makes a relay in the switchboard operate.

It works like that for decades and is proven very reliable. I think, something like this can get even cheaper to implement, than hundreds of smart switches. And it is way easier to maintain.

How it works is described here, it’s in Czech language, but google surely will help you a bit…

https://www.mylms.cz/hdo-a-nocni-proud-jak-to-vlastne-funguje/

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Thanks George for your response and insight - your approach makes a lot of sense. So I will plan for groups of 50 or so dwellings and roll out in sections - this will make error handling easier as well. And certainly it is possible to have the generators issue the OFF/ON commands via volt-free contacts.
Thanks again for your suggestions.

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Hello Bebe, thanks for the response. I am familiar with the system of control you describe - here in South Africa it is known as ripple control. I have actually contacted a local company offering this service but they focus on supplying cities - a small community like ours would be too expensive. So while this would be an ideal solution it is unaffordable for our retirement village. This is what made me consider an IoT solution.
Thanks anyway for responding, keep well.

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Please let us know your progress if you do use Home Assistant.