How usable and reliable is HA for you?

Feel free to contribute your suggested improvements to the project via GitHub.

Iā€™ve been using it for years, and find it rock solid and easy to extend and change.

2 Likes

Cā€™mon!
Itā€™s FREE software that is appreciated by MANY people and has AFAIK capabilities that are endless.
Even though a lot of effort is being done to make it more user friendly and to standardize things, itā€™s not realistic to expect more.

Maybe you have to question yourself instead of the product?

I would advice you to use your time to investigate why something doesnā€™t work for you, set your frustration aside, try again tomorrow, ask for help* - which you will get here.

*do I have to tell you what the right and the wrong ways are?

1 Like

Iā€™t as usable as you want it to be, and as reliable as you make it !

How frequently are you making backups?
Iā€™ve learned that best is to make a backup before every change I make, before every update I do - if I do not want spend lots of time after that in doing investigations.

It does everything that I need it to do, if it doesnā€™t I most likely I donā€™t need it to. They update with new components and improvements monthly, as far as the UI, they just added a lot of new features and custom cards that will allow me to do just about anything that I can think of.

Help is almost always available to anyone that tries to help themselves instead of looking for someone to do it for them. Both here on this forum and on ESPHome Discord. I have been down the road of buying equipment and software only to have the creators change methods or design leaving only the option of throwing stuff away and starting over.

It does not get said enough, but thanks to people who develop Home Assistant and ESPHome.

1 Like

True. It is free.

Maybe you have to question yourself instead of the product?

Yes, itā€™s probably me being an idiot not being able to find where the dashboard disappeared after I took ownership of it (as I wanted to change it), why the editable UI fields do not look editable and are greyed out, why HA looses authenticated user session on page reload, why zigbee coordinator tries to send a message to stateless device and fails, why integrations got messed up after latest update and so onā€¦

Thank god (actually devs) there is abackup and restore functionally.

Your questions:

Do not logout on page reload.

How to control a socket with multiple switches?.

Zigbee button vs switch? Convert button to switch?.

Zigbee button and tasmota socket integration misbehaving.

Perhaps someone can help. :grin:

Well I have no IT knowledge, no other home automation system but Iā€™ve learned how to use Home Assistant by playing with it set up in a virtual machine on my laptop, when I was ready to go to production phase I moved HA to a dedicated machine.

For the past three years my HA is rock solid, it is so solid and realible that for the past two years itā€™s my main HAVC control system (I do have a backup analog control but never had to use it). I use 48 integrations, 16 add ons, over 100 automations and it works without any problems.

As far as updating I do it once a month, then I update all my hacs integrations, add ons and HA itself. Before I update I read realise notes and note every problem I might have, then scan through the forum to see if there is a bigger problem with the realise. After an update I just see if everything works. At first I would take me some time to go through all this, but now that I know what to look for all this takes me about 30 min. to 1 hour.

1 Like

Not sure it would help You to know how frequent , beside i have 3 kinds of backup ā€œproceduresā€
Every YAML file, including add-on setting, automations etc, i manually copy, so even the Dashboards, ( Yaml in Raw-editor ) so i always have these to i.e make ā€œofflineā€ editing in/from. , beside the ā€œautomaticā€ backup before updating, and ā€œfullā€ backup on occasional basic(from UI).
And as im running HA-OS in vmware, i copy the whole vmware-folder , about every 2 nd month (usually prior to ā€œmajor/specificā€ updates)(vmware and HA is running on separate m.2 nvme)
I only keep 3 of these, 3 ā€œfullā€ and 3 month of ā€œnormalā€ autobackups.
Some YALM-files like cards/dashboards/automation/templates etc basically still have from day 1(multiple versions)
So no i have not any ā€œexternal schedulesā€ or ā€œrunning proceduresā€, i donā€™t find any reasons to load a backup i.e daily/nightly, and so i have never had any issues related to/or caused by backup :wink: , obviously

My backups happen every time any time a file changes in HA. I use an offsite backup service for that very reason. Every time I make a change to something in YAML (or the .config files), a backup of that file gets stored and versioned. Makes restores SUPER easy.

2 Likes

Then Home Assistant Developer Documentation and Integration Architecture will be familiar to you.

This is always a good idea regardless of the software being used. And I always test my backups to make sure they will work for recovery because I can never predict when I will need them.

2 Likes

So, it is clear from your history (using for months, joined four days ago) that you have not come here for help, but to just complain.

I am not sure your P.S. is genuine from your replies to responses to your ā€˜clearlyā€™ attacking post.

Being a developer and admin for 35 years, I find HA very useable and reliable.

Would I recommend it to my mechanical engineer, bus driving, waitress, etc relative? Hell no. I push them to OTS systems with support.

This just made me giggle. Especially with your ā€˜backgroundā€™.

1 Like

Might be worth doing a fresh install on new hardware to see if itā€™s more stable. What youā€™re describing is not typical.

Hey, Billā€¦ would you mind to explain how do you do that? I miss exactly that - making a backup of each yaml, dashboardā€¦ when i ā€œmessā€ with it. I make nightly backups, but many times itā€™s not enough.

Being a developer and admin for 35 years, I find HA very useable and reliable.

And you are giggling when someone finds making a backup before absolutelly every change operation an indicator of reliability issues. Not sure on what systems you work, but the ones I work on do not require userā€™s backups before every change operation.

For me HA has been rock solid for years, and Iā€™m not the only one :slight_smile: You have to put in the work to understand what is going on. If you face issues. Solve them yourself. Especially if you have IT knowledge. When you get more and more familiair with it, it becomes addictive and extremely fun to work with.

1 Like

HA is as reliable as the hardware you buy. If you buy e.g. Tuya Wi-Fi stuff, donā€™t be surprised if it is unreliable. But if you do your homework before buying, you will have nothing to complain about.

3 Likes

For me, It runs my entire house, etcā€¦ I imagine itā€™s the same for all the folks who commented on this post.

I find it an odd question to inquire to a community this large, especially when you consider the effort made to assist new users. Most are dedicating their time for free.

2 Likes

Iā€™ve been using HA for quite some time now and I find it very usable and reliable. I donā€™t think Iā€™ve ever had downtime that was cause by software issues. I run pretty much the whole house on it. I do regular backups and when I update to major versions I do a hypervisor snapshot first so that a rollback can be done in seconds.

1 Like

I get your points :slight_smile: Iā€™ve been working in IT for 20 years before I started with HA, and while Iā€™m overall super happy with how far I made it so far, the path there was and is quite rocky from time to time.

The documentation is confusing in certain areas, it took me a while to find the right ā€œtone of voiceā€ to feel accepted in the community/forum (something I wasnā€™t used to from all kind of other online communities/forums), and while the overall aspirations of HA/NabuCasa sound like moving more and more into a widely used solution direction, I would still to this very day not install an HA instance for someone who doesnt have at least some kind of background in IT as well.

To answer your main question: by now my instance is very usable, and mostly reliable, but I on purpose donā€™t have usecases where I would get into trouble if HA suddenly didnt work anymore as before.

3 Likes

HA is quirky and odd at times, but it is partly due to the fact that it is controlling stuff that was not meant to be controlled by the vendors and it is partly due to the way HA evolves, which is fast and ever-learning, so you have old code doing it in one way and new code, that do it in another way, because the developers have gotten wiser by the old code.
The learning curve is steep and one thing that is probably not expressed clearly enough in the documentation is that the real goldmine to info on HA is this forum. The forum access is pretty much a must-have to master HA in any way.

5 Likes