I’m relatively new to HA, but have used HA running on HAOS to manage numerous aspects of our home including:
measuring and understanding power consumption on the property
measuring and monitoring solar production and using excess production to heat hot water storage in lieu of gas
automatically turning lights on and off around the house
turning on/off my stereo including active speakers and subs
turning off TV/AVR/Playstation after hours if the family have forgotten to
controlling thermostats
charging my solar system battery pack, heating hot water storage, and running a distiller when energy is offered at discount rate
All this has meant that I have a plethora of (principally) Shelly and Sonoff devices hanging off my network, which is easily handled as my wi-fi infrastructure is Ubiquiti throughout. However, when it comes to managing these devices I have two issues I’d appreciate the insights of others on:
being able to readily identify them on the LAN
handling firmware updates e.g. I have many Shelly Plus Plugs installed - when there’s a firmware update is there an easy way to upgrade them all in a single operation as opposed to doing it one device at a time?
What @FriedCheese said about naming each individually, and also in the shelly app itself you can update all of their firmware at the same time. Also, as you have better cleaner control going through a little more pain when first setting the devices up, not only static matching IP’s on both each shelly and also reserved and assigned on your router, I also set up a bookmark to every single IP for each shelly and have a distinct 30-digit password for each in my password manager. That way you can easily go into each Shelly’s web UI and update other settings to make their connectivity permanently rock solid (such as websockets or coloit - which should be set up on every one of them - !)
Definitely assigning fixed ips (these aren’t static, but rather dhcp reservations - semantics), and giving them friendly names in the ubiquiti console. I do this for every single thing I add to my network, so I know exactly what everything is and where/how it’s connected. Only takes a handful of seconds per device as they get added and configured. These friendly names are then also pulled into HA for device trackers, which makes life easier.
