I’ve two homes, and at the moment have a Home Assistant Green in home #1 which I’m using to control devices in both.
The things in home number 2 are “legacy” ones, set up on Tuya, eWeLink etc which appeared when I linked the apps.
Do I need / should I get another controller in home 2 if I’m going to set up new things there and have them work properly?
you’re almost certainly going to want to have a separate one in each house. if not now, you’ll prob eventually want things locally connected vs all going through the cloud.
one thing i did that i’d recommend tho, is to do a backup of one house and restore to the other. it not only made things a lot easier, but it also let everyone use the same 2fa authenticator in both places. i’m sure some security minded person will tell me how evil i am, but…
Thanks.
Is there anything special that I need to do to let the system know that there are two controllers running?
no. mine run largely independently of each other. there are a couple of devices that i have showing on both, but that’s the exception.
is there a reason you want them to know about each other?
of course the down side is that you don’t get one dashboard that shows both houses. at first i thought i might care, but in reality it never mattered really
Maybe I asked the wrong question. At the moment I can see devices in both homes on my one main dashboard, with, for example everything that’s on eWeLink in either home showing up there. How do I deal with there now being two separate systems?
Must I run two completely independent logins and accounts, including for Alexa, or if not how do I choose between different homes in Home Assistant?
At the moment I just have the rooms in each named to show which is where.
so when you’re in the 2nd home (where you don’t have home assistant) how are you accessing home assistant? through nabu casa or ddns? and does home assistant access the devices you have primarily through the cloud? alexa certainly goes from your home assistant up to amazon, then back to your house. you’re using eWeLink’s servers and it all goes up to eWelink and back down to you house?
if that works for you and you expect to always bounce through external servers, then sure… keep one home assistant, and keep dashboards for each.
if you believe you’ll want better responsiveness, want to reduce the amount of traffic going out into the internet (security reasons and such)… maybe set up cameras and want them fast/responsive, etc. then i’d go with 2 separate systems.
must you run two completely independent logins? you don’t have to. the chose is yours still. having 2 systems doesn’t force you into that choice. having 1 login or having 2 both work. they just have tradeoffs. alexa, for example, if you have 1 system, if you “announce”, your announcement will hit both houses. if you have your doorbell hooked up to announce on alexa, when someone arrives at one house, both houses will be notified… i want a “good night” command and have it do the right thing at the house i’m in, not turn off the lights in both houses. etc.
so first think through whether you want your experience to be separate or if you want your experience to treat it like one house. start from the experience you want, then work backwards to answering the questions of “do you run 2 completely independent logins”.
2 systems is better if you believe you want to have local control versus sending everything to the cloud. 2 systems is better if you commonly want common actions (ie, say “good night” vs saying “good night house 1”) do the right thing in each context.) etc.
just depends on your preferences.